Name: Is Tokyo Affordable for a Large Foreign Family? ? | Life in Japan Episode 61
Uploaded: 2020-07-30T09:20:05.000Z
Duration: 10 min 14 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

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This week we're talking about how you can afford living in Tokyo, stay tuned!

Money! There's no way around it, living in Tokyo is expensive!

How do we afford living here? Do we just have tons and tons of money?

The first thing is that we don't actually live in Tokyo.

We can see Tokyo from our house, but we live in Kanagawa, which is right next to Tokyo.

We can get downtown in 20 minutes. It's super close.

But the prices on this side of the river, compared to Tokyo, it drops quite a bit.

And for a big family like us, that's an important issue.

And we don't live too close to the train station, so that really drops our costs of living.

Living far away from the station has its perks as far as that but it's far away from the station!

But there's cheap bicycle parking at the station.

The whole reason we live in Tokyo is because this is right by the church that we are planting,

It's right by the coffee shop. It's where we're working.

It's close to downtown Tokyo which has lots of options for language schools.

Those kinds of things, so this is definitely a convenient place for us to live.

First day of class is done. What do you think?

It was a wonderful class but I have a splitting headache!

Another way we save money is that we have a parking spot that comes with this house that we rent.

Which, that's usually a couple hundred bucks a month, just for a parking spot.

And the car that we drive, for example... It's old.

We drive a nice car, it's a Toyota Noah, but it's 17 years old!

We bought it used. We didn't pay that much for it, but it's a good car.

It's been really good to us, and we look for areas like those things to save money.

The clothes that we buy, we buy decent clothes, but we're not spending a fortune on our clothes.

Oh my goodness, and what do we have here?

Are you getting some pretty pictures, Sarah?

Good! Good good good! You look so pretty honey-child.

We go to Gyomu super for most everything.

Also OK supermarket has a lot of cheap prices.

Things that we can't get there we'll go to our local grocery stores like Life or Inageya.

But they're definitely more expensive than the discount grocery stores.

Heading up to the second floor of savings.

And every now and then, about once a month we do a trip to Costco to get those American items.

The big bulk items — that works out well for our family.

Shopping at those cheap places really helps.

And, one thing that I like to do is meal plan.

Because if I know, ok, this week these are the things I'm going to make for these meals, I will buy just that.

Instead of going into the grocery store and saying...

"Oh, those noodles look interesting, that meat looks interesting! " I just buy it, buy it, and it just stays in my fridge or freezer.

If I know exactly what I'm going to use it for then I only buy those items and it really cuts down on our grocery bill.

A new family favorite is Little House on the Prairie!

The girls have never seen it, and now they are totally into it, right? Love it? Very cool?

We don't go into credit card debt. We use credit cards, because you get lots of points off of them.

And they are very convenient — especially now — you don't want to be touching money.

But we have always paid off our balance by the end of the month

So you don't get charged that interest, because the interest on a credit card is just a killer!

And also we get point cards for each store.

And it's amazing, every now and then they'll be like "Would you like to use your points for your purchase?"

Japan's obsession with point cards is almost out of control.

But nobody has more point cards than anyone I've ever seen than our good friend Yoshi

Who keeps track of his point cards and always has them ready and available. It's impressive.

Here's what happens in Japan. You live here long enough, and you wallet just fills, just fills with all kinds of cards.

Yeah, these are the cards that I usually use...

And I also have a stack of cards that I hardly ever use but sometimes I need.

Yeah- this is my other stack. Look at those cards!

So what are those Yoshi, they're credit cards, they're what else?

They're credit cards for every single store I go to, you know.

Like Yoshi, I've cleared out my wallet of the ones that I don't usually use

And so these are the ones that I take with me in my wallet because I use them often enough to want them.

But so many times I go to a store and I forgot the point card at home. Man!

Even when we do things like a ski trip that we did early this year,

You can get tollways cheaper, you can get packages for skis and rentals cheaper

There's all kinds of discount packages available, if you have somebody to help you look.

Oh yea, I think so. Dude, I saw that ski go flying over and I was like "Oh no!"

And we just bought a tent, so we're hoping to go camping!

Camping is much cheaper than staying in a hotel.

Especially for us since we usually have to get two hotel rooms.

It should be an adventure, let me tell you what. Hopefully it should make for some good videos.

The big thing when you're talking about finances is that you don't end up spending more than you make.

And that's something that my Dad whose an accountant — he drilled into me at a young age and I'm so thankful for that.

Because if I don't have the money for it, I don't buy it.

And I don't like buying on payments, you know, pay for one year every month or pay for two years every month.

I prefer if I have the money, than just go ahead and buy it. If I don't have the money, then start saving up towards it.

I have a lot of nice studio gear, but that gear has taken us almost 20 years to buy.

We buy as we go, I never bought on payments or installments or anything like that.

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Is Tokyo Affordable for a Large Foreign Family? ? | Life in Japan Episode 61

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