Moving from overseas to retire early in Japan
Posted: Thu May 30, 2024 12:49 am
Anybody else living outside Japan, but looking to retire there? Would be keen to hear your experiences and thoughts on our plans.
So: my Japanese wife and I are living & working overseas (high income, high cost of living) and plan to do so until the kids graduate high school and we retire in our 50s. She's fluent in English, I'm fluent in Japanese (N1). We could retire in either country, but we're both leaning towards Japan because our money would go a lot further there.
Financially, our situation is unusual in that the vast majority of our assets are in a tax haven where there are basically no taxes on investment gains. (This wasn't planned, we just lived and worked there for a long time.) I understand Japan taxes on worldwide income if we become Jp residents, including investment income, but merely spending down previous assets does not incur tax.
We have next to no assets in Japan, I have no Jp pension, my wife might qualify for a marginal one. We will likely inherit some Jp property etc when my wife’s parents pass away, but not anywhere we’d want to live, so we plan to sell it and it's not hugely valuable anyway. I do intend to run a hobby company but it'll be incorporated outside Japan, selling only digital goods and I don't expect to make serious money from it.
We're weighing three options:
Okinawa. We love the place, it's nice and warm (I hate the cold), it's big enough that we can get a nice semi-rural property that ticks all my boxes and there's a proper city with everything we need. Yes, summers get hot, but we spent 10 years in tropical SE Asia so we can handle it for a couple of months per year. Downsides: no family or friends, going anywhere off island requires a flight, traffic, airplane noise, not hearing great things about the level of available medical care, being constantly mistaken for US military gets old, top of the list to get nuked if Xi starts WW3.
Kansai. My wife is from the region and still has some friends there, countless travel and culture opportunities (classical music, art museums etc), top notch medical care available, easy international travel. Downsides: winters are cold, summers are still sweaty, not sold on the general idea of living out my days in some random concreted-over suburb when I could be near the beach with palm trees. We also don't really have a concrete idea of where to go in Kansai to strike a good balance between amenities and space: Hyogo, Wakayama, somewhere else?
Stay overseas. Main advantage would be to be closer to kids & any future grandchildren, but it's a globalized world, who knows where they will end up. Downside: everything including housing is way more expensive, kinda boring, wife has lived in gaikoku for 20+ years now and would prefer to go back to where the sushi is decent and she doesn't need to deal with casual racism.
Thoughts? Any major advantages or pitfalls I'm missing? What would you do?
So: my Japanese wife and I are living & working overseas (high income, high cost of living) and plan to do so until the kids graduate high school and we retire in our 50s. She's fluent in English, I'm fluent in Japanese (N1). We could retire in either country, but we're both leaning towards Japan because our money would go a lot further there.
Financially, our situation is unusual in that the vast majority of our assets are in a tax haven where there are basically no taxes on investment gains. (This wasn't planned, we just lived and worked there for a long time.) I understand Japan taxes on worldwide income if we become Jp residents, including investment income, but merely spending down previous assets does not incur tax.
We have next to no assets in Japan, I have no Jp pension, my wife might qualify for a marginal one. We will likely inherit some Jp property etc when my wife’s parents pass away, but not anywhere we’d want to live, so we plan to sell it and it's not hugely valuable anyway. I do intend to run a hobby company but it'll be incorporated outside Japan, selling only digital goods and I don't expect to make serious money from it.
We're weighing three options:
Okinawa. We love the place, it's nice and warm (I hate the cold), it's big enough that we can get a nice semi-rural property that ticks all my boxes and there's a proper city with everything we need. Yes, summers get hot, but we spent 10 years in tropical SE Asia so we can handle it for a couple of months per year. Downsides: no family or friends, going anywhere off island requires a flight, traffic, airplane noise, not hearing great things about the level of available medical care, being constantly mistaken for US military gets old, top of the list to get nuked if Xi starts WW3.
Kansai. My wife is from the region and still has some friends there, countless travel and culture opportunities (classical music, art museums etc), top notch medical care available, easy international travel. Downsides: winters are cold, summers are still sweaty, not sold on the general idea of living out my days in some random concreted-over suburb when I could be near the beach with palm trees. We also don't really have a concrete idea of where to go in Kansai to strike a good balance between amenities and space: Hyogo, Wakayama, somewhere else?
Stay overseas. Main advantage would be to be closer to kids & any future grandchildren, but it's a globalized world, who knows where they will end up. Downside: everything including housing is way more expensive, kinda boring, wife has lived in gaikoku for 20+ years now and would prefer to go back to where the sushi is decent and she doesn't need to deal with casual racism.
Thoughts? Any major advantages or pitfalls I'm missing? What would you do?
But this was a while ago, and yes, the plan would be to explore our options on the ground before we make the plunge and buy a house/apartment.