RetireJapan

Hi all!

rakuten ideco account details finally came in the post, now sat with the wonderwife trying to figure our allocations. Basically since we know nearly nothing we're trying to keep it simple, whist taking into account what little we do know.

So, this is what we have in mind:
kabu 70%
saiken 30%,
(Logic: I'm 43, wonderwife is 40, but I gather "your age in bonds" is a little conservative, so we did (roughly) our age minus 10. I'm not expecting to retire before 70 - i actually like teaching!

Of which:
kokunai kabu: 20%
kokusai kaku 50% (because I read good things about vanguard on mrmoneymoustache....)
kokunai saiken 15%
kokusai saiken 15%
(basically choosing the funds with the lowest tesuuryou....)

Again, we know nothing so would appreciate people who know something having a quick look at what we have in mind.

At the end of the day tho, something is better than nothing so we're not going to sweat the small details too much.

thanks for any comments anyone can offer, glad to finally be getting this sorted.... (have also applied for nisa, still wating for that one to come through....)

Mostly looks fine.

I personally don't put anything into domestic bonds because the returns are so pitiful. But you do get the advantage of no exchange rate risk.

One thing to watch with vanguard is triple taxation on dividends you get: if you're using vanguard VT ETF or something like that, all the stocks outside the US contained in it get taxed 3 times: once in their country of domicile, once in the US on the dividends generated by vanguard, and again in japan on those dividends.

Personally I've avoided this by using japanese low cost funds. They don't get quite as low as vanguard but they're still low cost. They get taxed twice(country of origin for the original stocks, and then japan), but most of them reinvest dividends internally, so you get to "defer" that into capital gains when you actually sell the product.

Looks good. One thing you may want to add is some emerging market equities -they seem to be slightly undervalued and have some potential for growth over the medium- to long-term. This is a minor detail though and what you have there is certainly 'good enough'.

thanks for the pointers, much appreciated, we added an emerging markets fund and put the numbers in, part one (ideco) is now complete!

Coming up soon: parts 2 (nisa) and 3 (normal investment account for any extra we have), phew this is pretty tiring, much gratitude for this site, might never have managed without it!

Great to hear. It's worth the effort, as one you have everything set up you can pretty much forget about it