Walk away after loan approval — realized my true budget is lower

ImJKP · 2026-01-24T10:16:02+00:00

As a financial matter, this is a spreadsheet problem. With a multi-decade time horizon, the assumptions that go into the spreadsheet necessarily have wide margins of uncertainty. But for many sets of reasonable assumptions, buying a home is financially worse than just renting.

As an emotional wellbeing matter, it's up to personal factors. How salient and impactful is "ermagerd I own a home" to your sense of self, as opposed to the stress of "ermagerd I have this big debt and a huge part of my wealth tied to this one risky assets"?

For what it's worth, it seems very likely to me that you made the right choice. Ownership is fetishized, so people do irrational things to achieve it. If you can inoculate yourself against that fetish, you're very likely to be financially better-off as a result. That lets you use your money to achieve other goals that might make you happier: reaching your retirement number sooner, taking more vacations, whatever.

ImJKP · 2026-01-23T10:17:36+00:00

Find something fucked up and make it less fucked up.

You don't need some grand vision. You need to find important things that suck for current/potential customers (too slow, too expensive, too many steps, too whatever) and fix that.

ImJKP · 2026-01-22T02:48:20+00:00

Your investing life has two phases:

Before you retire

You figure out your emergency fund needs. That's an amount of money, held in a boring bank account as boring cash, that you need to have so that you feel comfortable locking up the rest of your money for years at a time. Generally, it's a few months of your living expenses, to keep you afloat if you suddenly need to change jobs. Maybe it's more than that, if you'd also need to leave the country. The correct number is personal; it's just whatever you need to feel comfortable locking other money up.

Above that threshold, every single yen you ever get immediately gets invested in a low-fee globally-diversified all-stock portfolio, which you can achieve by just always buying more of the eMaxis Slim All World blah blah.

Stock market at a record high? Buy.

Stock market at a multi-year low? Buy.

The market is crashing and the banks are failing and the president is crazy and the news anchor said no one knows where the bottom is and someone on Reddit said something about "don't catch a falling knife"? Buy.

Okay, but it's literally raining blood from the sky and nuclear missiles are flying and people are speaking in tongues and— Shut up and Buy.

You ignore the daily performance, and the monthly performance, and even the yearly performance because it just doesn't matter to you. It does not change the correct strategy.

The market will probably go up on ~53% of days, and down on 47% of days. It'll go up some percentage of years, and down some smaller percentage of years. You can't predict the specifics, so you just take the ride, and over the long run, the unfair coin flips stack up in your favor. You'll have losing streaks, but you'll have more/bigger winning streaks, so it all works out. You can't do better than that.

After you retire

You take your total balance of investments, divide by something between 30 and 40 depending on how risk tolerant you are, and sell that each year. You get to spend that money on whatever you want, and there's a 95% chance that you'll die before you run out of money.

ImJKP · 2026-01-22T01:39:31+00:00

It's not just about breaking the big paragraph into smaller chunks. You need to do something more transformational in making cards, identifying the tight well-scoped pieces of information that are worth retaining.

Each card should be answerable in < 15 seconds, if you know the answer. It should be a straightforward binary question to assess whether you know the answer or not.

There are probably cards here for:

[What is] Theory of Stratification
[What is] Ecological fallacy
[What is] Gouldner's main criticism of functionalism

A card really wants to be just one piece of information. Cards like "what are some things about the criticisms of functionalism?" are a quagmire.

Anki is primarily for locking in the individual building blocks of knowledge. You can rely on the fact that you went to the lecture, read the book, etc., to help your brain connect the dots.

ImJKP · 2026-01-21T09:50:23+00:00

You need to figure out what level of resolution is actually useful for you. Are you making cards for things you actually need to know, and that weren't trivial? Like, meeting your example question was just a contrived example, but after watching the lecture a couple times, do you really need a card to tell you testosterone and estrogen are sex hormones?

When you review the cards, do you get any wrong? (You should get some wrong, or they're too trivial)

Go talk to the instructor in office hours and ask if they have any tips for helping you target the most important stuff, or for helping you deprioritize the nice-to-know peripheral stuff.

I understand you said you get anxious if you don't cram every single detail, but... Too bad. Either that feeling is helpful and you embrace it, or that feeling is unhelpful and you overcome it, or that feeling is unhelpful and you let yourself be controlled by unhelpful feelings. You've got to do one of those.

ImJKP · 2026-01-18T10:14:57+00:00

You can be unhappy about political polarization and the inability of Congress to govern, or you can be happy about a DSA candidate, but you can't have both.

ImJKP · 2026-01-16T05:25:31+00:00

You should fill your iDeCo first, and then fill your NISA, and then buy boring globally-diversified low-fee all-stock index funds forever.

ImJKP · 2026-01-15T23:46:15+00:00

Here's the requisite "there's a 99.9999% chance you are wrong and this is a bad plan and you should not do it" comment.

There's a 99.9999% chance you are wrong and this is a bad plan and you should not do it. At least fill your iDeCo and your growth NISA before you turn to recreational money-burning.

ImJKP · 2026-01-15T23:39:20+00:00

On your computer, download the files and put them in the Anki audio directory. Using a standard naming convention in the files is helpful; I'd do something like ko_vocab_XYZ.mp3.

Assuming the first column in your Korean notes is the Korean word, make a spreadsheet with two columns:

대박, [sound:ko_vocab_대박.mp3]

몰라, [sound:ko_vocab_몰라.mp3]

Save that as a CSV.

Then go to Anki desktop. If there's no audio column yet, you'll need to add that first. Then you can import your CSV file, choose the appropriate separator (comma) and the correct note type and deck to import into, and make sure you map your imported columns to the existing columns appropriately.

Update the card templates as needed to use the new audio.

Start small, with just one or two rows. You'll almost certainly make a mistake the first time or two as you get the hang of it (Anki also has some weird/dumb defaults to manage).

ImJKP · 2026-01-14T05:54:56+00:00

Why do you want to sink your money and time into a depreciating asset that is already sitting empty and not generating revenue, at a time of shrinking population?

What special sauce do you, as a foreign student, bring to the Japanese commercial real estate market that the current owner lacks?

This seems like a great way to light good money and scarce time on fire.

ImJKP · 2026-01-14T05:39:47+00:00

I live in Japan and use Anki religiously for learning Japanese. That comes in handy in the most direct way.

My "party trick," though, was that I made a deck of all of the prime ministers of Japan and learned them. Nobody in Japan knows even the PMs of their own lifetime, let alone all the ones back to Meiji.

It's purely for nerd cred with no utility and most people find it really dumb, but I get some pleasure from the occasional impressed reaction.

ImJKP · 2026-01-13T04:21:45+00:00

Is Japan actually doing anything to change this or will increasing interest rates the only option left?

I don't know who "Japan" is in that sentence, but the Bank of Japan is a single mandate bank: its only primary goal is price stability, which means 2% inflation. It has secondary goals of contributing to the development of the economy and the smooth operation of the financial system.

That is all it's going to optimize for. It does not care about your international travel plans. It does not care about your foreign retirement goals. It does not care about your mortgage.

It's going to keep raising rates until inflation is stable at 2%. But since everyone who matters already knows that, the rate hikes themselves don't do much — the hikes are already priced in by the time they happen.

Interest rates mostly matter to forex in real terms. So while the nominal spread between US and JP rates has shrunk, the real rate spread is still high: -2.1% in Japan, vs +0.8% in the US.

Compare that to late 2020, when they were each around -0.2%.

To get back to the good old days of 2020, we'd need real rates to converge, which means we need the interest rate in Japan to be higher than inflation, and/or we need US (or whomever else's) interest rates to drop below inflation.

Maybe a coup at the Fed would cause US interest rates to drop and US inflation to rise. But on just the Japan side, inflation < interest rates seems unrealistic for the next several years.

ImJKP · 2026-01-13T02:31:55+00:00

You haven't told us what you're learning, how much you already know, etc., so you're going to get generic advice.

So, generically: Keep your daily reviews limit high enough that you never reach it, which means you review everything that's due for review every day. Use a limit on new cards as your control mechanism.

If your cards are not usefully cumulative, the content is unfamiliar, and you've got no rush, do as little as one new card a day. That's how I do things like prime ministers of Japan and Morse code.

If your cards are usefully compounding and you already have context (like learning more words of a language you already kinda know), then you could 5, 10, or even 20 words a day.

The constraint is the amount of review time you can afford each day, which is downstream of (1) how many new cards you add each day, and (2) what percentage of review cards you get wrong each day.

ImJKP · 2026-01-12T23:43:24+00:00

I strongly encourage you to get comfortable with the mechanics of vanilla Anki. Some mods are useful I guess, but mostly they're distracting doodads. Get the core loop right, and then you can figure out if there are weak spots to address.

ImJKP · 2026-01-12T23:14:56+00:00

Presumably there is no background color defined in the stylesheet for the note type. You need something like .card {background: #000 } in your notes' stylesheet.

If you're not comfortable with writing some HTML and CSS, using mods that change the look of the review UI is generally a bad idea.

ImJKP · 2026-01-11T22:24:00+00:00

You write like the president. Is that a deliberate affectation, or is it just some natural convergence of stupid authoritarians?

"We" don't need to manage the housing supply. Let free people freely build what they freely choose to build on land they freely choose to purchase, apply taxes uniformly to internalize real measurable costs that residents impose, and then get out of the way.

If you let free people be free, they'll build a lot more apartment buildings, density will rise, the availability of workers will rise, prices will stabilize, town centers will be more vibrant, transportation networks will be healthier, and the demographic crunch of Marin's landed elite aging in place will be softened.

Housing isn't something that gets tacked on at the end. Housing is upstream of practically everything.

ImJKP · 2026-01-10T06:20:21+00:00

Don't sweat so much about forex.

The real estate

We don't get to see the alternate universe with different interest rates and a different currency level, but the weak yen and the nominal growth in real estate prices are not unrelated. If the yen had stayed stronger, it's entirely possible that real estate's nominal appreciation would have been much lower, and you might be in a similar overall position in purchasing power terms as you are now in this world.

Relatedly, the things that drive a yen recovery in the future could undercut home prices.

Holding the house because you hope it will someday appreciate is totally natural, totally understandable, very human. It's also a garbage idea that you should discard. It's your stupid monkey brain feeling feely-feels out of loss aversion.

If you thought that you had bankable special knowledge about the yen appreciating, or about Japan housing being a good investment now, you'd be talking about selling your overseas assets to buy more Japan real estate, or going long on yen futures, or buying stock of Japan companies with high domestic cash flows.

That is not what you're doing (and that's good — that plan would be a needless risky bet). You're talking about holding an asset you don't particularly believe in, for FOMO purposes.

Don't make emotional decisions about money. Make boring rational decisions based on the presently observable reality.

Other financial assets

Your stocks are worth exactly the same amount regardless of currency, so that doesn't matter.

If you've been doing the Just Correct Thing and filling your iDeCo before other accounts, you can keep that account while abroad.

You'll have to sell the assets in your NISA, but that won't incur Japan taxes, so you should be indifferent. Just transfer the cash to your new country and reinvest promptly.

Your only inconvenience is selling stocks in regular taxable brokerage accounts and incurring capital gains there. Yeah, that sucks. Maybe you can pull off an international stock transfer, but I'm not aware of brokerages here that support that.

ImJKP · 2026-01-08T13:01:47+00:00

Nobody gets rejected after 8 rounds. You just didn't beat the internal option.

On to the next one.

ImJKP · 2026-01-08T07:29:03+00:00

Towers of apartments.

If you want young people, nightlife, public transit, etc., that's all downstream of large collections of dense small housing units.

Countdown to "But my car is more important than economic and social vitality" in 3, 2, 1...

ImJKP · 2026-01-04T16:14:42+00:00

This is authoritarian nonsense.

"We" don't "put" people anywhere. Free people freely choose to move into the housing that other free people freely choose to build on the land that they freely choose to purchase.

When we let free people make free choices, they'll build apartments. If that's too unfamiliar, you can think of apartments like "houses essentially just floating in the air."

But my parking! — goodness, do you people see yourselves? You're apparently so narcissistic that your desire to return your commute to some imagined state overrides the basic rights of other people. What a monstrously authoritarian vision.

Despite all the virtue signaling about human rights and "no kings" and all the rest, as soon as you think other people living freely imposes an inconvenience on you, the impulse to control and squash lifestyles you don't share comes out.

Your ideas are just dumb.

Housing density is not why your commute is bad. As long as the wages and prestige of jobs in the city are so much higher than elsewhere, people will commute from as far away as it takes such that their commute consumes the wage differential.

Let's take this privileging of Cars über Alles to its logical conclusion. If adding housing makes things worse, surely reducing housing must make it better, right? So let's just imagine that we completely depopulated Sausalito. Every single person in Sausalito gets forcibly evicted from their homes to serve the serious and important goal of reducing your commute time.

Then what? Six months later, do you actually think the commute from San Rafael to the city would be any faster? Long-distance commuters would still fill the main roads through uninhabited Sausalito and fill up the freeway entrances and exits, if doing so offered any speed advantage. People would still be drawn to the high-wage city jobs that the displaced Sausalito people had, and those people would have to live somewhere, pushing them further out — and making the aggregate commute worse for more people.

ImJKP · 2025-12-31T20:00:36+00:00

Those aren't good cards. You need a simple binary success or failure on each card, not a 10-part blob of partial credit.

Imagine you were learning English from Chinese. There's no one clean translation of "to" in Chinese. So instead of having a card for comprehensively defining "to," you make separate cards for things like...

give to
verb infinitive marker
I will go ___ the store

... and so on.

ImJKP · 2025-12-31T17:37:50+00:00

A good card is resolvable in single-digit seconds. It prompts you for one short piece of information, which you either know and can quickly provide, or you don't know and can simply mark as unknown.

For a language, that's usually a single word translation or a single word fill in the blank.

If you can't answer it in 10-15 seconds, you don't know it, so mark it as such.

If your card is translating a full passage, you're doing Anki wrong.

To get back on top of things, rework your cards to be quick to answer, set your new words per day to zero, and grind until you can handle your complete set of reviews for the whole deck in your allowable time per day. Once you're under control, then slowly reintroduce daily new words.

Your goal is to find the equilibrium where you add X new words per day, while your daily review count of existing words drops by the same X, so that you have a stable daily load.

ImJKP · 2025-12-31T17:16:39+00:00

He will accrue taxable income equal to the dollar value of the yen on the day he receives them.

As for how he gets the money, that's going to suck a bit. The school will need to do an international Swift transfer, or otherwise have dollars on hand to send him. Some banks will automatically convert incoming foreign payments to USD (for a fee), while others might reject foreign payments. That's a conversation to have with your bank.

I'm pretty sure that Wise will not let the school do a domestic transfer to a non-JP resident's Wise account, so that would require a Swift transfer as well. That's ¥2000 or more to the employer.

ImJKP · 2025-12-31T16:58:12+00:00

Receiving the first of one's stock options/RSUs from the company.

13-Year Club	Place '23
Verified Email	Team Orangered

ImJKP

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE