Monthly Financial Snapshot: July 2022

Financially, not much change to report for this month or last. Inflation is still pretty high (although maybe it’s starting to taper off?), the Yen is still pretty weak (although it’s slightly stronger than it was last month), and the market is still pretty much doing whatever it wants to do. My investments made a pretty good recovery in July, increasing by about 4.8%, and it basically returned my position to where I was at the end of February of this year. In terms of Yen, my savings and investments are at an all-time high, but if the Yen continues to strengthen back to its normal range faster than my US investments recover, then the overall effect might be negative.

I did do an emergency trip back to the US in mid-July because my grandmother unexpectedly passed away. I was fortunate enough to find out about it with enough lead time to book a last-minute award flight (net 66,863 United miles + $160.77) in time for the funeral. It’s times like these when having a large miles/points balance really comes in handy, so I’m thankful to past me for putting in the effort to learn how these systems work and how to efficiently accumulate these miles and points. I was also fortunate in that in June the US lifted its requirement of a negative COVID test to enter the country, as well as Japan lifting its requirements for mandatory on-arrival COVID testing, multi-day enforced hotel and home quarantines, ban on use of public transport and invasive monitoring policies. If I had to deal with all of that on top of last-minute international travel, it would have been an even larger burden. Here’s hoping that travel continues to make at least small progress towards normalization!

Here’s a summary of my financial position at this point:

Projected time to FI (assuming 6% growth and 4% withdrawal rate): 11 years, 1 months.