Rainy season???
Well, it’s only early May, and yet here in Sendai it is getting unseasonably humid. Hopefully it’s just a temporary thing rather than an acceleration of the seasons!
Seems like the Japanese government is getting a bit worried about how the general public views their vaccination efforts so far and things seem to be accelerating. You can see the latest figures here, getting better but a long way from Suga’s goal of 1m vaccinations per day.
RetireJapan Site Reach
I did some internet searches on financial topics in Japan, and found that the site was not ranking well on them. Our organic search visibility seems to be much worse than I expected it to be.
Any advice? I am planning to write some long-form articles on our main topics, hopefully that will help.
I’d also appreciate it if you could share the site and link to it if you can: I feel like there are lots of people out there we could be helping, but aren’t because they don’t know about us.
Blog post from the past
Last night I had an idea for a blog post. It was going to be about the similarities between money and electricity, and give some ideas for people to work on their financial resilience. I was looking forward to writing it next week.
Then today on Facebook I got one of those ‘you have memories’ notifications, and one of them was this blog post.
Maybe I need some time off…
The forum this week
Lots going on on the forum this week:
This week’s links
- This website is fascinating. Shows real estate prices all over Japan by area: 土地代データ
- This article has interesting nuggets buried in a slurry of nonsense 🙄
Interestingly enough, when I first came to Japan my apartment rent was 30,000 yen a month (after the rent subsidy). My mortagage now (21 years later) is still 30,000 yen a month. Plus ca change! How to live like you’re earning ¥10 million a year on an income of ¥3 million - Kevin Kelly is back with another advice list: 99 Additional Bits of Unsolicited Advice
- This was a very long and very interesting article on the origins of Covid-19. I have no way of judging its reliability though! Origin of Covid — Following the Clues
- This is great. I love it. The perfect financial crime? The Alfred Hitchcock Path to FI
- Japan is leading the world again: Births in U.S. Drop to Levels Not Seen Since 1979
- Eeek. Let’s hope they manage to address this: China’s Emissions Now Exceed All the Developed World’s Combined
- Not surprising. I think Covid gave us all a lot to think about: Affluent Americans Rush to Retire in New ‘Life-Is-Short’ Mindset
- This is excellent. Read it now: 10 Things You Shouldn’t Care About as an Investor
- Eeek. Japan is #155. Not surprising I guess, given that we’ve had three medium sized earthquakes already in Miyagi this year 😬 List of countries by natural disaster risk
What do you think? Anything good in there? I found #4 really interesting, and #5 charming.
From number 2
“The survey results indicate,” she says, “that satisfaction with life depends not on income but on your sense of being in control of your income.”
That, plus the sense of being in control of your expenses.
Control of your income and expenses is very much aided by having a cash buffer. If you are paying your expenses from a pool which is large enough, say, for one year of expenses, which is being (at least) replenished from income, you will feel very little stress at all. Even if your income takes a hit, you have significant time to make expenditure adjustments, should the income hit look like being longer term.
Investment experts of talk about keeping assets in cash as a lost investment opportunity, but for many of us who are very good at thinking about what could go wrong in the future, cash is of much more value than its monetary one.
I’m starting to find that. I’ll be unemployed/semiretired from next April, so I am suddenly squirreling away cash to an unprecedented degree. Having a 1-2 year cash buffer suddenly seems very important, in a way it didn’t while I had a very stable job ^-^
Regarding number 6, I have not read the way the report in detail, but, in ranking Japan as no. 155, it would seem that they are talking about the risk of a natural disaster occurring NOT the risk of dying in one should it occur.
If anyone should doubt the resilience of Japan to earthquakes, I often refer them to the astounding fact that, after 2011 there were 5,387 aftershocks of magnitude 4.0 or higher along the Pacific coast from Iwate Prefecture to the north of Chiba Prefecture in the period of one year.
And I neglected to add that, other than the 2011 earthquake itself, the number of deaths in those 5,387 aftershocks was limited to a coupe of dozen, if that. Contrast that with a country like that of Iran, where earthquakes in the mid-6 range have been know to kill 10-20,000 people.
The number of deaths from the 5th largest earthquake ever recorded itself was less than 1,000 if one does not count drowning in the tsunami. That is not to dismiss those drowning deaths but simply to note that the vast majority were the result of a refusal to evacuate (in other words, avoidable.)