We took a trip to Hokuriku this week. Drove down to Toyama, stayed in a hotel we like, ate at a small French restaurant we stumbled upon a few years ago when it first opened, visited my wife’s aunt’s grave, spent a couple of nights in Kanazawa, and visited the Fukui dinosaur museum (that’s where Pinkosaurus came from).
It was exhausting taking care of our four year old granddaughter (her first time away from her parents for this long) but her older sister helped and it was a good experience for everyone. Her English got WAY better just from being around me constantly for six days (I only talk to my grandkids in English).
Nice to get away from normal life for a bit but I’m happy to be back and ready to get stuck into work again!
Interview with Kokoro Media
I did an interview with Kokoro Media a couple of weeks ago, and I thought the author (Anthony Griffin) did a great job writing it up. Check it out here: Ben Shearon: Investing and Saving for Retirement as a Foreign Resident in Japan
YouTube
Thank you for your support of the RetireJapan YouTube channel. I uploaded a review of the Ship 30 for 30 online writing course, which I took a couple of months ago.
The Forum
The Forum is doing well (24,672 posts so far). Here are the latest active threads:
This week’s links
- Investing will not make you rich, earning and saving will make you rich. Investing will allow you to remain rich or get slightly richer: Moontower #170
- Hope to see much more of this in the future, both top down and bottom up. We’ll be installing panels when (if) we move into our in-laws’ place: Share the Sun
- I’m definitely going to try this soon: My 12 hour walk
- More links: November 2022: Best Content on Japan
- This makes sense (I’m also guilty): Mental models
- This is exactly the kind of whining disempowered nonsense that annoys the hell out of me. Take responsibility, take action. Or don’t. But it’s on you at the end of the day: Things you’d better not do upon retiring
- Is it? Japan’s Weaker Yen Is Here to Stay—for Better or Worse
- Liked this from Seth Godin: When we look in the mirror
What do you think? Anything interesting in there?
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“Japan’s Weaker Yen Is Here to Stay—for Better or Worse”
For worse!
I can no longer afford to visit the USA anymore. a 40% increase in the exchange rate on top of higher airfare. My recent 1-person trip cost me 500,000 yen in travel fees and spending cash for 3 weeks (and I had a free bed to sleep in). That is outrageous.
My parents are old. They can not travel anymore. If I have to attend a funeral. Oh well… nothing gets put in retirement for that year.
Do you like computers? The $2000 RTX4090 GPU is only selling for 500,000 yen in Japan.
Video games? Deadspace and Calypso Protocol are banned in Japan. US or UK version only then, just 15,000 yen for a single video game. COD or God of War? Censored in Japan… so NA version again. 15,000 yen instead of the usual 8,000. Like American or UK shoes? Yeah, can’t afford those anymore. Prices are going up on a lot on stuff at Costco. Coffee went from 1500 to nearly 2800 a bag of beans. My paycheck? LOL… hasn’t gone up in 10 years yet my coffee has doubled in price.
This is the poorest I have ever felt in 10 years.
Foreign exchange risk is real when your expenses are in a different currency to your earnings/investments.
Having said that I personally expect the yen to be back around 120 at some point in the not too distant future*
*not based on anything objective, not financial advice
On the bright side, if you look at the Big Mac Index a Big Mac here costs 390 yen, a Big Mac in the US would cost you 695 yen. Now personally I don’t go anywhere near Big Macs, but it is a reflection that our cost of living is very low here and that we should be able to save money. Then if you have investments overseas those investments will give you a lot of buying power here.
But I do worry for my kids. If they stay here their wages will be like 3rd world wages, so it will make it difficult for them to travel etc.. the way I was able to.
Number 7 – I still for the life of me understand where the government got ¥20,000,000 from. Sounds ridiculously low to me.
*don’t understand
I think the 20m is based on a number of assumptions, among them: married couple with full kosei nenkin and kokumin nenkin, retirement bonus, paid off home, *standard lifestyle*.
If you change any of those you might need more. In some cases a lot more.
The 20M number was in the news maybe a couple(?) years ago. I think it’s a reasonable number, assuming, as Ben says, some of those assumptions.
This coming March I’ll have been retired for seven years. While it may be possible to live on just pensions (national plus koseinenkin, approx Y2M/yr), I typically spend an extra million a year on top of that, and that’s kind of living as we do/did normally, no special care or attention to spending–and with some carefulness it could be less (e.g., living on that pension only as a goal, maybe get rid of one car, and I probably would not have just gotten a new laptop, another splurge or two, etc).
For a hypothetical ¥20M of savings, I would have used about 7 of it so far, and in this picture, would exhaust it about when I hit 85-86yrs old (figuring 20yrs of drawdown at a million a year).