Reviewing the Budget
I kinda forgot in the midst of getting bussy again at home, to make the promised review of the budget. So finally, here goes…
As I said; since you’re handling a ‘strange’ currency, you should keep an eye on your spendings. Well for starters; that was a wise decision!
As many people keep a little book with them for noting down ideas or things to do, it comes in handy to note down your budget on holiday.
Every day, make a wallet for the day as planned in the budget and write it in the book. And as the day progresses, write down the actual spendings.
Transport, food, training money and pocketmoney (souvenirs etc).
As the first days pass by, you will come to see how good you have budgetted.
Transportation
I planned to take tokyo free kippu tickets, but we ended up getting a Pasmo card for the majority of time. Pasmo doesn’t really give you any discount but will make sure you pay the right price for the whole trip. As I said, with the tokyo free kippu, we would have to buy an extra ticket for the private railroad to Noda. The total fee would have been ¥ 2.180 (two ways, one person). With the Pasmo, this was ¥ 1.840. So this was cheaper if we just went to training and maybe a short trip in the center or so. The transport site Jorudan, was a great help. (Check what a trip for you costs from where you are staying, this might also help you descide what location is too far to stay at for regular training in Noda. I think our location was just the limit.) This site gives you the fee of every trip you lookup. So when our basic plans on a training day didn’t exceed ¥ 2.180, we could just use our Pasmo. If it did exceed it, we would take a Tokyo free Kippu and used our Pasmo just for the Tobu Noda Line. Be aware though, Tokyo free Kippu comes in different forms, get informed well at the Ticket Office! You have cheaper ones of ¥ 730, which are just for the JR lines, the one of ¥ 1.580 is including the Tokyo Metro lines. So know upfront which lines you will need to use, so that you buy a ticket covering them.
When using Pasmo, check when topping off your card if the right amount is on there, and when going out and topping it; check if the right amount is taken off. Also make sure you top it off at the right passway. Take one where the Pasmo/Suica logo is showing! Others will probably just give a green light, but will take off more money when you leave the station at the end of your trip! If you get a red light or you see the amount is not right; go to the officer at the side to check your Pasmo, he will ask you the last station you came from and will take off the right amount, or when it’s ‘broken’ he’ll fix it! We had that twice! The Pasmo all of the sudden said: amount 0 ! But that couldn’t have been right, so we went to an officer and he fixed it! : ) The first time we didn’t, we just thought we calculated wrong and uploaded the card anew. Wrong decision! Always check if you’re uncertain or you will loose money!
Ok, back to the budget.
In the end, we budgeted right! I calculated a Tokyo Free Kippu for every day and an extra for the trips to Noda. Now that we smartly used the Pasmo and where possible the Free Kippu, we ended up spending at least ¥ 6.000 a person less!
More money for extra trainings this means.
Keeping your budget in the book, you can make an assesment after a few days. Like me, I calculated how long we would have to do with an upload of the Pasmo for ¥ 5.000 or ¥ 10.000 and when we stayed under, that difference we could transfer to the budget of training fees.
Training
The first day you go to Hombu for training; write down the schedual of the Shihan teaching there and check with your fellow buyu (if you haven’t done that upfront yet) what the correct fee is. Then you can make a training schedual for yourself and a budget along with it. Calculate how much you would need for all the trainings, then see what you have. After a few days, if you budgeted well, you will see that you can spend more money on training from what you have saved on other things (food and transportation). We budgeted for ¥ 24.000 a person to make sure we could at least do all of Soke’s classes. We ended up spending ¥ 40.500 a person!
You can make your spendings on training as expensive as you wish ofcourse, but realise that training is heavy (and so is traveling) and so there will be a limit on the amount of training you will be able to make it to.
We still ended up with a nice training schedual, although we had planned for more trainings. But we didn’t push it, if we felt too tired, we rested. In the end you want to be able to enjoy all the trainings you go to, not?
What we spend in the end, which is nearly double our original budget, doesn’t really say we budgeted wrong. This was extra! Which means we budgeted great on the other parts of the trip! This extra spendings was saved out money from food and transportation!
Another tip: when seeing Shihan in Hombu, ask them if it is possible to come and train at their dojo. Do this in the beginning, so you can make sure you are able to go to at least one class in their dojo. Training fees are a little cheaper there and change of environment is always nice! You’ll see different people, maybe more local students, and it might be just a little less packed than in hombu!
Food
The initial budget for this was high, but that’s good! This way you are free to have a nice expensive dinner ones in a while if you wish and all that you save, you can spend on other things like training, trips and souvenirs.
We ended up spending even less than 1/3 of the foreseen budget!
That’s just over € 15 a person a day instaid of € 50!
But don’t make that decide you to budget smaller if you’re on a tight budget! A good meal is important! And it may take some adventuring and getting your best Japanese out and stumbling and looking into your pocket book of Japanese phrases to get you what you want for a descent price!
We ended up spending all of the money (or nearly all) anyway, but with a bigger smile! We got to buy nice souvenirs and went to the Onsen and had really nice training!
I think this is all I can give you for a budget review, I hope I can help out some people with this. If you’re still stuck with some questions, don’t hesitate to ask. We’ll be glad to help out!
