The Monday Read

Bonenkai season edition

Too soon? Had to book a bonenkai the other day, so that is it, the year is officially over.

I did our end of year financial spreadsheet the other day. To my surprise, our family net worth seems to have gone up by more than twice my annual salary over the last twelve months.

Just goes to show how decent money habits, consistency, and a bull market can yield pretty spectacular results over the long term… -and my wife and I both working while our kids are independent probably helps too 😉

Of course, at some point we will see a pullback or even drop in the stock market, and we’ll ‘lose’ a huge amount of money overnight.

No matter. Just carry on saving and investing every month. We still have a few decades to go 🙂

This week’s links

  1. This makes cleaning sound almost… interesting: Do what you are doing
  2. What to do when you don’t know where to start: Help! Analysis paralysis is stopping me from investing
  3. Huge change for real estate investors: JAPANESE INCOME TAX LOOPHOLE ALLOWING WRITE-OFFS FOR OVERSEAS PROPERTY INVESTMENTS TO BE CLOSED
  4. Some tools to think about personal finance: FI Laboratory
  5. Need to work on this: Rituals and Routines
  6. A viable opposition party in Japan? Media Mix, Dec. 1, 2019
  7. Interesting definition of genius: The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius
  8. I have run into this several times: would like to see it disappear. Bread and Roses: Challenging Japan’s Rampant Housing Discrimination
  9. This might be a fun experiment: could you live on your projected nenkin payout? Young couple’s massive shock when they try to live on pension savings

What do you think? Anything good in there? My favourite was probably #1, but #3 has pretty much shut down my vestigial interest in real estate investing…

6 Responses

  1. As for #4, I’m a back-of-the-envelope kind of person. (And by using those ‘calculators’, you’re undoubtedly providing salable data/statistics to someone.)

    And I like two words in #7, “remain irresponsible.” 😉

  2. For #8, happened to me personally in 2017. Despite working for a very well known company, having lived in Japan for more than a decade, and having literally 80% of my family (wife and 3 kids) being Japanese, I got outright rejected for a house rental, after having gone through all of the paperwork. The Landlord did not even try lying about it, I was rejected because I am a foreigner.
    The irony is that the landlord was renting his place because he was himself on an assignment abroad (the UK I believe).

    I guess the most insulting aspect is how it is done in bright daylight and nobody seems to be offended by it. I tried to get my company to intervene, but they didn’t lift a (legal) finger, despite HR pretending to be really angered by it as well.

    1. I was never refused renting once the paperwork started. However, the 3 times I searched an apartment for myself, about 30% of the places I found on a website were not available to me, because I am a foreigner (usually the real estate agent would answer honestly about it).

  3. Re #3, is it correct to assume that the same depreciation is available for buildings within Japan, but is of little use because such buildings are rarely of any value?

    1. Yes, in Japan buildings probably do depreciate at that rate, whereas overseas they might not, and the buildings might be worth more anyway.

      People with high incomes tend to favour real estate investing in Japan for this reason: they can use the depreciation to reduce their income tax.

  4. #4 led to a link about the Personal Capital app, which seems great, and auto-populates US accounts. I wonder if there was a Japan based version. Money Forward and Money Tree are lacking visuals and data in tracking investments.