Planning ahead is important, and I consider the Roth IRA a useful tool for every person who qualifies. That includes babies, who, like everyone else, should think about saving for their future. Because babies are not capable of comprehending what this is, their parent has to think for them. For the 2023 tax year, you can contribute $6,500 if under age 50 or $7,500 if age 50 or older. There are income limits involved, but I doubt any babies even approach it. Even a mere $300 per year for the child’s entire childhood, with no further contributions made past age…
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If you attend in 2024, it is the 70th anniversary of the Carnaval de Québec, a winter festival held ! Attendance requires an effigy of Bonhomme Carnaval if you are a teen or older. For example, my 2-year-old will not need her own effigie parce que les effigies sont “obligatoire pour les 13 ans et plus”. To purchase your effigy, you visit Nos produits carnavalesques – Carnaval de Québec. The snowmen are not sold in mid summer, but sales opened up at some point before I returned to the US in November. Purchasing before January 15th, 2024, allowed for a…
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In the Tohoku region of Japan, a common souvenir item you will see is their regional specialty, the Kamome no Tamago, which translates to “egg of seagull”. In English, they frequently refer to it as a “Seagull Egg”. Like most regional specialties, you will have to physically be in Tohoku (Iwate Prefecture is the safest bet), look online (https://saitoseika.co.jp/), or pass through international departures at the airport to find it. Like most of the other regional products, it has a short life; this one typically has 30 days from the date of manufacture. Although they claim that the motif is…
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This tastes like a banana Twinkie, agreed all of my taste testers. I have not eaten Twinkies myself too often and cannot remember what it tastes like, but the Tokyo Banana certainly looks like a banana Twinkie. Tokyo Banana is basically banana filling on the inside and a very soft sponge cake on the outside. The banana filling is rather plain, but it works fine together. (According to a vegetarian friend, these were vegetarian at some point but no longer are. They currently have gelatin. She was very sad.) The packaging is rather nice. The inside box is not plain…
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When you are getting billed by a medical service but you are sure that your insurance already paid or some account under insurance, such as an HRA, already paid, call your insurance company. Once upon a time, when I naively thought I could resolve such matters myself, my family called Labcorp three times without any resolution regarding two bills that had already been paid through my HRA. The first call was handled by someone who was tricked into paying a second time for the billed service on one of the invoices. I made the second and third calls. In the…
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Whenever you buy anything in Taiwan and are given a receipt, you may receive a physical printed out QR ticket along with your receipt. If you are a resident, you have the opportunity to not take a physical printout but instead have it added digitally to your collection. These are entries to a government lottery that was started to incentivize reporting sales and therefore allow the government to collect more of the sales tax owed to them. These QR lottery entries are done as a straight entry into the lottery, not a multiplier. It has led to silly situations such…
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I very much enjoy the cookie called langue de chat, literally “tongue of cat”. It originated in France but has proven itself to be quite popular in Japan. We can observe this because many tourist attractions and towns have their own version of it. The Japanese versions are commonly not shaped like a cat’s tongue but are more like a square sandwich with filling. In 2023, I purchased these langue de chat from these places: The Famous Hokkaido-Exclusive Langue de Chat As far as I know, the famous Shiroi Koibito chocolat blanc et langue de chat from Ishiya (“ISHIYA GUARANTEED”,…
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We bought our tickets for the Taiwan Railway online while in the United States without issue and chose two meals, one vegetarian and one regular, at the time. The train tickets would take us from Taitung to Nanzhou, which would place us conveniently for my Kaohsiung aunt to pick us up. For our money, we received a very low quality QR code that we were doubtful about. At the station, we walked up to the counter and attempted to change our dubious QR code for the tickets. Unfortunately, the man at the counter was unable to scan the low quality…
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The short version is that Nomad’s APAC 20 Countries Plan was usable in Japan other than remote Hakone and was not very usable in Taiwan. I was always able to reconnect within a minute in Japan. In Taiwan, not only was data slow but I also was unable to connect to the network for more like 3-5 minutes at a time. I decided to try those eSIMs that you purchase ahead of time instead of at the airport. The downside is normally that data SIMs purchased in the airport usually have better coverage and eSIMs bought online sometimes put you…
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If you see something starting with COTHTL (or a full COTHTL844-422-6922MA) on your credit card statement and you have a Capital One card, check whether the amount matches a hotel reservation you made. It is probably a Capital One Travel Hotel charge, meaning that you booked it through the Capital One Travel Portal. I was initially concerned to see a US charge amidst all the converted JPY-USD charges and was a little worried that I was the victim of fraud. After reviewing the dates, I realized, with some relief, that it was simply the charge for the hotel I booked…