Frugalista JapanMoney saving tips and ideas for foreigners in Japan!

Reader John Turningpin asked for more info on the CompTIA A+ IT qualification I passed recently, so I’ve put together a list of resources I used and more info on actually taking the test.

Overview:

The CompTIA A+ is an entry-level qualification that proves you are able to repair, upgrade, diagnose, and torubleshoot Windows computers. It consists of 2 tests. The first is a basic computer repair and troubleshooting skills test. For your 2nd test, you can choose from different options: (1) A higher-level but still general “IT technician” test (2) A customer focussed test for helpdesk roles (3) A hardware focus for depot / no-customer contact roles. I had originally planned to take the hardware test since I hate dealing with customers, but from the advice I had gotten it seemed like the general technician test would be more useful in getting a job.

As a general indicator for if you think this qualification is for you, I’d take the quick 10 question practice test over at CompTIA site (quick form filling in required) – anything below 5, and this probably isn’t for you; 5-7 and you have a good chance of passing with a few months of good study; above 8 and you can probably just go ahead and take the test immediatly, or find out the exact topics you need work on and focus on those for a week maybe.

Studying:

Experience: The best way to learn how to repair PCs is to get a hold of some hardware and play with it. Here’s an off the top of my head list of things you need to have experience of doing at least a couple of times:

• Change the video card out, and know the difference between PCI and AGP, and the newer PCI-e slots.
• Add 2 extra hard drives to your computer, and figure out how to partition them. I say 2 drives in order for you to understand the concept of primary and secondary drives on an IDE chain.
• Strip the processor and fan from the motherboard and then put it all back again.
• Format the drive and reinstall from scratch. If the idea of re-installing Windows XP doesn’t sound like a thoroughly riveting Sunday afternoon, this test maybe isn’t for you.
• Go to Sofmap and check out all the hardware – would it fit in your computer? Look at all the motherboards, figure out what kind of processor slots they are.
• Try connecting your computer to your TV. Most laptops and decent gfx cards support this just fine.
• Try setting up a home network manually. DO NOT just plug your computers into your broadband router – that’s cheating.

That’s all I can think of right now, but if you think of anything else, please add them in the comments.

Online learning: Going the legal route, ProProfs is a fantastic free resource with online practice tests, flashcard, tutorials on specific tough topics (like the laser printing process, which *will* be on your test) etc.

Videos: If you have money to burn or have no moral qualms about piracy, I thoroughly recommend the CBT Nuggets training course or VTC series. They cover everything in the exam rather comprehensively.

Taking the exam in Japan:

You’ll need to register at Pearson Vue first, then find a test centre near you using their locator. The process of actually booking a test is very easy using their online booking system, and just make sure you select the English version of the test (there is a dropbox that allows you to choose – it defaults to English). During the booking you will also need to select the test centre and an available time slot, so be sure to have chosen your test centre using the locator before you book. Simple!

Hope that was useful to you John, and anyone else interested in getting their first IT qualification.

Reader Jonathan Allen has kindly sent in useful money-saving tips that might work for some of you. Let’s see what they are, and I’ll add my own advice onto them.

Jonathan says: Get loyalty cards – like T-club points, Subway stamp card for free sandwiches.
Jamie says: I have a ton of loyalty cards, but I never seem to shop anywhere enough times that it amounts to anything before the card expires. As for T-club points (Tsutaya, right?), I find I never need to rent movies as the university I work at has an AV-room that I can borrow subtitled DVDs from, and anything newer can be obtained rather speedily through the intertubes – more on how to do this securely and safely in an upcoming post. As for eating out at places like Subway; if you insist on going there, get their loyalty card for sure – but understand that the even more frugal option would be to make your own sandwich! The most useful points I have ever had are those from my credit card, which you can really rack-up if you start making regular investment payments through it and use it to pay for all your regular grocery shopping too.

Jonathan says: Get a commuter pass if you use JR lines. I save a bit on a monthly Suica pass for the Yamamote line.
Jamie says: Sound advice if you travel on public transport everyday and are having to pay out of your own pocket. My job pays for my travel though, so I’ve never looked into this kind of thing. In fact, I recieve money to travel by train everyday, but cycle instead. Not only does this save me money, it also gives me a little more to play with. The subway system where I am in Kyoto city has a special 1000 yen travel card that actually gives you 1100 yen worth of travel, but it can only be used on the city subway and not the JR or Hankyu lines. When I do travel by travel by train, I use a an electronic smart-card from JR that means I can skip the entire process of buying a ticket and just charge it up once a month. Although it doesn’t save me any money, it does save me time and headaches of working out how much a ticket to wherever is, and it works with every kind of smart-kind reader around Kansai (PiTaPa, ICOCA etc).

Jonathan says: shop locally, much cheaper than department stores for most things.
Jamie: agreed… However, I have to admit I prefer the homogeneousity of supermarkets over small mom-and-pop greengrocers and local stores. While I would in theory like to proactive in supporting the local community and their dying smaller businesses, I don’t like the hassle I get as a foreigner in local stores. I go shopping to get groceries, not to have a 30 minute interview about how long I’ve been in Japan, how jouzu my Japanese is, and how it’s amazing that I know how to cook with such a tradtional Japanese vegetable. Give me the daikon already! Some of you however may enjoy these random encounters, and may even find yourselves getting the odd free fruit and veg if you can develop a good enough rapport with the locals.

Jonathan says: If you read a newspaper, get a subscription – it’s inevitably cheaper than buying it everyday.
Jamie says: I would go one further and say stop buying a newspaper. If you have an internet connection, there is such a deluge of news sites, podcasts and RSS feeds that there really is no need to read a physical newspaper anymore. If you don’t know how to have news (be it text, audio or video) automatically delivered to your computer or iPhone, then stayed tuned as I’ll be writing a tutorial soon enough.

Jonathan says: Join the Tokyo freecycle group for free stuff.
Jamie says: For anyone outside of Tokyo, and especially in Kansai, I suggest my own site too @ gaijinstuff.com – its free to register and super-easy to post something to give away or sell really cheaply! In fact I have a ton of free furniture listed to give away there right now, as I’ll be moving next month and see to have acquired rather a lot with gaijin moving in and out of our little house over the years. The problem I have with freecycle is that it’s done through yahoo groups, which I really don’t like. I don’t have a yahoo account, and I don’t want one, and I don’t want hundreds of emails in my inbox from the list everday or have to wade through in a “everything in one mail” thing. This is what RSS feeds were invented for, and I wish the admins of the great FreeCycle would acknowledge a better system when one exists. I have tried applying to create a FreeCycle group for my local area here in Kyoto, but they refused to acknowledge it if it wasn’t through Yahoo groups!

Thanks again Jonathan, and be sure to check out his blog at seoul-man.blogspot.com! Be sure to send in your tips too~

As a proud member of the JapanSoc (a wonderful social networking community for bloggers in Japan), here’s my entry for the February Japan Blog Matsuri, on the entirely unfrugal topic of foreign food.

To put it rather bluntly, if you’re at all serious about your new found frugality – as indeed I am – you need the stay the hell away from foreign food stores. The kind that beckon you in with their sweet smells of home, their thick bars of real Cadburys chocolate and stacks of various pasta sauces from all over the world, not just the homogenous “meat sauce” you find in Japanese supermarkets. But you must be strong, fight the urge.

Firstly, you should consider the amount of fossil fuels it took to bring that food all the way to Japan – can you really justify that kind of environmental damage so you can have a taste of home? Yes? Well – that’s your choice, but then at least bookmark this carbon offset click site and go there daily.

And if you didn’t know already, foreign food is hideously overpriced. Maybe the stores can justify their price with shipping charges and cute part-timers to pack your 1-inch block of cheese with worthless chemical ice-alike-blocks into high quality paper bags; but I can’t. Now we have to pay extra to destroy the environment? Thanks for the priviledge, but what gives – destroying the environment used to be free! You can achieve the same financial damage on your credit card while shopping for one meal worth of over-priced imported foreign food stuffs as you can a whole weeks worth of using locally grown vegetables and Japanese meat.

So what am I trying to say here? If you really want the taste of home, spend the time to make it yourself using locally produced ingredients. Personally, I’m partial to a bit of Chinese egg-fried rice to really make me feel like I’m back in ol’ Blighty

Over the last year or so there have been some amazing new sites on the intertubes that I personally believe can take your Japanese to the next level. Today I’d like to introduce those to you – hopefully saving you some pennies in the process.

Note that these sites are really not for absolute beginners. Before you start learning in this way, you really should have the basic Japanese grammar rules down, such as knowing all the different possible verb conjugations and tenses etc. From here on out, your only problem should be lack of vocabulary and fluency errors. That is where these sites come in.

Vocab:

Working on your fluency in a language is a big problem for most people. In speaking situations, there are constants debates over whether one should be even be directly corrected
iKnow is a “social learning platform“. Ignoring the social aspect of it though, what we have here is a personalized vocabulary trainer with proven method to help you remember the kanji and the meaning. Essentially, it shows you some vocab flashcards and pronounces them, then tests you on them with a variety of increasingly difficult testing methods (starting at multiple choice of meaning given the Japanese with a choice of 4, then 8, then choosing the Japanese reading given only the English meaning, and finally typing the reading straight from memory). You do this daily, and each time the system reinforces previously studied vocabulary. It sounds simple, but it does it so well and is honestly effective. There’s a huge variety of courses, not just Japanese for English speakers, and you can even create your own vocab lists (with voice recordings) for yourself or others to study from. What really makes the sites stand out is just the slick interface and how well everything is tied together. You can even subscribe to a automagically generated personalized podcast which contains example sentences of all the vocab you studied the previous day.

Fluency:

Working on your fluency in any language is a big issue. As for speaking, debates rage on as to whether it is ever appropriate to correct someone if they are understood, so this is something you will have to work out yourself with the people you communicate with on a daily basis. As for your writing fluency though – wouldn’t it be great if there was somewhere you could have your written work corrected by a native, even better if it was all free? Well, such a site does exist. Lang-8.com is precisely that. Again, a kind of social network with friend connections and blogging (or journals, as the site refers to them), but with one major differece – your journal entries are corrected by a native, usually within minutes. Of course in order for this to be free, there has to be some kind of exchange going on. The beauty of the site is that the exchange part of correcting journals is all automated – you don’t have to search for an exchange partner, you don’t have to keep correcting one particular persons journal. Instead when you login you are given a short list of journals entries written in your native language that are awaiting corrections; correct them and the system will add points to your account. Next time you add a journal entry, assuming you have points, your entry will be displayed on the awaiting correction list for other users. In my experience, my journal entries written in Japanese have been corrected by around 3 people all within the space of a few minutes of publishing. Of course, I also regularly correct others Englishs journals if I have 10 minutes free.

Both sites require a valid email address to register, but I can personally confirm they are spam free. If you’d to add my me as a study-buddy (!?), my username for both sites is “w0lfi3″ (careful with the zero and a three in there…)

If you liked this article and would like to subscribe to our feed for more down the line, click here. If you don’t know what subscribing to a feed means, you can find out more here. By subscribing, you will also be donating $0.50 towards a micro loan once I reach my first goal of 50 subscribers. At the time of publishing, we are currently at the grand total of 5 readers, so there is a long way to go yet!

GaijinStuff is another site of mine that I started a few months before this one. It’s essentially a free classifieds site, but it has a specific category for “free stuff”. I’m hoping that eventually it’ll turn into the FreeCycle of Japan, with people listing everything to give away. It’s a little Kyoto-centric right now as it’s difficult to get free advertising across Japan, but you guys can change that. It’s super easy to use and only requires registration to list items, not to respond to ads.

Personally it’s been a great tool for me to get rid of junk that’s only really worth a couple of hundred yen, if anything. But by giving it away for free, I achieve a number of distinctly wonderful things:

• The item no longer goes into the trash. In some cases with large objects and appliances / electrical goods, this is actually a direct saving since you normally have to pay to have those collected and disposed of.
• Someone else will have use of the item, so the responsibility for all production waste and transport costs that it took to make that item can now be morally shared with another person.
• It means that someone will not be putting cash and profits back into the worthless consumerist system and giant corporations that drive our modern life. If enough people did this, they would realise the system needs to be rethought.
• I am connecting with people! When someone comes to collect the item, I get to meet someone. Maybe this will result in nothing more than “hi, here’s your stuff, take care now”, but maybe it will turn out to be a half hour thoroughly interesting conversation with a complete stranger.

Anyway, please go take a look at the site and browse the stuff on there. If you have anything you’d like to give away, it’s really easy to register and post your item so please do. It would also be a really big help if you could link to the site on your Japan related blog, or tell your friends about it. If you have any comments about the site, please write them on this page or email them to help@gaijinstuff.com

ps: the subscriber count is still too low to fund my first micro loan to a needy entrepreneur. If you’d like to help me reach my goal of 50 subscribers and hence fund my first micro loan of $25, all you need to do is subscribe to the feed using your favorite feed reader. If you have no idea what subscribing to a feed means, then click here to read all about syndication.

As a child, I used to have serious issues with second-hand things. The society I was brought up in was all about shopping for shiny new plastic wrapped things. It has actually taken me a long time to remove the mental stigma of second-hand goods being somehow dirty or of lesser quality, but I’m so glad now that I have.

Having said that, living in Japan gives us quite a different second-hand purchasing experience than we might have back home. Garage sales and thrift / charity stores? Forget it. The Japanese market has absolute no use for second hand goods unless they look absolutely new. The second hand stores here in Japan (also called recycle-shops) are actually rather strict with what they will and won’t take. Of course, this also means you can expect better quality (and higher prices) for second hand items than you might back home.

For those of you without great Japanese, the sign you are looking for is 中古 or リサイクル. Search for either of these terms on google maps (just copy and paste the Japanese once you’ve zoomed in) for your local area and I’m sure quite a few will come up. Don’t bother hunting around for lost treasures – recycle shops generally hold clothes, appliances and maybe have a poster board with furniture from their warehouse. They may also hold brand goods like handbags etc, but they certainly don’t have antique bargains of any sort.

Do you enjoy second hand shopping in your local recycle shops? Found any bargains? How much of your worldly possessions in Japan are second hand?

Micro Loan Update: We’re currently at just 4 subscribers, quite a way off from the target of 50 for the initial $25 micro-loan. Please subscribe to the feed to add your $.50 to my loan pledge!

I am an incredible advocate of recycling, and have been since I was a child. I have never understood the mindset of individuals who do not spend the minuscule effort required to separate their trash. I convinced my parents to recycle when I was barely 7, back in the dark days when recycling meant hauling everything monthly a few miles to the local “recycling centre”. And not once have they wavered all these years. Nowadays there is even less excuse for recycling – in fact it is now mandatory across Japan and pickups are the same as with regular trash, from your doorstep. Be warned though – just recycling is simply not enough anymore. Even if everyone in the world recycled as much of their trash as possible, we would still have two major issues to contend with.

Firstly, for every bag of trash you recycle, another 17 have been made along the production process on your behalf. You can’t recycle them. This is where your conscious purchasing decisions come into play. By purchasing second hand, you share the burden of production waste with another individual. If you insist on purchasing new, you can choose products that are potentially more expensive but have less of an environmental impact.

Secondly, and the real motivation for posting today, is that a significant amount of waste comes from institutions and companies. Working in a university, I see this every day and it really frustrates me. The problem with institutions is that they aren’t spending their own money, so they really just don’t care about waste. You’d think that a religious university such as the one I’m working at might concern itself a little more with moral issues of environmental consideration, but you’d be entirely wrong… Each new school year, every one of the teachers in my office gets given a new syllabus to horde away somewhere – but do we really need it? Wouldn’t one for the entire office be quite sufficient? How about the idiot that decided to order a metric tonne of VHS video tapes that still haven’t been used and most likely never will – their fate sealed to sitting in a storeroom next to the 17 or so 1000-sheet each boxes of fancy departmental headed lined paper that some other moron decided to purchase years ago. The fully equipped gym that I have yet to see any student use? The mountain of English language books in the university library that are far beyond the level of any student that has ever studied English here? Who is responsible for all these wasted purchases? WHO!?

The answer may be quite simple: we are. Or at least our predecessors, and our colleagues. Every one of us in the business of teaching English professionally is involved in some kind of purchasing decision using budget money, and ultimately it’s up to us to use that money responsibly. One obvious piece of advice for people involved with purchasing disposable media such as tapes and CDs, paper etc is to make an accurate estimate of what is required, and not just purchase a years supply because making out a purchase order next month will be too much bother, or because you have a couple of extra hundred thousand yen on your budget that needs to be spent somehow. Just think before you sign off on that order – what you do if the money was your own? Would you consider that order to be financially and environmentally responsible?

For those of you not directly involved in purchasing decisions, you can still speak out and convince those who do of the benefits of being frugal during these rough times.

Found any pointless and badly made purchases in your school or company lately? Please name and shame them in the comments! Or perhaps you have an excellent environmental plan of action at your workplace, let us know.

If you haven’t already, you might want to consider susbcribing to our feed – just by subscribing, I will pledge $0.50 towards a MicroLoan.

WebEcoist has posted a rather shocking report on the top 5 “green products” that are in fact significantly less green than they claim to be. Among the other 4 random American products I’ve never heard of I was surprised to see energy saving compact fluorescent bulbs that I’ve come to love and respect. Sadly, it appears they contain a lot of Mercury – which we really don’t want to be throwing away randomly into the environment, or so I hear. Luckily the bulbs have a life of around 5 years and most people started buying them about 2 years ago soooo … we shouldn’t be poisoned for another 2 or 3 years yet.

I quote:
Compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs) are the poster child for the new generation of eco-friendly, energy saving appliances. Department stores are aggressively marketing them to consumers and they have been flying off store shelves for the better part of this decade. There’s just one problem: CFLs contain small amounts of mercury, a potentially lethal neurotoxin that cannot be safely disposed of with other garbage. But since the government has yet to discover an efficient means of recycling these bulbs, they often do wind up being tossed out with other garbage. Massive amounts of time and money must then be spent to clean up mercury contamination.

Is the energy (and hence money) saved worth poisoning the environment? Not in my opinion.

Inspired by FreeMicroloans.

One of the reasons I started this site and began to seriously examine my personal lifestyle and spending habits was so that I would be able to give more back to support those less fortunate. I think sometimes that I have it rough – that I’m only just about going to be able to pay the rent and utilities this month – but then is time to consider the billions of families around the world who live on less than $1 a day.

Until recently, I was quite unaware of the concept of micro loans. The idea is that you lend money (in this case via Kiva) to a business or individual that is struggling to survive or even to get off the ground due to lack of financing. The micro loan gives them the capital they need to get started, and by using that investment wisely they will soon be providing not only for their own families, but also employing other local workers and building a real economy.

Kiva is the world’s first person-to-person micro-lending website, empowering individuals to lend directly to unique entrepreneurs in the developing world

So how can you help? Apart from going and loaning $25 or more yourself, you could just subscribe to my RSS feed. For each subscriber I will pledge $0.50 towards a micro loan. Our first target is 50 subscribers, at which point I will choose a recipient for a micro loan of $25.

You can see how far I am towards my target on the feedburner widget on the sidebar so you’ll know how close we are to the target. When the target is hit, I’ll donate the micro loan (you’ll be able to check on my lender profile at Kiva) and we’ll set a new target! It’s never been easier to help by doing nothing!

If you think this is a great idea and you’re willing to subscribe to the feed to help out, please go check out the wonderful FreeMicroloan site where you can do the same there too!

You can also spread the word by mailing this page to some friends!