category: progress-reports

Current exchange rate: 146 Market movement: down US travel: planned! I finally pulled the trigger on this year’s US trip. I wasn’t able to get the absolute lowest flight prices I saw (at one point I saw tickets for under $1,000 RT per person, but I hesitated and prices went up again), but they were good enough to be worth getting. Since my family has mostly dispersed away from California over the last few years, it’s more complicated to plan a visit to see everyone....

Current exchange rate: 143 Market movement: up US travel plans: still undecided Another mostly uneventful month. One event coming up is that I will finally start selling off my I bonds that I purchased in 2021 (already sold a week before I’m writing this) and 2022 (will sell in early January 2024). Because US interest rates have settled down compared to previous years, the interest payments on I bonds has dropped as well....

Late update because there wasn’t too much that happened last month. As before, I’m still waiting on US flight prices to improve for a trip home. I did plan a Beppu trip for August, so have that to look forward to. Not sure about Sapporo though. The Yen is still at about 140, so pretty weak. The market went up a bit, but I honestly haven’t been paying much attention....

Still waiting on US flight prices / availability to go back to a somewhat reasonable level. United decided to do a surprise mile devaluation a week ago, so now Economy US-Japan flights are 55k miles each way, minimum. Previously to the devaluation, you could get flights for 35k miles, and occasionally below that. I have about 53k miles stranded at United after I had to do a last-minute cancellation for a planned US trip in April, and this devaluation has all but eliminated any reason to use United miles for an upcoming trip, unless there are no better alternatives....

Booked some upcoming weekend travel for this spring and summer. I’m trying to figure out whether I can do a US trip this summer / fall, but the flight prices are so expensive now that Japan has reopened for tourism and now apparently everyone else in the world must be traveling here. Even award flight availability is pretty scarce as the airlines would much rather fill the plane with people willing to pay a premium to be there....

Not a whole lot to report on for this month. Got quarterly dividends; I noticed that payouts seemed lower than this time last year, possible indication of upcoming recession? Also, finished filing my US taxes. I owed a couple hundred dollars because I went over my deductions for my Roth conversion last year. Here’s a summary of my financial position at this point: Description 03/23 Total Expenses $2,692.76 Gross Income $5,910....

New design for the site! I changed the site generator from Jekyll to Hugo, and also found a nice theme to use. The styling looks much better than the previous one, plus there’s some nice quality of life features like search, dark mode, etc. On the backend, Hugo is much simpler to run locally, and deployment builds are much faster than with Jekyll. Finance-wise, it looks like the market dropped a bit, and on top of that the yen also lost quite a bit of value against the dollar, so that explains the ~5% drop in assets compared to last month....

I finished doing the prep work for my US taxes, but as I will owe a small amount ($255) I am in no hurry to file early, so I’ll probably file sometime in March or April. Once again, I Roth-converted slightly too much which is what triggered my tax liability. I’m not letting it bother me though because I’m averaging a 1.38% tax rate on my Roth conversions so far, and once it’s converted all future growth will be tax-free (as far as the US is concerned)....

I’m back from my US trip, having visited with family for a couple of weeks. JPY has started strengthening slightly from its lows of last year, but I was still glad to have USD reserves to use during my trip. My impression of the US was vaguely post-apocalyptic at times (my trip to a Reno Walmart especially comes to mind), but it was still good to see family after more than three years apart....

Looks like both the market and the Yen have made a pretty good recovery this month! USDJPY is now down to about 134, so about 9% strengthening in the Yen compared to last month. Similarly, the US market went up about 5% in the same period, so a nice boost all around for me. Since it’s getting towards the end of the year, it means it’s time once again to start thinking about tax optimization....