Cost of owning a car in Japan (after 1 year)

We bought a second hand Toyota Voxy minivan last year. Now that it has been over a year, let’s review how much we spent on the car.

Read more

Traveling with a toddler (2.5 years) and a baby (6 months)

We had our second child in winter, and just came back from a 3 week trip to Hungary. I wrote about flying cross-continental with a baby when we did it the first time, but two kids required more logistics so I’ll share how it went this time.

Read more

First shaken (車検)

We bought a 4-year-old second-hand minivan (Toyota Voxy) last year. Since it is turning 5 years old soon, it was up for the biannual vehicle inspection (車検, shaken), which we just completed recently.

Read more

Car insurance renewal

We bought a second-hand minivan last year and took out optional insurance for it. Since it’s been almost a year, the insurance is up for renewal.

Read more

Our rent vs buy tracker - year 1

We recently built our home in Tokyo with Ichijo. Before deciding to build our home, I run the numbers and concluded that neither owning nor renting was clearly financially superior. (I was happy to see later that much more knowledgeable people arrived to the same conclusion.) We still decided to own our home for non-financial reasons. In this post (and future updates), I’ll track how our financial results compare to if we had continued renting.

Read more