The Monday Read

The snow is gone now thankfully

We had our final snowfall this week. Snow under the cherry trees. Thankfully it didn’t last long 🙂

We’re more than a quarter through 2019. How is your year going? Are you making progress towards your financial goals? Do you have financial goals?

I’m feeling very mid-life crisis-y at the moment. Probably just early onset ５月病… need to do a bit more exercise and get some sun, methinks. Take care of yourselves out there!

Here are this week’s links:

  1. Scary video about (potential) autonomous weapons: Slaughterbots
  2. I still like them though: Dividends Don’t Matter As Much As They Used To
  3. This is pretty disgusting: The Last Resort
  4. Just pay it, mmmkay. Pay your pension! – An ALT’s story of misunderstanding and self-inflicted ignorance
  5. Jason has a clear vision of what he wants: DIVIDEND INCOME UPDATE FOR MARCH 2019
  6. That is why I like them! The Stocks Manage Themselves
  7. I’m tempted to do something similar here in Japan: Why we just bought an off-grid, recession-proof home
  8. This is a really clear way to look at this: Should You Fix Weaknesses or Focus on Strengths? Here’s How to Decide
  9. Blog about building a house in Osaka: Place to park
  10. This podcast is interesting if you are interested in investing in real estate in Japan: Deal Analysis – Small Residential Building
  11. Really tempted but afraid work won’t be there when we get back: Are Several Mini-Retirements Better than One Full Retirement?
  12. The last one rings especially true: The Stories We Tell Ourselves to Sell Ourselves
  13. Really long and really interesting: You Have To Live It To Believe It
  14. Interesting times: The Future of Work: Will Our Children Be Prepared?
  15. Also this one: Automation entering white-collar work
  16. Sounds good to me! Sompo Japan Nipponkoa Himawari Life Insurance won’t hire graduates who smoke from next year
  17. Invisibility for sure: What is Your Financial Superpower?
  18. This is a wonderful, heartwarming Twitter thread. Well worth a few minutes 🙂
  19. Jeff Bezos’ thoughts: 2018 Letter to Shareholders
  20. Great interview with one of the Disney heirs: What It’s Like to Grow Up With More Money Than You’ll Ever Spend
  21. Half of the cars in Norway are electric now: Norway reaches historical electric car market share
  22. Every four years, one Sendai’s worth of workers disappear from Japan: Japan’s working age population hits record low
  23. Invest as much as you can, as early as you can, in stocks: The Life Cycle of Wealth
  24. We don’t talk about money because… The Money We Don’t Talk About
  25. Genuinely shocking stuff: Wealth Distribution in America
  26. And the same thing in video format: Wealth Inequality in America

Anything good in there? I really enjoyed the Disney interview. And the Twitter thread 🙂

6 Responses

  1. I didn’t read the entire article about Dividends not mattering but did read enough to garner that the author thought those who invested in these value stocks didn’t pay attention to the stock’s appreciation. If that was the gist of the article, I think the author was short-sighted. Savvy investors pay attention to everything.

    1. Tom,

      I agree that investors pay attention to everything but the point of the Carlson article on dividends not mattering as much anymore is that they now represent a smaller part of equity returns because more company cash is going to buybacks and dividend yields are lower than in the past (they were as high as 9% for the S&P 500 in the 1930’s). That has implications for how returns are taxed (less of the equity return comes in dividends you can’t control, more in capital gains which you can time according to your tax strategy) but also makes it harder to create a portfolio that puts out a high income automatically.

  2. #16
    I hope that in return graduates will refuse to work for Sompo.
    I am not a smoker and I applauded when I learned about Tokyo’s planned smoking ban in restaurants; but smokers have the right to smoke (just not next to non-smokers).
    What is next? Sompo to tell their employees what they should and shouldn’t eat or drink?

    1. I would guess that graduates that don’t smoke might see it as a positive. Very few of my university students smoke. Our campus is entirely non-smoking. I predict that smoking rates in Japan will collapse as smokers die out/quit and young people don’t take up the habit.

  3. I agree. In fact, having lived here twice with a 14 year break between, I’ve been amazed by how few Japanese smoke anymore.