nebbie question - how to choose funds for ideco?

[tense-eye-man]

Hi,

I'm currently looking into the ideco with my wife (she's Japanese, I'm from England but fairly fluent/literate), one obstacle we've come up against is that since neither of us know anything about this kind of finance (to be honest until a few weeks ago I thought anything involving stocks, shares etc involved active management and significant risk) we are at a loss as to how to go about choosing funds (is that the right word?) when we sign up with an ideco provider (SBI or Rakuten seem to be popular, tho I can't say I have any idea of the reasons for this...). Can anyone offer any pointers? I think we are more interested in low risk than high return. i'm partly confused because I've seen a few people on this forum seem to be spreading their investment around in a way that I really don't understand at all

One other question: does the ideco being tax deductible mean my kokuminkenkouhoken will also come down in line with the tax deduction, or is that calculated on income before tax?

Brief background on our situation: I'm 43 and work as a hijoukin lecturer for several universities, my wife does administrative work, we've paid off our house and now want to save for retirement - perhaps by 60 tho I enjoy my teaching work so will probably cheerfully continue doing at least some of it until 70.

thanks for any help anyone can offer, and thanks retirejapan for a very helpful site.

[RetireJapan]

Hi Tense-eye man (love the username, by the way -genius )

You have come to the right place. I think the RJ Guide to iDeCo is the best resource in English: https://gumroad.com/retirejapan
But Minako Takekawa's iDeCo book in Japanese is probably the best thing out there.

Generally speaking you want to decide your portfolio allocation, then choose low-cost funds. You can read Millionaire Teacher for a good overview of the reasoning behind that.

Feel free to post in the iDeCo forum for more detailed advice

Sadly you can't lower your health insurance costs, as they are calculated on basic income before most deductions.

Hope that helps!

[tense-eye-man]

thanks for the response

username - haha, wasn't really expecting anyone to notice that joke - clearly I underestimated this forum!

Yes, having posted, it occured to me that probably the answer is a bit more reading. I already mentioned that J book to my wife, her response was "I don't want to read a book about this stuff!" but that's just her way (and in fairness, she had already spent half the afternoon reading about it on the internet) so I'll probably get it anyway, it'll be good to have both read the same book on something for a change (the usual pattern is me saying "I read this really interesting book about such-and-such, but it's not translated into japanese so you can't read it, so instead here's my crappy verbal summary.....")

I'll post again when I have some more concrete questions....