hello! i am set to stay in Japan for a semestral exchange in about 10 months’ time and wanted to check how much i should budget per month (31 days) for the categories below. i did include a little extra for splurging on some days when exploring. happy to also hear how much your monthly expenses are too as a gauge!
– food: 160,000¥
– transportation: 3,500¥
– telco: 5,500¥
– necessities: 30,000¥
– sightseeing / shopping: 33,000¥
– misc. (emergency money): 1,500¥
for telco i’m not very certain on the prices/what the best telco is? would an esim or physical sim be best? i do want to keep my current phone number for things like SMS and whatsapp.
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**comfortable monthly budget for student in tokyo? (and what would be a recommended sim card?)**
hello! i am set to stay in Japan for a semestral exchange in about 10 months’ time and wanted to check how much i should budget per month (31 days) for the categories below. i did include a little extra for splurging on some days when exploring. happy to also hear how much your monthly expenses are too as a gauge!
– food: 160,000¥
– transportation: 3,500¥
– telco: 5,500¥
– necessities: 30,000¥
– sightseeing / shopping: 33,000¥
– misc. (emergency money): 1,500¥
for telco i’m not very certain on the prices/what the best telco is? would an esim or physical sim be best? i do want to keep my current phone number for things like SMS and whatsapp.
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food looks quite generous and transportation too low, possibly by a lot depending on where you want to go
Unless you’re planning to have breakfast, lunch, and dinner out at sit-down restaurants everyday or you can’t live without 2-3 trips to Starbucks daily, you’re budgeting waaaaay too much for food. Something like 20.000-30.000 is more realistic if you cook at home and go out to eat a couple of times a month.
Transportation really depends on where you live and where you’ll commute daily, but it seems low for the average person. Something around 10.000-15.000 would be considered normal, maybe a bit less.
What are you including on your “necessities” category? Is this for leisure stuff like gym, movies, etc?
Regarding emergency money, I try to save about 10% of my monthly budget if I can, but it depends on each person.
Per month? 160 000 JPY ?
That’s 5500 JPY a day. Eating out every meal (including breakfast), you should be able to reach that indeed. Stay quiet for a couple days, and you’ll be able to splurge in a Michelin restaurant.
Jokes aside, for a student, that’s probably x3 or x4 the budget…
For reference, 160k is what I’m paying for food for a family of 4. You can likely cut down to a quarter of that.