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Old Jul 08, 2016, 05:07 PM
bishop419 bishop419 is offline
Junior Member
 
Member Since: Jun 2016
Location: Japan
Posts: 24
Quote:
Originally Posted by ~Christina View Post
Moving to America .... How do you think that is going to improve your marriage? What is going to happen if she doesnt have the option of going to her parents whether she wants to or shes wanting too.

Just curious
It's not about improving our marriage. Our marriage is fine, it's her illness that's the problem. As I've already established, going to her parents has never helped her once, because they don't know what to do. She herself has said she feels worse when she's staying with them and when she does go there, it's only ever been to appease her mom.

I also already explained that moving to America isn't only about her:

Quote:
Yes, I'm American. Better mental health care is just one of the reasons I want to take her to America. There are other reasons as well. At the moment, I'm working a number of part-time jobs, many of them I do not enjoy doing at all. My income from online work is slowly starting to grow. I'm a self-published author and that money paid through Amazon is reported to the IRS as taxable income. And being an American citizen, I get taxed regardless of where in the world I live. This is starting to create an increasingly confusing taxation system since I also have to pay taxes in Japan and am now starting to run the risk of being double-taxed. Moving to the States would give me more opportunities to expand my business as well as find new avenues for work.

As the taxation becomes more and more complicated, there's also the question of how we deal with that. My mother-in-law basically does all our tax returns for us but she won't be around forever and once she dies, my wife has no idea how to do it and my Japanese isn't good enough to navigate these extremely difficult documents.

There's also just the stress of daily life. My wife is fluent in Japanese and English but my Japanese is basically just conversational. It really restricts my ability to advance in employment and as I'm pretty much working around the clock right now, I have very little time to improve my Japanese ability.

Another concern is retirement. Japanese pension plans are a total joke and it's only going to get worse with the aging population. The Japanese Supreme Court also recently ruled that an elderly foreign permanent resident who had paid taxes all her life wasn't eligible for welfare services. As the population ages and more strain is put on the pension system, I'm afraid of a very likely possibility where that precedent will be applied to pension payouts as well.

At least in the States, I speak the language, I know how the systems work (and if not, I can easily learn), I have better opportunities to make more money, and I can take care of things. Here, I'm dependent on my wife who is not really in a position to be depended on