Financial Matters...

Lately I've been on a personal finance kick. I'm on my third finance book, with many more on my wish list at Audible. This fascination started a few years ago, when, in an effort to make sure I'll be ready to handle my own income, I picked up a book called "I Will Teach You To Be Rich" by Ramit Sethi.

I wasn't looking for a get-rich-quick scheme, just some basic financial literacy, with common sense suggestions on budgeting, and saving. Living by myself for 7 months on my own salary as a JET was a great first step to find out how I handle money. Before JET, James handled all money related things, and before I met him, my income was barely enough to survive, so it was easy to handle. I wasn't bad about saving money, but I wanted to know more.

The first time I started reading this book (couple months before starting JET), I read only the first two chapters: dealing with credit cards and bank accounts. WOW! Luckily, I didn't have any CC debt, but even so, there was plenty of information about credit scores and how to make and keep them high. In some respects I was lucky, because my mom opened my first CC when I was still in high school. She also told me to use it to generate a credit history for myself. This wouldn't be so bad, but she also never paid off her cards until months later, thinking that's what meant to have them used. The only reason my CCs were empty, because I didn't want to buy things on future money, after they finally were cleared with James's help. So in the last couple years they were rarely used, and always paid off right away. Imagine my surprise, when I found out what it actually took to have the best credit score: generally no more than two or three CCs, used regularly, but always paid off in the same month, and having a big gap between credit limit and the debt on them.

The next section dealt with bank accounts, and it was chock full of information I've never heard about, but made perfect sense. It also talked about conscious spending, saving up for the big things, and ruthlessly cutting back on frivolous purchases. 

Then JET came, and the third chapter began talking about investing. INVESTING! "Like I would ever have the money or know-how to do it," I thought and put the book down, at least until I had enough saved to even conceive of investing.

Some time passed, and I realized Audible had this book! I was super excited, because I have been meaning to pick it up again, however, I had no time/opportunity for actual reading, and now I could listen to it wherever. The audible version was read by the author too, which I generally like. I started from the beginning, thinking it wouldn't hurt to review the stuff from before. I was right to do so, as there were a few things I forgot, plus this way I had a much better understanding of the author's overall philosophy.

This time I went on to listen to him about investing, and more about conscious spending, which was Chapter 4. Glad I did too, as most of the investing talked about 401K's and Roth IRA's, which are connected to most US salaries. But I would be lying if I said I was able to keep my attention on the topic all the time for 100%. It was good enough to get my feet wet in the subject though. The reason I stopped this time was because we don't have a US salary currently, and thought it didn't apply much to us at the moment. Plus I had this idea that whatever we end up saving up while in Japan will go towards a down-payment on a house eventually, not investing.

So once again I put down the book for some time, and focused on implementing things I've learned thus far, like cutting down even more on our monthly spending, and planning out long-term financial goals and how to achieve them, like saving up for a down-payment of a house.

Months passed, and I began thinking about our financial goals past the JET program. This put me on this final and biggest kick about getting financially literate. It also helped that the book "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" by Robert T. Kiyosaki was on sale at Audible. It's one of those books that I've heard about for years, being a best seller and all. Unfortunately, Kiyosaki's RDPD was so full of sleazy advice dripping with get-rich-quick schemes, and his attitude was so arrogant, that it's not really worth a read. It was mainly philosophical with nothing concrete, idealizing the rich, capitalistic, and consuming way of life. It mentioned all the ways the rich get away with not paying taxes, and how amazing these loopholes were. It called hard working people hamsters.

However, there was one thing that I learned from this book, and it's not a small lesson. It finally clicked that in today's economy, just because one is expected or wants to buy a house soon after marriage, doesn't mean that one should. Homes nowadays are liabilities (at least until they're fully paid), and it makes sense that in order to afford a liability, one has to have an asset to generate the money to keep up that liability. This was the only positive message I got out of this book: Use your money to aggressively build assets first, then take the money these assets generate to pay for liabilities. It also made me go back to my original book by Sethi, so I guess RDPD did two things afterall.

Armed with the understanding of the need for solid assets, I went back once again to Chapter 3, and this time listened carefully to Sethi talk about investing, portfolios, and how to slowly, but surely accumulate wealth. I'm not looking to get rich quick anyways, I just wish to not worry about the basic things in life, or our future when we retire. Now, after finishing the book for the first time, I have to say I see the world quite differently, at least when it comes to finance. Sethi's book is an amazingly simple step-by-step guide for young people to show how to get one's finances in order so that one can accumulate wealth over time. It might not be easy, but it's not impossible either, as long as a person is willing to put a little effort into learning about how to handle money well.

I do realize, of course, that we're very fortunate. Below a certain income/household, it's nearly impossible to get started, especially if someone is already stuck in the rat race. And even in our good circumstance, it took me three years (and a horrendous book) to understand the message this book is trying to show and teach. Will we reach the level of wealth we desire? Only time will tell, but at least I have some tools in my hand to guide us to the right direction.

In the mean time, I will spend a considerable amount of time and brain power to read more about personal finance, so that once we leave Japan, we know what we'll do with our money. To reach this goal, I checked out some blogs Sethi suggested in his book, like GetRichSlowly.org, and TheSimpleDollar.com, to see if I can find some book reviews or suggestions as to where I should start. The above links will take you directly to these book recommending entries of the blogs. The Simple Dollar even reviewed Sethi's book, which you can read here.

So here are the top 10 books I'm planning to read about finance:

1. "The Millionaire Next Door" by Thomas J. Stanley, Ph.D. and William D. Danko, Ph.D.
2. "The Bogleheads’ Guide to Investing" by Taylor Larimore, Mel Lindauer, Michael LeBoeuf, and John C. Bogle
3. "Your Money or Your Life" by Dominguez and Robin
4. "The Four Pillars of Investing: Lessons for Building a Winning Portfolio" by William Bernstein
5. "Smart Couples Finish Rich" by David Bach
6. "The Only Investment Guide You’ll Ever Need" by Andrew Tobias
7. "The Little Book of Common Sense Investing" by John C. Bogle
8. "The Money Class: Learn to Create Your New American Dream" by Suze Orman
9. "The Power of Passive Investing: More Wealth with Less Work" by Richard A. Ferri
10. "Lifecycle Investing: A New, Safe, and Audacious Way to Improve the Performance of Your Retirement Portfolio" by Ian Ayres and Barry Nalebuff

And a few more just to round out my financial literacy:

• "Born to Buy" by Juliet Schor
• "The Complete Tightwad Gazette" by Amy Daczyzyn 
• "America’s Cheapest Family" by Steve and Annette Economides
• "Miserly Moms" by Jonni McCoy
• "The Joy of Simple Living" by Jeff Davidson

Unfortunately, many of the main ones I hope to read soon are not on Audible. I checked our local library, but of course there's nothing in English about personal finance. The top 5 books I'm thinking of buying us for Christmas therefore are:

1. "The Bogleheads’ Guide to Investing" by Taylor Larimore, Mel Lindauer, Michael LeBoeuf, and John C. Bogle 
2. "The Complete Tightwad Gazette" by Amy Daczyzyn 
3. "Born to Buy" by Juliet Schor
4. "The Only Investment Guide You’ll Ever Need" by Andrew Tobias 
5. "Your Money or Your Life" by Dominguez and Robin OR "America’s Cheapest Family" by Steve and Annette Economides

I hope that this blog will help me keep track of our financial goals, and that maybe it serves as a jumping off point for anyone, who is yet to take a look into his or her personal finance, to become more finacially literate. We can't afford not to.

Hiking in Sandan-kyo

I really like hiking. It's one of those things my family did pretty often when I was a child, then fell away once we moved to New York City. For a few years now, I've been itching to go hiking, and when a friend of ours told us about this place, I decided that I'd visit it before I leave Japan.

This is Sandan-kyo, or Sandan Gorge. Designated as National Scenic Beauty, of which there are only five in Japan, its beautiful ravine is said to be #1 in the country. Though I don't have anything to compare it to, I have to say it was breath-taking. But let me not get ahead of myself.

Originally, I was hoping to visit Sandan-kyo during July, to run away from the city heat. However, even a couple weeks prior there were no more spaces in neither the hotel nor the ryokan that offered lodging nearby. In the end, that was a good thing, because I think it rained quite a bit that weekend. Anyway, this time around I began looking at rooms for either of the September three-day-weekends back in the beginning of August. The two places where one can sleep near the Gorge is the Sandankyo Hotel and the Kawamoto Ryokan. I was determined to spend two nights at Sandan-kyo, so that the whole trip wouldn't be too tiring for Rini. The hotel was really expensive, so I looked at the prices in the ryokan, which was much smaller. This search and price comparison took me a few days, in which time the ryokan got filled up for the first weekend (September 14-16th). Nervous that the space would fill up for the last available weekend, I quickly booked a room for September 21-23rd through japanican.com. For the two of us, with breakfast and dinner included, cost ￥32,000, which was very nice, especially compared to what the hotel would have cost us. Rini stayed for free.

So the date was set, now I just had to pray for good weather, and figure out when and how we'd get there and back home. Considering how sensitive I am when it comes to buses, because of motion sickness, we decided to take the local train to Hiroshima City, then the street car to Hiroshima Bus Center, and finally the bus to Sandan-kyo. I bought the discount tickets for the train, which cost ￥1,800 per person per way, and we set out on Saturday with the 11:45AM train. Luckily, all the weather reports for the area predicted sunny and slightly cloudy weather, so we set out in a really good mood. We got to Hiroshima City around 1:30PM, grabbed the street car to Ebisucho, because there is a building near there which has three floors of okonomiyaki restaurants, called Okonomi-mura. Hiroshima style okonomiyaki is probably one of my top 3 favorite foods in Japan, and what other place is better than Hiroshima City itself for the soul food of Hiroshima? So off we went to experience a little bit of heaven. I must say, would I live in Hiroshima City, I would eat here every other day, and would shuffle through all the stalls ordering my favorite okonomiyaki, to decide which place was the best. But alas, I had to contend with one stall chosen at random on the 2nd floor. It was delicious to say the least. If there was one food that I'd want to learn how to make from scratch before leaving Japan is okonomiyaki for sure.

Anyways, back to the rest of our trip. There are several buses to Sandan-kyo, but very few that go express. The difference in time between local and express bus is a good 45 minutes, while in price is only ￥200, which made it a no-brainer choice for us. The express bus we were planning to catch was at 3:33PM. Luckily, when I asked for tickets to Sandan-kyo, the person at the ticket counter was nice and told us about a special round-trip ticket that also included some coupons that could be used in Sandan-kyo, without any price hike. These tickets cost ￥2800 per person round-trip, which is the price for the express bus. The bus trip went by quietly, and we arrived at Sandan-kyo just before 5PM.

We checked into Kawamoto Ryokan by being shown to our rooms. Yes, that's it. No paperwork or even a question as to our names. Whatever I filled in during our online registration was enough. That's how small that place is. I believe there were only three rooms. Our room was a really nice Japanese-style room. The rooms were separate from the toilets and bathroom, and it took a bit of Japanese to figure out when we could use the family bath.

First we had dinner, which was really traditional and very good.While we ate dinner, the ladies who ran the place set up our futons in our room. They also asked us about what time we would like our breakfast in the morning, to which we said 8-8:30AM, as we weren't planning to start our hike early.

Once it was over, we took a bath as a family, which was really nice. We showered quickly, then soaked in the bathtub for 15-20 minutes. The bathtub was huge! It was really nice to relax in the hot water. Once we were done, we put on our yukatas and relaxed in our room until bedtime, when we changed into our pajamas. Rini and I fell asleep probably around 8:30PM, James stayed up a bit longer.

The next day I was was woken up by Rini asking to nurse around 6AM, so once she was done, I just got up. Unfortunately, she got up along with me, which made me regret telling the ladies such a late breakfast time the night before. Once James got up, we started packing our backpack for the hike later, since we still had time until breakfast. We planned on bringing with us our ErgoBaby carrier, and my new backpack, which had a change of clothes for Rini, diapers, and food and water.

Breakfast time finally came, and we went down in our yukatas, and enjoyed another traditional meal of fish, rice, miso soup, and a bit of scrambled eggs. It was really tasty. I surprised James by drinking some coffee, but I had access to extra milk and sugar, so why not, I thought? While James took Rini upstairs to get ready for the day, I asked some questions about the hike from the owner to clear some things up. My main concern was how much food to bring and where we could eat during our hike. There is a "restaurant" about an hour up the trail, which offered a few udon and fish dishes, but there was nothing else past that point. Considering the size of our breakfast, I doubted we would want to stop and eat that soon. So, I asked the lady to wrap up the rest of our rice as a simple onigiri for us (ie just put it into a plastic wrap and shape into onigiri), which she did, and even added seaweed to it! I packed our two onigiri and some other food we brought along from yesterday, and got dressed to go. We left around 9:45, Rini on my back in the baby carrier, and James carrying our backpack and water bottles. At the gate of the hike, there was a little natural spring, from which people were encouraged to drink. It was really tasty water, so we filled all our water bottles there, and off we went.

I can't say much about the hike, because words just wouldn't do it justice as to how beautiful it was. The trail running along the side of the mountain, the river was so beautiful and crystal clear, I wanted to jump in several times to go for a swim. Rini slept through the first 30 minutes to an hour of it, and I was glad she did, because we were able to go much faster with her on my back. Originally, I planned to have her walk along with us a little, then carried by me a little, and so on, but the trail was pretty narrow with deep drops to one side, which we thought wasn't the best place for a toddler to walk on, even if we were holding her hands.

After about 20 minutes or so, we saw Akadaki, which was a stream that made the rocks red. It was really beautiful, and the best part was that the water was drinkable. I found it even better than the one at the gate, and we made a mental note of filling our water bottles when we came back.

Another 20 minutes or so brought us Kurobuchi, where hikers can take a short boat ride on the river to the nearby "restaurant." Since it cost ￥300 one-way (￥500 round trip), we decided to just keep hiking, and take the boat on our way back.

We hiked for another 45 minutes, then stopped for lunch at Mizunashi.

Rini playing around as we relaxed.

After lunch and a bit of relaxation, we headed west to Sarutobi in hopes of taking a boat to Nidandaki. It took us about a half hour to reach the spot, but because of construction or incoming typhoon, there was no boat service that day. From the shore, it was hard to see what might be so special about the boat ride, and even though we left the place already, I decided to return with Rini on my back to satisfy my curiosity and take just one picture from the river. It looked pretty shallow, and was a nice warm day, so I thought why not? James wasn't feeling too well at that point, so we decided he'd wait for Rini and I to go and explore. When I got back, I took off my shoes and socks, pulled my pants really high, and into the river we went. The stones were a bit slippery, and I had to go really slow, so that we wouldn't fall into the river. At first, where I went in, it got a bit deep for my clothes to stay dry, but after looking around a bit, I found a really shallow way in, where I was able to take a few nice pictures and a video on my cell phone. The water was pretty cold, but kind of nice after 3 hours of hiking. 

As you can see, curiosity did not, in fact, kill the Kat... (cough, smirk, cough) In some respects I was a bit sad that Rini didn't stay with James, because I would have just swam in to see what was beyond. But on the other hand, Rini was probably the only reason I didn't follow through that crazy plan.
After we joined up with James again, we took the trail that lead to Sandandaki, which took about another half hour. At last, we were able to see one of the major waterfalls of this river. It was really beautiful, and I could only imagine just how gorgeous it must be during deep fall, when the leaves are red and golden yellow around the waterfall. At this point, if we wanted to, we could have hiked for another hour and a half to see the very end of the trail, where the Tarutoko Dam was. However, we were already hiking for over 3 hours at this point, and even I was starting to feel a bit tired, not to mention James, whose leg started to hurt, and Rini, who was becoming antsy just being carried around all day long. I never planned to hike farther than Sandandaki anyways, so after resting up a bit, we turned around and headed back down.

When we reached Kurobuchi again, we rested again for 30 minutes or so, then took the 5 minute boat ride. While it's worth taking once, I'm glad we skipped it on our way up, when we had the energy to hike. We got back to the beginning of the trail at around 4:30PM. It total, we hiked 16 km, going up and down and up again in one of the most picturesque places of Japan. Though we were quite tired and were looking forward to our family bath, this hike recharged my soul in a way I didn't quite expect. Sure, I missed hiking, but finding out just how much was a little surprising. If I could, I would take similar hikes every other week for sure.

Our final night was spent similarly to our previous one, except that this time we took a nice hour long soak soon after we returned to the ryokan, and only after that did we eat our tasty dinner.
The next morning was promising to be really early, since we had to catch the 6:55AM express bus to Hiroshima City, so I asked the owner if we could have our breakfast at 6:15, to which she had no objections. Needless to say, Rini and I fell asleep pretty quickly that night.

The next morning we packed up, had our breakfast, payed our bill, and caught the bus back to the city. Before heading back to Fukuyama, we dropped by Costco to shop a little bit and have lunch, but we still caught the 11:43AM train home. We ended our weekend trip with ice cream from Baskin-Robbins at Fukuyama station, then biked home to relax for the rest of the day. It was a wonderful trip, and I'm really glad we went.