The Monday Read: 200th Edition

Welcome to The Monday Read, RetireJapan’s weekly collection of content, musings, and links related to personal finance and life in Japan.

Cheers! Had a great day at Marumori Sauna. Definitely recommend. The thermometer in the sauna read 98 degrees… made the outside seem positively balmy.

This is our 200th Monday Read on the new blog (here’s the first one, from 2018!). I don’t think we can claim 200 in a row, but we haven’t missed many Mondays in the last four years. It is also blog post #889 on RetireJapan.

That is a lot of blog posts. You can check out some of the most popular ones on this page.

Regular readers (people who have been here for a few years) will have noticed a paucity of blog posts. We’ve kept the Monday Read going, but normal posts have gone from several a week to a couple a month to once in a blue moon.

Now that YouTube is settling into a routine, I am hoping to change that. お楽しみ！

RetireJapan TV

We had a great chat with the one and only Derek Wessman last week. You can see the full video here on YouTube.

See previous video episodes here: RetireJapan YouTube Streams

And listen to the audio version on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or search for RetireJapan TV on your favourite podcast platform (if it isn’t there please let me know!).

YouTube

Thank you for your support of the RetireJapan YouTube channel. We published 3 new videos this week:

  1. 9 reasons to retire in Japan, and 5 reasons not to
  2. Gift tax in Japan
  3. Getting monetized on YouTube in Japan in 2023

Please watch, share, like, and subscribe 🙂

The Forum

The Forum is doing well (28,709 posts so far). Here are the latest active threads:

This week’s books

Finished reading From the Trash Man to the Cash Man, by Myron Golden. Really enjoyed it. I don’t know what else he does (seems to do events and training) but the book was good.

Also read (after Daniel recommended it on RetireJapan TV) Don’t Tell Me I Can’t, by Cole Summers. Fantastic. Short, fascinating, inspiring, and once you look him up, tragic. I read it in an hour while waiting for my granddaughter to finish her riding lesson. Really recommend it.

Started reading 10x is Easier than 2x, by Dan Sullivan. Interesting so far.

This week’s links

  1. Mister Money Mustache is back: The Comfort Crisis
  2. This was really helpful (YouTube): 10 Years of Money Wisdom in Under 28 Minutes
  3. Funny how similar Tim’s points are to my video from last week. I promise I didn’t read his interview until after I shot it! Tim Sullivan: Cross-Cultural Education and Retirement in Japan
  4. I think raising the minimum wage here is really important: Costco Japan Pays Workers a Fair Wage, Local Businesses Seethe
  5. This is pretty shocking, even when aware of the general situation: Number of Japanese Households with Kids Dips Below 10 Million for First Time
  6. Hmmmm. Maybe I should shut RetireJapan down? Fortunately I think we are a long way from this being a problem: Rich and Anonymous
  7. Most encouraging: Towards a new Golden Generation
  8. This makes a lot of sense: Preparing My X-it
  9. I’m not sure about the population thing. Will it be a net positive or negative in the long run? Not sure. But it is certainly happening: Japan’s population drops by nearly 800,000 with falls in every prefecture for the first time
  10. More Derek for any new fans after RJTV. Also a really compelling case for doing potentially boring/annoying things in the community: The Sacred and the Propane
  11. This is horrifying, and also horribly normal here in Japan. Just hope you don’t end up on their radar: Media watch: Prosecutor implies false accusation is just part of the job
  12. I don’t think I can afford to even be poor in the US: A beautiful, broken America: what I learned on a 2,800-mile bus ride from Detroit to LA
  13. Yikes: Hot weather in Japan forecast to remain until October
  14. Makes you think: ‘Our daughter asked if we were going to die’: diary of a tourist in Greek wildfires

What do you think? Anything interesting in there?

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8 Responses

  1. #6 – slightly related -I always wonder if by retiring early, people will assume I am a multi-millionaire and that I can afford to do anything (hence I keep my plans largely to myself!). Almost certainly they will think I have more money than I do. It’s not really about being very wealthy, though; it’s really just about having enough that you can organise it in a way that will last and support you. I hope people won’t think it means I have both the time and funds to fly home for any and every celebration or event of friends and family. Depending on how long I work, I might have either the time or the funds to do that, but probably not both!

    1. So far I just tell people one of the following: that I finished work, that I do freelance work, that I run a website, that I do YouTube, that I am an English teacher, or that I am unemployed.

      No one has really seemed to care about any of those, so I just pick one at random 😉

  3. Thanks for the link to the article on Greyhound buses. How times have changed! I traveled all over the US and Canada on a $100 pass over 40 years ago when I was a student and actually enjoyed the experience. The buses were rarely full and ran like clockwork. A lot of the passengers were retired people. I managed to sleep on the night buses — don’t know how I managed that!

  4. I think I’ll forward #7 (Towards a New Golden Generation) on to our 30-something kids, to see what their perspectives/thoughts on that might be. Neither one is in Japan right now, with one due back in a couple years, while for the other it’s at least an option. We’ll see.

    And (#12), back in summer of ’82 I left grad school and rode a multi-day greyhound from Illinois to San Francisco, where I caught a flight for a job in Beijing. It was like traveling in a mural–more the changing people and dynamics on the bus than the scenery outside.

  5. #8: I always found funny the crying people leaving this or that platform. I think there are many other alternatives so not sure why is it that important that I don’t like gmail or tiktok or… anything really.
    Just switch to what you like and all good 👍🏼

  6. #8: Decided to check up on this John Scalzi guy – he’s still on Twitter/X and being very active, 3 weeks after posting his “exit article” 😂