The Monday Read: Sakura

The cherry blossoms hit Sendai a few weeks early this year, but they are looking great. Had some wonderful weather this weekend although I only managed to grab a few minutes to enjoy them.

It’s been BUSY, so much so that I missed both my goals this week and paid the penalty (see below). Will do better from now on.

Company workshops/seminars and university guest classes

I did a full-day workshop at a company in Tokyo last week and really enjoyed it. Apparently the participants did too. We’ll be putting together an info page on the website, but if anyone is interested in having me come and talk at their company about personal finance, investing, and preparing for retirement in Japan please get in touch.

I’ve also done a number of guest classes at universities, so if you are able to invite outside speakers and would like to give your students a head start in life please get in touch also.

Your First Ten Million Yen

We finished the second cohort of the Your First Ten Million Yen course last night. It went REALLY well. Great participants, lots of energy and questions, and I think the course has gotten a lot better.

I’m planning to run the next cohort in 2024. If any one is interested please sign up for the special email list here. We’ll only use it to make course specific announcements, and people on the list will get information about the course before it is released publicly.

YouTube

Thank you for your support of the RetireJapan YouTube channel. I completely failed to publish a video this week, so have paid the price below. In more positive news, we crossed the 1300 subscriber mark 🙂

Metrics

Fourth week.

Jiu-jitsu training sessions: 1 (fail)
YouTube videos: 0 (fail)

Consequences: 10,000 yen to Second Harvest Japan (147 meals)

The Forum

The Forum is doing well (26,733 posts so far). Here are the latest active threads:

This week’s books

Started reading Children of Ruin this week, by Adrian Tchaikovsky. I really enjoyed the first book in the series, so looking forward to getting into this when I have some time.

This week’s product

I moved out of the classroom in my wife’s school that I have been squatting in for the last three years last week, and bought a standing desk to soften the blow.

It is WONDERFUL. I love it so far. I got this one from Flexispot. Ordered it and it arrived much quicker than they said.

My impressions so far: the packaging was excellent. Really robust and fit for purpose. The materials and construction are also good. The instructions are okay but a little hard to read and one of the steps really threw me.

Other than that I had no problem putting it together and I love being able to effortlessly switch from sitting to standing. I spend far too much time in front of a computer, and this should help to make at least some of that time less passive. I should have gotten this years ago.

This week’s links

1. Sounds kind of ominous when you say it like that, Bill: The Age of AI has Begun
2. This seems sensible: Occupy Kyoto
3. Nice write up of what seems like an important film: The Ones Left Behind: The Plight of Single Mothers in Japan
4. And balance is restored to The Force (Reddit): Emaxis Slim, Lowering fees to match Tawara
5. This is pretty bad (people using My Number cards to print jyuminhyo in convenience store get other people’s records): マイナカードで他人の住民票発行される 横浜のコンビニで5件
6. I enjoyed this (YouTube): A Rant About Japanese Traffic Cones
7. Interesting (short) take (YouTube): Japan Prepares for a Changing World || Peter Zeihan
8. Very timely if we have another economic meltdown this year: One of the Biggest Mistakes in Investing
9. I can’t tell how liquid my thinking is. Feels kind of like the fish swimming in water tale: Mental Liquidity

What do you think? Anything interesting in there?

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