How's Your Pension Doing?

If you have been paying into it, that is...

Ever since 1986 it has been compulsory for people living in Japan to pay into the national pension scheme. Compulsory but not enforced.

That seems to be changing, and one of the aims of the My Number system is clearly to track social security, income, and assets more closely.

The Pension Authority in Japan has a website that shows your pension contributions and, once you have paid in enough, your projected payouts. It's very easy to register and I recommend you check your official record for mistakes.

You can see my payments in the image above.

I can probably claim the red '未加' months as I wasn't in Japan at that point, and the underlined '国年' months are when I applied for reduced payments due to losing my job (I have the option of paying the difference in arrears).

​It's interesting to see where you are. You only have to pay in for ten years to vest, and you can get credit for the years between turning 20 and your arrival in Japan.

​Until a couple of years ago, some of us were paying into the kyosai nenkin pension scheme, a variant of kosei nenkin for public servants and members of certain unions (doctors, teachers, etc.). Kyosai nenkin was eliminated and members were rolled into kosei nenkin.

​The website is slowly adding information for former kyosai nenkin members, and they were doing it based on your birthday, so I got access to mine a couple of weeks ago.

Around the same time I also received my pension postcard detailing payments last year. My payments, and my wife's, and my employer match for kosei nenkin, add up to about 1.2m yen. To be honest I'd have been happier keeping that and investing it myself :O

Any thoughts on the Japanese National Pension?

This post first ran on RetireJapan in September 2016