I didn’t mean to upset anyone
I was a bit surprised at quite how many upset, disappointed, and congratulatory messages I received following our April 1st blog post.
Sadly I have not found a wealthy corporate buyer for the site and community, and will have to keep inflicting my scribblings on you for another year.
President Trump’s April Fool’s announcement was much better, even if it was a day late…
You may have noticed that stock markets are slightly down at the moment. Don’t worry, this is very normal and actually a good thing if you are still saving and investing every month.
Our portfolio is down… quite a lot of money (4-5 years’ worth of spending?). Not a problem.
Just don’t panic and start second guessing yourself or selling things.
How are you feeling about your investments at the moment?
RetireJapan TV
RetireJapan TV will be back on April 22nd from 20:00 (we had to change the day! It will be on Tuesday this month).
We’ll be talking about how to navigate the health system here in Japan. Join us live to ask questions or contribute to the discussion.
YouTube
Thank you for your support of the RetireJapan YouTube channel. New video soon. Maybe.
The Forum
Speaking of which, the Forum is doing well (40,730 posts so far). The forum rules are here. In essence, they are:
- Be nice
- Ask any question you like
- Only answer questions when you have relevant knowledge or experience
Here are the latest active threads:
This week’s books
I am still on my Terry Pratchett binge! Bought all of his Discworld books on Kindle and am currently reading The Thief of Time (24/41). Really enjoying it.
Also started reading Stolen Focus, by Johann Hari. Pretty good so far. About our (my?) inability to concentrate.
This week’s links
- I love this guy: Getting by on “Yūtai”
- My wife’s school has a kamidana and we get the local priest out once a year to bless it: Kamidana
- I’m still pretty unimpressed with AI, but probably need to try using it more: Reid Hoffman: ‘Start using AI deeply. It is a huge intelligence amplifier’
- This rings true: Good news: Happiness isn’t everything
- Love this. So inspiring: Deadlifting in Your Nineties, in “Strong Grandma”
- I don’t have a Switch, but might consider getting this one: If the Switch 2 Stumbles, Nintendo Has No Plan B
- Don’t fancy this job: The last cleanup: Life and death in a lonely Japan
- Crypto in tokutei accounts? Yes, please: Japan to give crypto assets legal status as financial products, Nikkei says
- I love Stephen Fry: AI: A Means to an End or a Means to Our End?
- This is great. Hopefully it will bring costs down with greater scale: Tokyo Starts Mandatory Solar Panels for New Houses
- Pretty grim. To be fair, I have stepkids and don’t want more children: 52% of Young Japanese Don’t Want Kids
- How incredibly embarassing for customs and immigration at Kansai International Airport: U.S. tourist arrested after bringing a handgun into Japan
- Absolutely savage (YouTube). It’s queued up to my favourite bit: How Trump’s Tariffs Will Transform Global Trade?
- I like that the article factchecks him. Foreign residents presumably pay at least 2-3x (or more) the 1% they are receiving currently: Tamaki: Medical fee cap reforms needed to stop foreign misuse
- Very true: Ten good reasons to hold cash
- Tough topic (helping your children with money): Giving Advice
What do you think? Anything interesting in there?
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Planning to retire in a year or two, so in the current situation very much tempted to move from overseas shares/indexed to cash. Opinions?
What was your original plan? Why change it now?
Reacting emotionally to events is not a good approach most of the time.
If you go to cash (what, with everything?) what are you going to do next?
Same situation as Igor above, so I can sympathize.
I sensed things would go awry at the start of the year, and was sorely tempted to leave just NISA alone and sell what I had in my Rakuten tokutei account, (particularly the stock index fund holdings) while I was well up. I held in the end, and am now regretting it. Wife tells me to hang in there, but I’m still scratching my head. I take your advice about not second-guessing the market to heart, but can’t help feeling in the present situation that things will continue to drop, so cashing out now and re-investing at an opportune time (probably as next year’s NISA allowance) might make sense.
The issue is what do you do if the market goes up 20% tomorrow? And keeps going up?
Getting the reinvesting timing right is the hardest part, not the going to cash timing.
I moved about 10% of our portfolio to cash in February because I wasn’t comfortable not having a couple of years liquidity just in case the market went down for a while. That wasn’t in response to the market dropping though!
I would be wary of doing anything big. Making small adjustments can be fine, as long as you know why you are doing it and what you are going to do if things don’t work out the way you thought they would.
Thanks, Ben. Yup, I know that timing the market is generally not advised, that “set and forget” is best.
We actually probably have more than four years’ liquidity. Maybe I’ll do things by halves.