RetireWiki.jp - latest updates and discussion

[TJKansai]

...
One thing the US has (at least in some states) is directed beneficiaries. By filing with the financial agency you can actually have your estate distributed fairly easily. I know this as my uncle took care of my mom's estate. Ninety percent was at Vanguard which simplified things, and getting it all settled took just a couple months and one or two trips to the courthouse. No lawyers were necessary.

I've been told by the relevant department of my broker there in the US that transfer on death (TOD) is indeed state based. Unfortunately, since I've always used my j-address with them, the question immediately became, how would they know which state's rules would be relevant in my case?

Also, tho getting along with a US account that is based on a friend or family member's address might be okay for ongoing investing, using that address for TOD, while it might work, would be a point at which you (and others) would really want things to go smoothly--and not have questions about where you lived come up that could disrupt or snarl that TOD process.

So if there is no foreign address, would Japan would recognize the foreigner's "home country" as Japan?
And then there is the question of whether the process is governed by the address of the institution or the address of the investor. (I don't know)

[adamu]

The will section looks good, though the last bit seems fairly vague (no fault of the authors). Of course it is probably impossible for Japan to have a rule which covers every country. Still, I find it hard to believe people with PR won't be covered under these rules. We are certainly taxed like Japanese citizens.

Nice to see they have introduced a simple version that doesn't cost hundreds of thousands of yen. I'll see if I can get my in-laws to do it.

Considerations for foreign nationals

According to the Japanese government, non-Japanese citizens in Japan have their estate dealt with under the law of their 'home country'. Other countries may have similar regulations. The safest approach would seem to be to make as simple a provision in both countries as possible.

I agree more concrete, sourced, and less hand-wavy info there would be better. But it's better than no info and it can be improved. The wiki relies on people who notice insufficiencies or potential improvements to actually make those improvements. You have a wiki account, if you have info to share please improve the article.

[RetireJapan]

So if there is no foreign address, would Japan would recognize the foreigner's "home country" as Japan?
And then there is the question of whether the process is governed by the address of the institution or the address of the investor. (I don't know)

My understanding of this is that 'home country' is country of nationality. For US citizens, I have no idea how they decide which state that applies to

Fortunately for Brits, the UK has a law that bounces inheritance stuff back to the country of residence.

[captainspoke]

...
(1) So if there is no foreign address, would Japan would recognize the foreigner's "home country" as Japan?

(2) And then there is the question of whether the process is governed by the address of the institution or the address of the investor. (I don't know)

For 1, I think Ben's point is good.

For 2, not the institution, the address of the investor--where they reside. Eg, probate for residents of a state would be handled at that state's level, not national, nor where the deceased happens to have had some kind of property. Institutions (banks/brokers, some pension systems, even health insurers) follow state rules and laws.

And I wish the US would behave more like a country than a collection of states--one of the things that I like about japan.

[TJKansai]

I agree more concrete, sourced, and less hand-wavy info there would be better. But it's better than no info and it can be improved. The wiki relies on people who notice insufficiencies or potential improvements to actually make those improvements. You have a wiki account, if you have info to share please improve the article.

Don't get me wrong, it is a great start, and I now know more than I did this morning!

I have a Japanese friend who is a retired judge, and he is usually happy to discuss anything legal over beers. Next time we meet I'll bend his ear and work on edit if I find out anything of interest.

[adamu]

Good morning and happy early Friday

Here's one for the nerds: I updated the wiki's stats page to now include information about page views and what people click on to get to the site. I turned it on mid-April so there are a couple of weeks of data now:

https://retirewiki.jp/wiki/Special:Statistics

I also added a link to the stats page to the sidebar so it's easy to find.

Our most popular article by far is the table comparing the different NISA formats and iDeCo (originally started by Kuma). Most of those views are via Google searches, the most popular search being "tsumitate nisa" and variants. It's a bit ironic, because the actual Tsumitate NISA article is pretty barebones... Anyway it looks like there are lots of people out there looking for this info, and the comparison article has a good title so it gets plenty of hits.

The 2nd biggest referrer after Google is RetireJapan - probably mostly due to my incessant links.

I don't want to focus too much on targeting viewing stats; I'd like the wiki to be a place to gather useful info and it's a bit of a chicken and egg problem, but it's good to get an idea of what's people are finding, highlighting popular articles that we might want to focus on improving, and maybe what useful information we have that is not getting onto people's screens.

[adamu]

Thinking of ways to get more recognition for people who contribute.

I enabled a feature that lists the contributors to the articles at the bottom of the page. It seems to list them in chronological order regardless of the substance of the edits, though.

I found a better tool that calculates contributions based on the amount of content added, but it doesn't work on the latest version of the wiki software. So I've naturally gone down a rabbit hole trying to fix that tool so that I can use it.

[adamu]

there is no obvious way I am aware of to access it in its entirety directly from the forum. Is there one I am missing?

We originally discussed making it part of RetireJapan, but decided to keep it separate because running a wiki is not a small effort, requires technical knowledge, and comes with its own running costs. I'm not sure what you mean by direct links, but I think the best we can do is keep people aware of it and encourage people to link to it when useful, and, hopefully also edit it when there's info that would benefit from being recorded and maintained, rather than destined to be lost in time on a forum thread.

We've had some excellent contributions from forum members mentioned earlier in this thread.

It would be really cool if we could automatically give forum accounts access to the wiki or integrate it more strongly, but there are technical and moderation challenges there. There's also a slight conflict of interest, as it's not "official" RJ so a prominent link might be confusing, but I wouldn't complain if it was linked as a helpful resource from the forum topic list though .

I found a better tool that calculates contributions based on the amount of content added, but it doesn't work on the latest version of the wiki software. So I've naturally gone down a rabbit hole trying to fix that tool so that I can use it.

I got this working, by the way. Article authors are now credited at the bottom of each article

[RetireJapan]

I wouldn't complain if it was linked as a helpful resource from the forum topic list though

How about a dedicated board in the forum?

[adamu]

How about a dedicated board in the forum?

We could do that, but would people find it useful? I think phpBB has the ability to post an external link in the topic list too.

The wiki itself has a way of discussing articles ("Talk" pages for each article), but it's not currently been used by anyone except me, talking to myself . I think the Pension article has the most "active" discussion so far: https://retirewiki.jp/wiki/Talk:Japanese_pension_system

List of all Talk pages, for the curious: https://retirewiki.jp/wiki/Special:Pref ... amespace=1