Question for anybody who knows about living and working in Japan.
Is ¥10 million a reasonable annual salary to support an entire family of six in Tokyo? Especially for someone used to making more than two and a half times that in the US?
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@danjones000 Also, check whether it includes bonuses. Professionals here typically get two bonuses a year, each around one month's salary. Hiring foreign nationals from places where that's not the case can instantly save a company 16% of regular wage costs because no one is going to tell you they are all getting bonuses. That you need the job to maintain your working visa puts you at a disadvantage to negotiate once you're here, and you may be shamed with "foreigners only care about money."
@danjones000 @LifeTimeCooking This is probably a good question for @unseenjapan.
@danjones000 Nope. You are going to be very tight. You could easily hit a 750k yen a month on family expenses.
Rent in Tokyo alone will run you 300- 500k, aka a substantial part of your income.
Going rural has savings but that has its own issues.
What you have in hand is sufficient for a small family living frugally in Tokyo.
I was just looking at the location of the job. It's on the south end of Tokyo, in Setagaya City. Probably reasonable to commute from a nearby city, like Kawasaki or Yokohama.
Would living somewhere like that be more possible, or still really tight?
@danjones000 @jay Setagaya is pretty expensive. You could live across the (Tamagawa) river to the south, in Kawasaki, but your commute might be a pain because the train lines fan out from Tokyo (so you might end up changing lines twice, for example). You might do better to live further out west. There are some cheaper areas out in that direction I think. Yokohama probably wouldn't be a great commute for similar reasons.
@danjones000 @jay I lived in the area around Musashi Kosugi and then Mizonokuchi for a while. It was cheaper but it wasn't great. Big developers have done a good job of promoting that area but the reality doesn't quite live up to the hype. It used to take me about an hour to commute to Otemachi (each way) if everything went smoothly.
@danjones000 It's two moderate middle-income mid-career salaries, roughly. That's probably not enough to comfortably support a family of six, especially when you start to factor in costs for schooling or supplementary tuition and the high cost of housing.