u/salmix21

Hello,

My wife and I are expecting our child to be born sometime around december and we've bought this air monitor to check the humidity, temperature and co2(ppm) of the room.

After doing some research about the co2 values it seems that less than 1000 is ideal for sleeping and from 1000~5000 can cause issues on sleep(this is why air feels like heavy sometimes when you go into a closed bedroom).

We noticed that we are reaching around 1800 ppm which is not ideal for us nor the baby so we need some ventilation in the room. The air conditioner doesn't do anything as it just recirculates the same air. We are both foreigners so we aren't sure if there's some unwritten rules on how to keep the house ventilated in Japan. We are living in a ZEH house so it's quite well insulated which is part of the reason I think we get this high level of co2 concentration. We have some air vents in the walls that we can open but am not sure if they are bringing in enough air.

So I have a few questions for those who have dealt with this situation.

1. What do you to improve air quality? Opening the window is possible but it can get kinda loud and am not sure this strategy will be possible during mid winter or next summer.

2. If anyone knows, what do you when you have a newborn, do you have to open the windows repeatedly to ensure it doesn't get to a high ppm level or is there an easier method to manage this.

From google the only reasonable answer is to open the window and run the heater during summer but I'm worried this might skyrocket our energy bill :( so hopefully there's another way.

Cheers!

Edit: We also have the kitchen exhaust, the toilet exhaust and one in the shower room. Our realtor said to keep the one in the toilet and shower running 24/7 so that's what we've done.

As everyone else in this economy, I'm trying to find ways to save some money here and there. We have a big fridge with a lot of space and have been thinking of buying meat in bulk since I'd like to start eating more meat.

I was searching for some pages were you can buy wholesale meat and found this one (https://www.m-mart.co.jp/) and was planning to buy from there but I haven't done the process or registration yet, so before that I was hoping to hear if anyone has any opinions.

I was doing some research on NISA to understand better the lifetime allowance, and it seems from what I read that it can be used for stock trading as long as the volume you trade during the year is less than the yearly allowance because the lifetime allowance can be reset.

So Lifetime allowance resets every year if you sell your investments, so as long as I'm buying within the 2.4 Million yen limit per year, then all the gains are tax free and as long as you sell within that year, your lifetime allowance will be reset next year by the initial amount your purchases.

So an example would be that if I buy 1,000,000 yen worth of Apple stock this year, and it increases to 2,000,000 later in the year. If I sell at that time then the 1,000,000 yen earnings will be tax free, and my lifetime allowance will not be added to the 18 Million lifetime allowance.

I feel like such a dumb person for not knowing this before, now I have to pay tax for some of my other stocks because I didn't want to waste my NISA lifetime allowance.

I'm kicking myself so hard right now guys ... Unless someone corrects me and tells me I'm wrong haha.

So we are a small foreign company and we use a back office service but most of the mail and admin stuff is done by any one of us.

Today I checked the mail and noticed we got receipts for resident tax for some of my coworker's municipalities but I didn't see one for my municipality. Since I'm applying for PR soon I want to be proactive and make sure that it gets paid on time, I already contacted HR in my company's HQ to contact the back office service to verify but my understanding is that the first payment needs to be done by June 30th.

Does anyone know what steps to take in case it doesn't go as planned?

I read that I can still go to the ward where I was living last year on January 1st and maybe I can pay proactively, but not sure what issues this may cause.

I know the resident tax is being taken from my salary every month for the past year so I assume it was being paid on time for last year, but for this year I'm a little bit worried.

Any advice or tips is greatly appreciated!

[ So sorry for the wall of text :')] I'm currently in talks with a small company that needs some help with their processes etc. Basically they have some inneficiencies and I'm building an app that could automate these things so they don't lose so much time doing this work.

Now the value proposition is strictly internal, it could help them get more revenue by being more efficient and having more time to focus on other things but all things considered is an internal tool doing something that could be done by a minimum wage employee or part-time worker.

Now I have a very good relationship with Mike (Fake name FYI) who works in this company(Corp A), he was the one who personally helped me and my family when we had some issues and needed their services, I've know him for around 2 years and after the last time he helped us we even discussed some business ideas and topics so I think we have a fairly good relationship. Now he's basically 2nd or 3rd in command at his company since it's a small company with a specific niche and the CEO trusts him a lot.

I had a talk with him as I had a couple of ideas for his industry and we spent like 2 hours in a cafe discussing various ideas until he explained to me one of the processes they had which was very tedious and I said that's something that could be automated, so I told him I'd do a Proof of Concept and I was able to get it to him within 1 month. He tried it and liked it and said if this can be installed in his company and integrated with other services. This is possible although the integration is a little bit tough.

So all in all things are moving well, now I'm just worried about pricing. As I mentioned, Mike and his company helped my family during some tough times and we are not even their target customer(It's basically pro-bono work) so for me I would like to give back to them and I think that this app would help them but I can't help but think that it could also be done with some AI automation tools to some extent. The differentiator here is that our app would be tailored and scoped to their specific processes which would be easy to use and also more structured. If we were to do this with AI tools only (which I haven't tried yet) it could probably work but I am not sure how well.

Now my concern with the pricing is that the initial workload would be a little bit high ( I think around 100160 hours of work) and at my current rate it would be around $3k$5k dollars(adjusted for local currency) and then maybe a monthly recurring fee of like $1k~$2k depending on their usage. I think they mentioned they paid for other companies who manage their website and salesforce so I think the pricing for those may be in the similar range but I'm not sure.

Does anyone have any advice on how to move forward with this? I'm thinking of just telling him a general range and asking for his feedback like what he thinks but I'd like to know if anyone has any advice on what to focus on etc. FYI my main goal here is to keep a good relationship with them, this also means providing good support etc and I'm also worried if I price it too low maintenance would become tedious etc.

Hello,

My wife is expecting our child to be born later this year, we are about to perform reservation for the birthing clinic and we have to reserve the spot by paying a deposit.

My understanding is that the government gives around 500k to cover the childbirth regardless of the hospital's actual cost.

This lump sum payment can either be given directly to the hospital, or it can be given to us. If we give it to the hospital then our deposit for giving birth is 50k whereas if we decide to get it ourselves then we have to deposit around 500k.

My question is, if we get the money directly from the government, can I claim the 500k as medical expenses and get a tax return based on that?

Does anyone know if the tax return still applicable even if we perform a direct lump sum payment to the hospital?