Saving for the Future
Jon is back Prolific contributor Jon is back with his second guest post in as many months. You may remember his post about deciding to buy a house from last month. Today he writes about his financial plan. I always find it really interesting to hear or read about other people’s situations -it’s a great […]
Some Thoughts on The Stock Market
Keep calm and follow the plan Well, the stock markets seem to have caught the novel coronavirus. Checked my Rakuten account today after seeing some posts on the forum here, and we’re down… quite a bit. I figure this might be a good time to do a quick post for anyone who is feeling a […]
Disaster Preparation: Diseases 2
Second order effects After last week’s post, I did not expect to end up writing about the novel coronavirus this soon, but I have thought a lot and learned a lot in the last few days so here it is. I promise this isn’t going to be some drawn-out paranoid series though, this should be […]
The Monday Read
Happy New Year edition Well, that’s the end of 2019 (and the decade, depending on how you measure it). Hope it was a good one for you 🙂 Our next blog post will be planning 2020: hope you’ll join us for the ride. This week’s links New blog post by Tim Ferriss (he mostly does […]
Progress Report 2019
The Mega-Progress This year we are combining all the progress report posts into one huge long report. Previously we had a separate post for each one, but I think it might be more readable (or skippable!) as one big long post. We’re going to cover the following areas in order: iDeCo Progress NISA Progress Mortgage […]
The Monday Read
Advent Calendar Edition We’ll be doing the annual progress reports again this year, and instead of breaking them into multiple posts we’ll just do one long one including all the information. Let me know what you think of the new format! In other news it seems like the government is going to extend ordinary NISA […]
Cashless Rebates
How does 2-5% cashback sound, sir? Have you noticed that recently a lot of shops suddenly have ‘we take PayPay’ and similar signs up? There are also a lot of places that recently started accepting credit cards, using those little blue card readers to process the payment. It seems this is not a spontaneous occurence, […]
Disaster Preparation in Japan
Are you ready for anything? I was not expecting the typhoon this week to take out Narita Airport and large parts of Chiba. A colleague was at the airport and said they hadn’t seen anything like it since the 3/11 earthquake. Given the potential for natural and other disasters here in Japan, I thought this […]
The Monday Read
Typhoon Time: Stay Safe Out There Week two of our resumed regular service. Seems like this might be the last gasp of summer: I’m looking forward to cooler and less humid days and nights once autumn arrives properly. One exciting announcement: we’re planning a RetireJapan event in Tsukuba on October 26th, in collaboration with Tsukuba […]
Japan Pension Update 2019
More of the same My birthday is this month, so I received my annual pension statement last week. If you are paying into the Japanese state pension system you should receive your annual statement (年金定期便) around your birthday. If you don’t receive a statement I recommend following up, as something may be wrong with your […]