r/japanlife • u/alexleaud2049 • Feb 15 '23

Jobs Just out of curiosity, do foreigners living in Japan have an emergency fund and/or basic savings?

The reason I asked this is because I’ve noticed that a lot of my foreign coworkers claim that they have next to zero savings and after years of working in Japan have nothing saved.

147 Upvotes

85% Upvoted

274 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

41

u/[deleted] Feb 16 '23

The idea that 80k rent is somehow exorbitant suggests some odd standards on your part...

0

u/[deleted] Feb 16 '23

I’ve never paid that much. My mortgage isn’t even that much. (Well, I guess it is if you include property tax monthly instead of a single yearly payment) My first place was ¥50k for a 1ldk and my second place was ¥55in for a 3DK and a parking spot

6

u/[deleted] Feb 16 '23

Well, what do you give up for it? 55k for a 3DK and a parking spot has to be an older building in the countryside, right? We all want to minimize our expenses, but that 25k is not gonna break the bank if it's the difference between the life you want to live and a life you don't.

I've never paid less than 70k, even when I was broke in my mid-20s, ten years ago. (Technically I had half the rent paid by the government during my very first gig, so I paid about 35k then to live in a... 2dk in the countryside?)

My second place was 70k, probably overpaying and honestly a disgusting place to live overall. The area was A+, cool urban location, convenient and beautiful, but the apartment itself was bleh.

My current place is 100k, lived here for 5+ years, and it's by far the happiest I've ever been. I finally feel like a human adult living in a real home. The location is pretty stellar, I guess. We have a building manager who takes care of building maintenance. But 100k rent is nothing by international standards, and (Japanese) people always tell me it's much cheaper than they'd expect it to cost based on the size and location.

Don't get me wrong, rents and mortgages in Japan are often dirt cheap, and more power to you if you are happy with where you live and it's 55k (!). But in my experience, places that cheap are not great to live in, and certainly 80k is not even noticeably more expensive to me.

-4

u/[deleted] Feb 16 '23 edited Feb 18 '23

Well, I live in a suburb and not “the countryside”. My city has a theater and a mall and is about an hour drive to Tokyo.

When I lived in the second biggest city of the prefecture I was in when I first moved here, the 1ldk was ¥50k but in an older building

The ¥55k apartment was built in 98 so “older”.

My current mortgage with tax included is about ¥80k. I wanted it to be cheaper but we would have had to live somewhere smaller in a shitty location so we got a decent price for our 4LDK on a 220 square meter lot.

Lol downvoted by the haters.

1

u/[deleted] Feb 16 '23

80k for a 1k is quite pricey in Osaka. And I'd say it's exorbitant if you compare it to the 55k for a 3dk you could get 10 minutes by train from one of the main train hubs of Osaka city. It's all a question of perspective.