Review: Interactive Brokers
A fallback option, but not my first choice So I wrote a teaser post about Interactive Brokers just over a week ago and promised to report back once I had opened an account. After considering a few things I decided not to go through with opening an account (details below) but I think I learned […]
The Japanese Pension System
A nice light topic Recently I have been getting a lot of questions about the Japanese pension system, which made me realize that I don’t understand it perfectly. The pension service website seems like a good place to start, but there are still unanswered questions. What exactly is required to join if you haven’t been […]
Electricity Market Liberalization
Set my electrons free! A huge change is coming to Japan, and I only found out about it a few weeks ago. The electricity market is going to be opened up from April this year, and consumers will be able to buy their electricity from a number of companies instead of their local monopoly. I […]
Lessons from Personal Finance Workshops
I learned a few things too. Last weekend I had the chance to go and speak to the Gifu and Nagoya JALT chapters about personal finance. I’m very grateful to both chapters for inviting me and making it possible for me to fly down to present. These were the longest workshops I have done, and […]
The J401k survey results
A little worrying… Thank you to everyone who answered the J401k survey over the last couple of days. The results so far are slightly worrying, but not unexpected. After all, the book I read about the J401k said that only around 0.2% of the people who are eligible for the account actually have one! The […]
Public Servant Pensions
If you are in the kyosai nenkin system, you should read this My university reminded me yesterday about the coming changes to public sector pensions in Japan. From October this year, Kyosai Nenkin (共済年金) will disappear, and all public servants will be moved into the Kosei Nenkin (厚生年金) system. Kosei Nenkin is also known as […]
The biggest danger
to your retirement is… … not getting started. Of all the dangers, not thinking about retirement has the worst consequences. If you put off planning for retirement, you run the risk of waking up one day and realizing that you don’t have enough money and won’t be able to make enough to maintain your preferred […]
The Weak Yen
The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come I took a couple of trips this month, to the UK and Dubai, and it really brought home to me how weak the yen is getting. The UK in particular was a bit of a shock. As a long-term resident of Japan who likes to travel abroad and […]
15 Financial Rules
Rules are made to be broken I read an interesting post by My Own Advisor the other day (actually quite a while back!) giving his take on 15 Financial Rules. I liked the format, so here are my thoughts: Your retirement income needs to be 70% of your working income.I don’t agree with this. I […]
Your financial stability
How many legs does your stool have? My favourite way of thinking about financial stability is to focus on income streams and to use the image of a stool. This is fairly self-explanatory. The more legs a stool has, the more stable it is and the less likely it is to fall over if it […]