RetireJapan

I am currently planning to buy an apartment in Japan. It is a new apartment that will be finished in March 2025, which is when the payment will be due, with the total cost being around 50,000,000 JPY, or around 320,000 USD at current exchange rates. I am planning to purchase it without a loan, and the money to cover it is currently sitting in my US Vanguard account. Considering I'm a US citizen, I am wondering what is the best way to handle transferring the money from the US to Japan. Basically, I am looking at three options:

Transfer it immediately. The benefits of this would be to take advantage of the current good exchange rate. The drawbacks would be that once in Japan, it would either have to sit in a basic Japanese bank account, or invest it and pay any additional possible taxes associated with PFICs.

Transfer it when the payment is due (March 2025). The benefits of this would be it could sit in my US Vanguard meanwhile. The drawbacks would be that the USD/JPY exchange rate could get worse between now and March 2025, perhaps significantly worse.

The third option would be a possible hybrid of the two approaches, possibly to reduce risk. Any and all advice is appreciated.

If it is invested in stocks there is also the risk of a market downturn in the next few months. If it were me I would probably send it over soon. You know that you will definitely need it in cash, and in yen, at a fixed point within the next year. Conditions are reasonably favourable now in terms of both stock price and currency. I would value certainty in your shoes.

I would also look to move it over now. I remember having a similar dilemma when we purchased our house and funded from assets drawn down overseas. In the end I did about half a dozen transactions.

You might want to look into ways with low bid/ask spread on the currency transfer, you can save 1-2% by not using banks to do the actual conversion for you. IB is a popular way to do this I believe..