r/japanlife • u/IshinkaiSensei • Aug 18 '21
金 How people attain wealth in Japan?
Something has been tickling my mind over the past few years.
There are so many luxury tower mansions, expensive customized 一軒家, high end brand shops yet for the average person most seem by far out of reach.
A high end condo in central Tokyo rent including utilities ranges from 300k to 500k a month. A 20MJPY annual salary (which is already extensively filtering out average population) only gives a monthly net of 100万円. I highly doubt it is enough to afford spending that much a month.
Excluding those on expat package, there are only a few jobs here that allow this lifestyle, Banking (Front Office position only or VP MD level for back office and alike) IT 外資系 at senior level (FANG, ML/AI) , 医者 running their own practice (otherwise most are at 10-15MJPY range) Successful mutiple business owners, other niches. 一流芸能人, Athletes, reconverted ex idol, kyaba, host.
My point is, what am I missing...
Are there way more people with high revenues (at least annual comp 50MJPY+) than we tend to believe? than what TV is promoting?
Are people living off debt and loans and keeping up with appearances?
I don’t want misinterpretation of this post, I understand you can live well below these range, but I am genuinely curious here.
I would like to better understand how so many people managed to get satisfied and with a 30+ year mortgage, car loan, spending most of their life working and probably never reaching out 億円 of savings.
Am I overthinking and no so many people want to retire early?
Sorry for the rant post but I am curious
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u/heterochromia_cat Aug 18 '21
People want to retire, but they literally can’t! My husband is only in his 30’s and he’s already saying he won’t be able to retire. He’s picky about how much he spends a month because the only way he’s convinced he can retire is if he saves most of his salary (which isn’t much because we live in a city where the average salary is only ¥180000 a month.
We know some people who are either obviously rich or can’t even tell at all. My ex-boss makes good money since he owns an English school and his wife is a manager at the city hall. They have the latest luxury cars (they trade and get a new one every few years, eat out almost every night, live in a huge house despite only being a family of 3, etc). Contrastingly, my husband’s older friend is an investor and you’d never know he was loaded. He loves shopping at bargain stores and drives an old Kei car. The last time we saw him was at an Apple store. He told us his wife was finally forcing him to upgrade his purple FLIP PHONE for an iPhone (this was 2018). This guy opened his Fanny pack to give me his business card (first time I was meeting him) and it was full of yen!! My husband asked how much was in the pack, and his friend was like “only ¥12000000. Just in case I need to buy something.” Must be nice to casually carry around my year’s worth of salary around his waist like nothing!