dreaife的休憩小栈

Recently I looked at 426’s views on Japan’s future and the world’s future economies, and I also saw quite a few predictions of major disasters for Japan this year. I think the big changes that have been talked about may indeed be coming soon. I haven’t experienced an economic crisis, and I’m not really familiar with natural disasters either. For now, the best I can do is to prepare for everything I have considered, to at least feel a little more at ease.

First, what I need to consider is direct personal safety, namely earthquakes and tsunamis, and also fires. I am not very familiar with these, and even if they occur around me, I can’t guarantee that I can react in time, or that I can take the correct action immediately. So, when looking for a place now, I choose to look for relatively safer areas by district/location and price, to make up for my deficiencies in disaster preparedness as much as possible. Of course, learning about disaster preparedness is still necessary, but it may not need to be as strict as in dangerous regions, and I can also slightly increase the chances that the room’s belongings are safe, reducing my property losses.

Then, after ensuring I can endure this period of disasters in the natural world, what I will have to face next are disasters from the financial world. For an economic crisis, for me who hasn’t experienced one, I really can’t imagine how severe the depression will be or how hard life will get, and what I can do is probably only to keep some margin to sustain my own life even in the harshest winter.

From this, there are two aspects: one is to maintain a working visa in Japan so as not to be deported, and another is to increase income so that I can sustain my life while also boosting myself for the post-crisis rebound.

First, on the visa front, maintaining the visa is mainly because I am already in Japan; maintaining my current job is the cheapest option. Secondly, other countries are also cutting immigration quotas right now, and finally, in Japan it is also the cheapest option for me given my interests. At the same time as maintaining the visa, it would be best to obtain permanent residency, as this would reduce many living costs in Japan and give me more freedom in income choices. The fastest route, of course, is the 80-point-per-year skilled immigration program. Of course, after applying there is still quite a queue (assuming I change jobs at the end of this year, combined with other applications I should reach 80 points [15+10+15+5*2+15+15], if after applying it still takes 1-2 years, that means from now until the latest by the end of 2028 I can obtain PR).

Regarding income, I hope in the future to have two sources of income: one from salary—any job type is fine, but my personal preference is a work-from-home type with more personal time; and another from side gigs or passive income.

Speaking of earning money, I think excluding illicit means, the only way is to meet others’ needs, give and take—people choose to pay money to satisfy their needs. Work comes from a company turning demand into a role, letting me provide labor to earn a stable cash flow. But work requires consuming more time and energy, which reduces time for exploring other directions, and that’s the advantage of remote work, enabling redistribution of personal time. The other way to earn money is to provide a product yourself, and others can pay to satisfy their needs through this product. Meeting others’ needs, work requires you to continuously provide your time long-term, but can yield a stable cash flow; selling a product just requires one large creation, later only a small amount of maintenance to achieve long, ongoing cash flow—but the premise is doing solid market research and promotion to ensure the product has competitiveness in its target demand area. In other words, one trades time and effort, the other trades your assets.

After that, once your assets accumulate to a certain level, how should you invest these assets to make money work? Of course this is something you might think about systematically once you reach the 100k level or more, because with smaller assets you might prefer high-risk investment portfolios, which could more easily lose principal. On the other hand, placing a small amount of idle money into the stock market or similar to practise trading skills can also be a form of development.