The Monday Read: January Thaw

2023 has only just started, and already things are not going the way I thought they would. No plan survives contact with the enemy, and all that.

No matter! We press on regardless.

The Monthly Read

It has come to my attention that some people may love RetireJapan but not want to get a weekly email, and we have been neglecting them dreadfully.

Fear not! For we are launching a monthly email list. Instead of getting a weekly email from us with all the goodness from the site, you will instead receive a monthly email with all the posts and announcements. All the goodness, one quarter of the calories.

Your First Ten Million Yen Cohort 2

Your First Ten Million Yen is RetireJapan’s flagship course. It is designed to take people who do not have their finances in order and help/teach/encourage them enough to get them to a point where they can save and invest their way to 10 million yen, which is big enough to be life-changing for most yet small enough to be achievable.

So we got some feedback from the first cohort, reflected on what went well and what could be improved, and put together a new and improved version. The second cohort starts at the end of January and might be a good way to kick off 2023 if you are yet to get started saving and investing seriously.

Taking the course and getting your finances in order could be worth tens or hundreds of millions of yen to you -not a bad return on investment 😉

If it is not for you, perhaps you have a friend or colleague who might find it useful? I’d really appreciate you sharing it with them.

YouTube

Thank you for your support of the RetireJapan YouTube channel.

We published a new video on new financial habits for 2023. We also finished our first SBI Securities video, looking at the main menu on the site.

The Forum

The Forum is doing well (25,205 posts so far). Here are the latest active threads:

This week’s links

1. Not really about money, but interesting (AI as the third big thing for humanity after history and science): The Third Magic
2. The perennial problem: How to Divorce Your Phone
3. Yikes. Might give us some good stock buying opportunities if the yen recovers: Third of world economy to hit recession in 2023, IMF head warns
4. For now (Economist, so you might need to register to read): Kim Povlsen says we should welcome robots, not fear them
5. Reddit thread on eternal NISA: New NISA Q&A for individual investors by the FSA summary
6. Inheritance tax in Japan really shouldn’t be much of a concern to most people (Reddit): “The latest NTA data shows that, among the ~9% of estates that are large enough to trigger inheritance tax, the median taxpayer is paying just over 3%.”
7. This is obvious but not intuitive: Condos can be akiya, too
8. Nice long-form article: Japan’s Bubble-Burst: The Party That Wasn’t Supposed to End
9. This is a good thing. We need to move away from individual ownership of cars: New car sales in Japan fall 5.6% in 2022 to lowest level in 45 years
10. I need to make a RetireJapan version of this: Guillermo del Toro’s Inspiration Machine
11. Ooops. Japan real wages fall most since 2014, keeping BOJ goal distant
12. Now that is more like it (still too low): Families in Tokyo to get ¥5,000 per child to address falling birthrate
13. Pretty screwed, it seems… How Screwed is the Yen?
14. Hadn’t thought about it like this before: Uber Eats Japanese Delivery Staff Value Their Freedom above All
15. A slightly subpar article on an important topic: Work forever: Japan’s seniors brace for life without retirement
16. I am a procrastinator: Macro-Procrastination
17. This was an interesting listen (Joe Rogan podcast): #1921 Peter Zeihan

What do you think? Anything interesting in there?

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