February 26th, 2018
Found something interesting on Reddit this week. Made me laugh, then made me worry slightly. Does everyone hate the writing style on RetireJapan?
I haven’t noticed any notable news stories, so here are some links I found interesting this week.
Who is your boss? Are you happy with that? Always enjoy Derek Sivers’ writing, even when he’s writing for musicians.
This week’s millionaire interview. Pretty solid and relateable this time.
How to grow your net worth $1m in four years. Of course, eh?
How much is enough? A really important question. Getting this right can transform your life.
A few factors that will affect your safe withdrawal rate in retirement.
The Wealthy Accountant reminds us to work on the small, permanent money improvements. I have an electrician coming round next week to look into changing mercury lights into LEDs.
Very in-depth and very long article about technological unemployment. Are machines replacing human workers? Are new jobs being created as the old ones disappear?
Some thoughts on mental preparations for retirement. Mindset might be more important than money.
If you are under 40 you should be hoping for a stock market crash. I really hope we have a bad one sometime in the next couple of years…
Cooking at home is healthier and saves money. I need to get better at this.
Live like a student now so you can live like one later, too. After all, students basically do what they want all day (at least they do in the UK. Japanese ones, not so much).
Do rich people own stocks because they are rich? Or are they rich because they own stocks? I suspect it might be the latter.
How safe withdrawal rates actually work in practice, and why you probably won’t run out of money.
Nippon Life is bearish on Japanese equities.
The secrets to financial success are revealed in this nice little write-up. They turn out to be rather obvious. Doesn’t stop them working, of course.
Buffett has said it before, but you don’t need more than average intelligence to be a good investor. EQ and and an understanding of principles and history are much more important. This post by Ben Carlson makes the argument that being smart is actually a net negative.
Incredible if someone isn’t aware of this, but ten years ago I was not following this basic rule of personal finance. Do yourself a favour and make it iron-clad in your life.
Tynan writes another thought-provoking post this week: how to avoid worrying about things.
Collaborative Fund shares their interesting articles of the week. I particularly enjoyed the car-sharing article. Pretty soon we’ll all be getting rid of our cars.
I booked a hotel with Booking.com and was reminded how much I like their service. Sign up with this link to get 1,800 yen when you book next.
This article explains how Amazon organises their warehouses: TLDR they don’t. A bit like my office, except that I don’t have a database in the cloud keeping track of where everything is…
Seth Godin makes a good point about sunk costs as only he can. I have a lot of projects I probably need to clear out of my head.
Phew. Anything you enjoyed in there? Do you miss the randomly bolded words in this post? Let us know in the comments 🙂
I prefer bullets or italics to random bolds. That said, I never noticed it much on Retire Japan until this post. So maybe this time used it to make an extreme point, whereas the other posts used it sparingly to help the reading focus attention? RT needs to decide whether you want to offer fairly digestible information in a community forum or whether you want to be a place for number crunching. I think you have to do your due diligence by yourself, but sometimes an article that reminds you of how EPS or interest rates might be used to aid evaluation of data is always nice to read.
BTW, it occurs to me that this was just a typical Alpha male post designed to casually snub as a way of gaining a few social status points. So many egos in amateur investment discussions. Keep your thoughts focused on empowering people with information, and the negative comments will just fall away in harmless echoes.
I was actually a bit flattered that they knew the site well enough to lampoon it 😉
I had never thought the bold was in any way distracting and I like the way most posts are written. I also agree that it is a good regular read and once you start doing that you really do get a lot from this site. Just keep doing what you are doing!
I agree with Cynthia that there are lots of egos in amateur investing discussions and I think there are lots of people who post to say ‘look how smart and successful I am.’ That’s not really the case with Retire Japan as people here really do seem to be about helping each other and are quite happy to say when their knowledge is limited in a certain area. As someone who is still very much a beginner I find it to be a great resource and not at all intimidating to join in!
Thanks! That’s the atmosphere and community we are trying to build 🙂
It’s a blog, not a forum, to be exact.
I kinda like random things being thrown at me. Sometimes too organized = too purposeful, too opionated sometimes, even.
I like your style because I get to draw my own conclusions.
Thanks Mary!
We do have a forum too though: https://www.retirejapan.com/forum/ 😉
Hello Ben
I think a rephrased old adage applies very appropriately here:
You can please some people all of the time, you can please everyone sometimes, but you cannot please everyone all of the time
Worry not about the presentation, and let the quality of the content speak for itself 😉
Best Regards
Wise words indeed. Although in this case it seems that half the people hate the bolding, and the other half never noticed it…
No one so far likes it 😉
I love it as it is. Easy to read. It couldnt be any easier for me to understand personally. Lots of useful stuff. I always look forward to receiving it in my inbox.
Thanks, Jon!
I think some people come here to find very specific help, but “instead” they end up finding educated) opinions, sometimes from you, sometimes from us (in the comments or in the forum).
When pointing this site to a few friends, they had similar feedback that one already needs to know “a lot” for the information on the blog to be useful.
Maybe it could be as easy as revising some of your most complete/popular blog posts and enrich them with additional info, links to the forum where people are discussing this topic, etc…?
And maybe write an FAQ of the most popular questions people ask about investing/retiring in Japan.
At the end of the day, everyone’s looking for their personal finance advisor 😛
Keep up the good work 🙂
Those are some great points.
A site redesign is in the works, and part of that will be some way of bringing old blog posts back.
Alongside that I think some free PDFs on basic issues would be good (maybe give them out to people who sign up to the mailing list).
And as for the personal finance advisor, we have a new page on the site 😉
The RJ blog and forum have been (and continue to be) of immense help to me personally, and I also think the writing and style are perfectly fine–unpretentious and very accessible.
I don’t know of anything else on the web that is tailored to this specific (and small) audience. I’m just grateful that it exists at all!
Thanks, MT!
About the small audience, I always feel it should be larger… 😉
Hi there. Thanks for the kind words about my article on mental prep for early retirement!
My pleasure, ERD! I love your site and read it regularly 🙂
The Redditors can tend to troll when they feel like it, which is a lot of the time. I like the writing style and design of your site, it is easy to read, and the information is amazingly useful to me and my friends who are in similar living situations.
If many Redditors feel otherwise, I think they’ll end up coming to this site on a topic-specific basis as it shows up in links in comments, rather than browsing the main page or tracking the RSS feed, and that’s peachy, too.
Thanks Douglas!
We hope to offer something for everyone, even snarky people online 😉
The Reddit parody is lacking the obligatory question at the end of each article to generate engagement and comments. 😉
Sometimes it does look like you are following blogger 101 a bit too closely, but at the same time developing your style takes time and most people understand you would like to see retirejapan turn profitable some day.
Regarding the use of bold and single sentences per paragraph, I actually see this as a good thing considering the topic of the blog. It adds emphasis and clarity, and this is what we want. You don’t want to delight your readers with good words and style, you want to convey information, and I think you are doing it quite brilliantly.
Sometimes I can tell that is it difficult to come with a good topic 3 times a week, so it is understandable that some readers feel the “good” content is hard to find. But this is easily fixed with an index or best-of menu (which you already have), and again, blogger 101, engagement, etc – you need to stay in your reader’s mind! 🙂
Oh and let me take the opportunity to say that I absolutely love your Monday Read and hope you will keep doing this. Most of there articles end right into my Pocket read list.
Ha, ha, where is this blogger 101 you speak of. I think I could do with taking a look at it 😉
I’ve been posting those links to Facebook for years, but I think very few people were seeing them, so the new posts fix that problem. No one seems to hate it yet so I think it’s a keeper (will also be posting short posts at the top when they come up).
Yeah, not everybody is using Facebook – I have been missing all these links so far.
I also think it should make more sense from your standpoint to have all your content centralized in one place, which you have control over and truly own (i.e, this excellent blog).
N00bster: “Yeah, not everybody is using Facebook – I have been missing all these links so far.”
^^^Same here. How about a “Best of the Monday Reads from FaceBook” post for us antisocial non-SMS types.
I would love to, but…
Look at this post. This is one week’s worth. There are a couple of years’ worth on the Facebook page. It would take me months to go through them all. Probably not going to happen 😉