RetireJapan

As far as investing goes, what specific questions do you have? Sorry if this is too basic, but I hope it's not. Investing can generally be broken in to two general areas. Lending and business ownership. Oh and this is technically passive investment. Lending is pretty straight forward, you take your ...

Specifically, does anyone run a multi-unit rental? Currently, my wife's family has a small rental building in one of the suburbs of Tokyo. It's quite old so the options are to either renovate or sell it. If they decide to sell then they're considering buying another building that would have a owner'...

Oh no, thank you for pointing that out! You're spot on. You also got me thinking about the weakness of a bond fund vs the actual bond again. It's strong point.

The year-to-date figures are negative for almost all bond maturities and the short term treasury and corporate bond total returns are only 0.6-0.74% for the year. That includes interest so bonds have a worse return than the current US money market return of 2% I think you're confusing YTD return vs...

Everyone needs to run the numbers for themselves just to make sure they are aware of the real cost of each option. Yup, you're right I'm oversimplifying. Everyone needs to make decisions they're comfortable with. I assume if someone is considering purchasing then they've already budgeted the transa...

You're right that bond prices and interest rates move in opposite directions. I should have been specific short term bonds are doing well. This idea has more to do with money flows and psychology than bond yields. Money is always flowing in to the system. Some of it is new money, some of it is reinv...

Renting vs buying is a pretty simple in my opinion. Which costs more? If it's cheaper to rent, then rent. If it's cheaper to buy, then buy with fixed rates. Yes, the fixed rates are higher, but they fix your payment for the duration of the loan. You also need take in to account the real interest rat...

What jcc said is spot on. In Sept 1st, 2017 Nikkei was at 19,691. Where is it today? 22,351. All your purchases from Nov-Feb 2017 and May-Oct 2018 were higher than that so of course, you show a paper loss. This year there was also a major shift of investment out of emerging markets in to more mature...

IMO Nissan is behind the ball. Which is odd because Ghosn got them really ahead when he pushed the Leaf forward so fast, but they lost focus and have been leapfrogged by a lot of other companies. The future of mobility is changing rapidly, GM announced they were laying off 14% of its salaried workfo...

I'm new Japan, so all my experience is from the US. In the US you always need to keep at least 6 months of expenses in cash, due to insecure nature of your job in the US and most unemployment insurance in the US, at best, covers only about 60% of your income. From what I've pieced together so far, i...