Happy New Year! I hope you had a fun relaxing time over the last couple of days and that you are looking forward to The Year of the Bunny 🙂
I’ll be doing a planning blog post soon -have all sorts of things I want to get done this year, many of them involving RetireJapan. Otanoshimi!
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?
YouTube
Thank you for your support of the RetireJapan YouTube channel. After a lot of undignified pleading on social media, we reached our 2022 goal of 800 subscribers on the YouTube channel in the early evening of December 31st 😉
We published a new video with new new NISA information this week -check it out. We also did our second episode of RetireJapan TV, which you can see on YouTube here or listen to on your favourite podcast platform (just search for RetireJapan or RJTV). Please let me know if you can’t find it on your platform of choice and I will get it added.
The Forum
The Forum is doing well (25,058 posts so far). Here are the latest active threads:
This week’s books
My goal was to read 50 books on Kindle this year, and thanks to being at the in-laws’ place and Kohaku being on TV I just managed it. Finished Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky in the early evening on December 31st.
And what a book to end on! I really enjoyed it. I read the premise (intelligent giant spiders on a terraformed planet competing with humans) on one of those ‘best SF books of the year’ lists, and bought it immediately. Great read, highly recommended.
By the way, is anyone else in the Kindle Rewards beta program? I love it and hope they make it permanent (basically you get 5% points on Kindle books, 2% on physical books, and can redeem 300 points for a $3 voucher towards Kindle books). I am racking up points like there is no tomorrow 😉
This week’s links
- I had no idea about this: Kishida’s kid not cut out for Nagatacho
- This is really interesting (free online book). The Network State
- Harsh stuff. Is this going to overwhelm the government in the future? Even Celebrities Die Alone
- This is actually really good: The 10 Best Ideas I Learned in 2022
- I keep going back and forth on this: when it was first announced I loved the idea, then lost interest, and now after reading this am somewhat interested again: Amazon Kindle Scribe review: The Kindle just got weird, and I love it
- Don’t agree about the inheritance tax, but an interesting list: Japan Surprises 2023
- A good bunch of snippets from Scott Galloway: 2023 Predictions
- I actually did this in the last few years of my job: The Year in Quiet Quitting
- Arnold Schwarzenegger has a new motivational email list -just what the doctor ordered for 2023. Sign up here: The Pump Daily
- This is so good: All Success Is A Lagging Indicator
- A good primer: Why Should You Invest in the Stock Market?
What do you think? Anything interesting in there?
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I agree with you about not agreeing with the comment about inheritance tax. I also think it is worth mentioning that the scary 50% rate only kicks in on quite large estates. There is a tax free portion that depends upon the number of statutory heirs to the estate, but as a simple example, in the case of two children inheriting from a parent, the 50% rate will only apply to the portion of an estate worth in excess of 342 million yen. (Full disclosure – there is also a 55% rate that would apply to the portion of an estate exceeding 642 million yen.)
If someone is leaving an estate that size to their children, then they should be capable of finding an accountant and lawyer who are skilled in reducing such tax burdens for their clients.
If someone leaves an estate worth 100 million to their two children, the amount of tax payable is 9.6 million. This does not seem like an unreasonable price to pay for winning the birth lottery.