Monthly Costs

The month of August has ended, I have decided to compile all months worth of data and plot them together to see what my monthly expentitures look like when looked at all at once. The graph below is what it looks like.



With that said, the interesting thing is tha food costs have stabilized at about 32,000 yen/mo, that works out to about 1,000yen/day for food. My predictions that food costs would drop did not pan out. What it means is that sure, groceries are cheaper to buy, but when I cook for myself, I tend to eat more than I would eat compared to eating out.

You will notice that my costs for goods tend to fluctuate. The big spike is when I bought my scooter sending my goods costs skyrocketing for the month of July. The total I pay for the month will vary by about 10,000 yen (about $110) depending on if I make a large purchase or not.

Services, you'll notice that I have spikes in my service in May and August. Those were the times where I paid for gym subscription fees, 2 months in advance. That's $77/mo or close to $150 in a single shot.

Transportation. You will see that my transpot fees remain low. I bought a set of 1 day rail passes in August (3 of them) for $66. Gas costed me about $22 for the month of August for my scooter. I logged 262km and I pay $1 per 11.2km travelled. This is quite a significant savings over riding my bycicle.

A scooter travels about twice to 2.5 times faster than a bike (and with no effort). Using about 20km/h for average biking speed vs 40 km/h average scootering speed, I save 15 minutes for every 10 km travelled. Suppose I worked at a job that paid me $20/hr (not unreasonable for tutors and certain city jobs) meaning that 15 minutes saved is actually $5 more productivity (net gain, $4 savings by travelling by scooter assuming that all time is money). The break even point for this calculation is $4/hr (yes, this is below min wage). Assuming that time is money, even working at min wage, you'd be "saving" money by using a scooter under these conditions.

Just a note, the amount of money you save will be slightly less as you have to factor in the fixed costs of bike maintenance and insurance. My insurance fees for 2 years ran me about $120. Assuming that I used my bike for 9 months out of a year at 260 km/month, I would be paying about $0.05/km or about $0.5/10km. Brining my cost per 10km to about $1.50/10km... putting the break even point at $6/hr. There are more benefits to scooters, such as not needing to wait at bus stops and not having to walk the distance from a bus stop to your destination. Factoring these values in scooters give further value to their users. OK enough about scooter costs...

Room costs, they stayed fairly constant for the last few months. I will see in the winter if my room costs go up for heating and by how much.

Finally Entertainment. It fluctuates. This month I had exams meaning I locked myself into my room and pounded books, slept and took walks to relax. Meaning that I didn't go out to movies, events or etc.

Observations...

Room and food costs remained constant. I expect transportation costs to be faily fixed as well. Costs that should vary the most are goods and entertainment costs. I am still debating whether to consider costs like train rides to fire works or fun trips fall under transport costs or entertainment costs. My gut is telling my to put those costs into entertainment (currently they are listed in transport costs). Anyways, there you have my little financial report.