Predicting what you need/want to spend money on is difficult because the range of what people spend is quite broad. Schools can go from 0 to millions of yen. Clothing, heating, food and holidays also have very broad ranges.

In most cases expenses get scaled to what your income is rather than the other way around. Set your max spend based on income and savings goals and fit the expenditures within that amount.

This is really going to vary based on income level, location, lifestyle, etc. For example, someone buying only import foods in Tokyo for groceries vs someone cooking only local foods with little meat in a rural area, etc. 

But out of curiosity I pulled up one of my financial docs from this past year. This is just a random snapshot of a month: As a family of three we spent about $700USD on groceries, $300 on eating out, $100 on household goods, $200 on clothes, and $800 on kid activities (mostly after school program). 

Caveat: this is a random month, not a monthly average. Also, we didn’t travel that month— we like to travel domestically a lot (to enjoy living in Japan). And of course, someone is going to pop on and say “You spend HOW much on XYZ?!?” Everyone’s lifestyle and budget is different.

ETA: this is our expenses as an “established” family. When we first arrived we were basically bleeding cash due to startup costs (furnishing a place, new clothes for kid as she outgrew whatever we brought, initial fees for kid stuff, etc).

That's something you've to figure out. There is absolutely no way anyone here can just throw out a number and make it somewhat fit your situation based on what little information you provided.

General rule of thumb for average salaries is 33% rent (including utilities), 33% daily expenses and 33% saving.

If your salary is high enough, that rule goes out the window because at some point spending 33%/66% of your salary on daily expenses / rent is ridiculous and just money thrown out the window.

Similarly, if your salary is low, it's more like 50% rent, 40% daily expenses and 10% saving.

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How much are people spending on household bills?

Hi everyone,

My family will be moving to Japan in a couple of months and I'm trying to put a spreadsheet together of what our monthly budget will look like. We'll be living in in semi-rural Aichi, not too far by car to Okazaki or Toyohashi so I've already budgeted for fuel/train costs etc.

I'm just wondering if anybody here is in a similar-ish situation (my wife, myself and two young kids) I'm just trying to find a rough monghly budget for a 4 person household, not including mortgage/rent.

Thanks in advance for any info 😃

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Turn it around. Take your salary and base your expenses from there. Don’t forget taxes, nenkin, hoken, and your kids schools.

As people said, each family is different. But as a family of 4, we spent ~7M yen in total last year. Since our mortgage is ~2M, that put our bill at ~5M annually, ~420k monthly.