RetireJapan

Thank you for all the replies. I will look into it some more. I guess the fact it's cheap means that claims are fairly rare. But just in case... With insurance that often means that the threshold to claim benefits is high. Not my experience with juku hoken (it is easy to claim). But cover is not pa...

Depends on your preference, investment time horizon etc. but that looks pretty unlikely to grow much. Seems a waste of a tax advantaged account. I recommend thinking about your portfolio as a whole, not separately in each different account. So even if you want to own that many bonds, put them in you...

The person I spoke to actually called me back to say that it was not obligatory for my boss to pay for social insurance because my company was small. She said that it had to be a place that had 50 staff members. However what you just posted says 5 staff. If it’s 5 staff then I’m potentially in luck...

Thanks, don't know the exact amount yet, it will depend on expenses, etc., but might well be a more than that 3600-man, given today's exchange rate. That is why I worry. Inheritance tax in Japan is applied in bands, so anything up to about 100m or so is not going to be excessively painful. https://...

We have juku hoken. It covers students on the way to and from the school, any accidents they might have on the premises, damage they cause etc. We've made a few small claims on it and they were all paid promptly. Coverage is not particularly generous, but it is nice to hand parents off to the insura...

If you add to your investments regularly it should smooth out some of the volatility. But holding a diversified index for the long term should deliver reasonable returns. Try not to check the price of your holdings much, it doesn't help and will only make you unhappy.

Does anybody know how Japanese tax authorities treat income to a Japanese beneficiary from a foreign (USA) retirement accounts? My wife (Japanese) and I (US citizen), no kids, now living abroad, have most of our money for retirement in a TIAA retirement account (taxation is deferred until when you ...

"Transfers of funds between persons who have a legal responsibility to support each other do not constitute a gift, unless the Gift is for a purpose other than support or living expenses, etc.." 'legal responsibility to support each' means 'dependent'. Whilst a student under about 25 migh...

So if you pay for your (adult) child’s rent it isn’t counted as a gift to them? If I remember correctly, former PM Hatoyama had a minor scandal where his mummy was giving him tens (hundreds?) of millions of yen a month to cover his living expenses. The scandal was that he might be using the money f...

For anyone actually worried about this, paying family living expenses directly (rent, utilities, groceries, travel, insurance, education expenses) while letting them save and invest their income seems pretty foolproof. Personally I'm planning to do that as well as regularly gifting up to a million y...