Hiroto Kiritani : Japan¡¯s 'Coupon Man' Who Used Coupons As His Second Cash For 37 Yrs

Discounts, cashbacks, vouchers and coupons are no less than music to ears for everyone. After all, who does not love to utilise these money saving tools to reduce their expenses? But guess what- imagine living almost exclusively on them, and that too not just one or two years, but more than three decades! Yes you read that right.

Meet Japan¡¯s ¡°coupon man¡± Hiroto Kiritani, who has apparently been almost entirely living off his coupons since 37 years, thus transforming them into his Second Cash. Soon to turn 72 on 15th October 2021, he used to be a professional in Japanese Chess (shogi) and eventually ventured into a stock investment when he was 35-years-old in 1984. At that time, he was invited to teach shogi to the staff of an investment company, wherein he became so fascinated by the idea of owning shares of numerous companies that he soon bought his first stock in 1984 and gradually developed a taste for it in no time, special thanks to the encouragement signalled by the famous stock bubble of the 1980s.

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Now a question that might have arisen in your mind, is, how owning stocks can fetch you such huge coupon supplies big enough to manage expenses even after almost four decades? So, the logic behind this can be explained through an incident that happened with Hiroto Kiritani in 1989. In December that year, he lost 100 million yen due to the crashing of Nikkei Stock Average. While this was certainly a sad moment for him as an investor, but this incident made him aware of investor benefits¡¯ value, which is a substitute for dividends. Simply put, in case a company remains profitable over a predefined threshold, it¡¯s shareholders become eligible for some shareholder benefits , called yuutai in Japanese, transferred to them in the form of vouchers and coupons.

Hence, the presence of such investor benefits assisted him to survive the 1989 market crash by enabling him to purchase essentials like food and clothing without actually using any real money. Similarly, in the year 2011, post the Great East Japan Earthquake, the coupons that he used to receive from companies whose shares he had bought, were enough for him to not just get by, but even almost live by them exclusively, as per the words spread, thereby making Hiroto Kiritani quite a popular personality in his country. No surprises that he makes quite a good living off these coupons, which is clearly indicative from the numerous instances where he has been invited on TV shows and even given interviews about this to several magazines.

Hiroto claims that he is able to gain access to nearly everything he needs through the coupons- from watching free cinema for 300 times a year, buying groceries, to availing free gym membership, the vast variety of his coupons have them covered. Now if you are curious how many stocks does this man own, the answer is-he owns over 1,000 Japanese companies and corporations¡¯ stocks, out of which close to 900 are preferential stocks, simply implying that he basically gets access to all kinds of coupons to utilise in whatever ways possible!

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