RetireJapan

The dividend and capital gain tax rate in Japan does not increase above that 20.315% rate. If your only income is qualified dividends and you are filing married-filing-jointly you actually can be tax-free on the US side up to (for 2024): $89,200 + $29,200 (2 standard deductions if under 65) = $118,4...

My 雇用保険 is taken out monthly and in July when it is taken from my bonus as well.

Very sorry that you are in this situation. I do want to thank you for sharing the details of what happened because this is making me reconsider how I should be protecting my accounts and whether I should ever use Apple's payment services.

The key word here being "Japanese" mutual funds. For Americans like captainspoke and I the ETF version of a Vanguard fund is preferable to its mutual fund version since they both pay out taxable dividends as per US law while the ETF has significantly lower fees. Japanese mutual funds can ...

If you think about the yen-dollar exchange rate over the last 35 years or in relation to purchasing power parity, the yen is till incredibly weak.

... 1. Did you see the SS benefit reduced by WEP? 2. How do you handle the US SS payments on Japanese taxes? 1. It likely was, but I haven't explored the calculations. The process was initiated and handled mostly thru the local pension office here, and due to this, what I get for pension here was c...

@captainspoke wrote: An aside, but if you happen to be US, and have any social security earnings (high school or college jobs etc), the totalization agreement works. I only had ~20 credits/quarters, and what you usually read is that 40 are needed to collect SS. Totalization brings you up to minimums...

The effect of exchange rate changes is complicated because the companies are dealing with expenses as well as income in various currencies. I work in international pharmaceuticals and almost all of our expenses for clinical development are denominated in US dollars because of how the industry servin...

Sorry that you had this bad experience (especially that deep cut). I don't mean to defend the hospital but this reminds me of something that used to happen to me when I was practicing medicine (moonlighting) at Kaiser hospitals in northern California. The community of undocumented workers tended to ...

Yeah BNDX and BNDW include corporate bonds, and mortgage-backed securities, I think, which I probably want to avoid in retirement. I am not sure about negative returns on government bond funds though. Over the last five years eMaxis SLIM Developed Bonds returned 5.22% including distributions https:...