This has been a good resetting weekend, cleaning and seeing friends and generally getting ready for fall, aka The Most Glorious Season There Is, All Hail The Death of the Hateful Heat of Summer. But as I dug in on my budget, I found myself poking at some ideas that... I may have explored in this space before or possibly not who can be fussed to look at the archives anyway let's get into it.
The impetus for this budget thinking was a nice benchmark for me: after eight months in my beautiful, stable, benefits-and-vacations-and-all job, I finally looked at my last few months' budgets and decided that I was ready to start automatically diverting about a quarter of my paycheck directly into an online-only account. This has always been the best way for me to ramp up my savings, and after the tumult of the last couple of years, it feels really good to be on solid, rapidly-tucking-it-away ground again. Moving from "safety nest egg to cover expenses if I lose my job" to "saving for long-term goals" is a great pivot to make.
As I made the decision, I also sat down with my budget for the year-ending trip to Japan I'll be taking. I've been delighted to discover the country is affordable, as long as you don't want the high-end luxury experiences, and are willing to shed any stick-in-the-mud "but I want to stay at a Hilton" preferences. If you're down to roll with the local scene and just be in Japan, lots of things open up.
To wit: staying at just about any western-branded hotel in the country is automatically going to run upwards of $100, and probably upwards of $150 a night even in low season. By contrast, staying in a guesthouse room with a tatami-mat floor with a futon and green tea table in the corner is running me about $30-40 a night, and that is obviously the kind of experience I want to be having, come on.
It's the same on the food front; much like most travel outside the States, if you want the kind of experience you have at home, or are gun-shy about trying out restaurants or environments that you're not familiar with, you'll pay $30+ a meal easily. If you want to dive into the magical-seeming world of kushikatsu (fried skewers), yakitori (grilled chicken parts), or bowls of noodles, you're gonna be solidly under $15 and probably under $10. If you stop by a konbini (convenience stores), which have outlandishly good reputations for their food, you'll probably be under $5.
Needless to say - as with ordering a cappuccino and cornetto at the bar in an Italian coffee shop instead of paying ten times as much for a hotel lobby breakfast - you will end up closer to the culture, having a more immersive and worthwhile experience than if you fuss and overpay.
As ever, a little knowledge goes a long way: depachika (the food halls in department stores) prepared food are crazily highly regarded, and about an hour or 30 minutes before close, the shops discount everything heavily. If you do as the thrifty Tokyoites do, you'll save cash and up your culinary game by pouncing on the deals. (Scotland has something similar, but Tesco's food is uhhhhh less refined, is my experience.)
Similarly, while there are some relatively high-priced attractions (paying money just to go to the top of a building will never make sense to me), tons of things are priced affordably: temples are usually only a buck or three, shrines tend to be free (minus the ¥5 coin you toss in their offering box), sento (public baths) are about $5... some arcades are extremely affordable. You can carve out a packed itinerary for well under $20/day, if not half that.
This also means doing the research to know when it is time to splurge. I don't need to pay $80 for a food tour of Osaka, but I might absolutely pay that much for a walking tour in Kyoto that will give me cultural and spiritual context for what I see over the rest of my trip. I won't spring for tasting menus at Michelin-starred restaurants, but I'm looking into classes on the tea ceremony, on textile dying, on ceramics, to get a little closer at an experiential level. I don't want to pay $150 to stay in a Hilton Garden Inn, but it might be worth $200 to spend the night in a ryokan in the mountains between Kansai and Tokyo if I know that the price includes a seasonal, local kaiseki feast in my room, breakfast the next morning, and an outdoor onsen (hot spring bath) that overlooks a snow-blanketed forest.
In any case, it's been fun marking out a budget for this trip, and having done that math is making it even easier to cut costs day-to-day now. When I know how many unique experiences I could cover in December by foregoing a lazy-night delivery of Thai food here in Chicago, it gets a lot easier to pocket the cash.
So: budgeting! It's fun! Money is still a made up artificial construct that in our current era has wildly warped so it bears basically no coherent relationship to the labor it ostensibly represents, but if you are clever with it you can sometimes go eat a dumpling in Japan!
