Work and Salary History, Part III

Here is a graph of my Salary plotted against my age. Obviously, like all good capitalists in their 30's, it is sloping upwards :) I have not included any smaller incomes like my house rental here. The graph is just a representation of my pay from my main jobs (currently I do some consulting at night that brings in enough money to be worthy of being graphed)


The blue, top line represents gross pay before taxes, while the pink is a pretty good approximation of my net after taxes (and exchange rates). The taxes to some extent and the exchange rates to a large extent have really affected my net. For the last 4 years living in Japan, making my income in Yen, and shipping most of it home to US Dollars to be invested has affected my before versus after tax percentages. You can see about 2 years ago where my gross pay went up a little, but my net went down compared to what it was the year before. That was because of exchange rates.

You can also see the dot com bubble helping me out a couple years ago. It seems like Japan was 2 years behind on that. I was with a dot com company in the US, my salary was increased like crazy. Then they tanked, but we still had deals in Asia so I came to Japan to continue the development of the product (and internationlaize it) and was paid even more. Since Japan's economy was not doing much, they were not affected by the dot com crash (that much). While a sample size of one does not mean anything, you can almost see a mixture of the US and Japanese economies displayed in the graph.

I do try to wait for good exchange rates before I ship my money home, but it all depends on the amount of money I hold in my Japanese bank accounts. I usually save up about $20000 dollars (after taxes) every 4 or 5 months and then wait for a decent exchange rate (depending on forecasts of market conditions) and ship it to the US. However, it also depends on money market rates (I don't do US treasuries right now, but I guess I should for the extra 1%). About 3 years ago, I could wait longer for a better exchange rate because my $20000 would have only been getting 2% in the US money markets (which comes to $33 doallrs a month). But, the yen-dollar rate depending on it's swings, could save me 100-200$ a month if I held it waiting for a good rate. Now, it's different though. Now, with money markets returning 4.5%-5%, the longer I hold it in Japan, the quicker I start to lose money I could have gotten in interest in a US money makret account.

Also, don't even begin to ask about Japanese bank interest rates. They are always less than 1%. I get like a penny a month for $20000 here in Japan. That's one reason many Japanese don't save the same way Americans do.