Banking and Mobiles

I've done a few productive things in the last few days. It's wednesday already! We haven't done very many exciting things, and I haven't taken any pretty photos BUT I have been to all my classes My two culture classes have been cancelled, because the teacher lives on a small island off the main area of Kyushu and has to take a boat into university. The typhoon means that the boat he takes to work has been cancelled, so no Tea Ceremony or Murakami classes this week. I was a little bit glad, because I've been very tired and the classes are 1 and a half hours long, which is way longer than I'm used to =/

Well, I accomplished 2 things yesterday and today. I managed to transfer money from the UK to Japan! I had to go to the Halifax online banking website and log in. The internet is so slow here it's never worked before, but I managed to find a time when I think everyone was at uni so it was okay. I know it's a difficult thing to do (I had trouble with it anyway, and I'm not that stupid =/) so I'm gonna do a little step by step guide that works for Halifax and may or may not work for another bank.

• Login to online banking with your username etc. 
• Choose the account you want to transfer money from (i.e. student account)
• Underneath there are tabs that say transfer, international transfer etc. - choose international transfer.
• It asks you if you have a special code, but I did not so I chose no. 
• Then you have to type in your name as it is on your bank account details. I wrote my full name in romaji, because I didn't think Halifax could process katakana. 
• I had to write my bank account number, which is written on my bank book and marked by the kanji 口座番号 (こうざばんごう - account number) and is 7 numbers long. 
• I had to write the name and address of my bank, which is Nishi Nippon City Bank - I had to translate this from the Japanese on my bank book but it's not very hard to do with bank names I'm sure. The address I wrote is their main address that I found on their website.
• When this was done they wanted to make a phone call to one of the stored numbers they had for me to make sure it was legit. As I did not have a phone number in Japan/even if I did it would take a week for them to confirm it/I wasn't sure if that would even work as they might not be able to phone Japan I asked my mum to answer the house phone for me.
• The website I was on gave me a number, my mum typed that number into the automated message service from Halifax and it was confirmed. 
• Then the transfer was set up and I just had to choose how much money to send over! And it said it would take 1-2 working days, so it should be here by now =3

So, in general my advice to anyone who will come to Japan on a year abroad regarding money is:

• Take A LOT of money with you on the plane - or get travellers cheques or one of those travel store cards which you can get from STA travel etc. because you WILL use much more money than you think. In the first few weeks I have spent about £700 on buying basically everything I need to live all over again and all the fees that came at the very start of the course. 
• Make sure you have online banking set up and know how to use it before you go, because it's so annoying being frustrated and confused in a foreign country when you really need money. 
• Check your phone number connected to your account, so that if they want to make a call to confirm they can do it to a trusted person/family member etc in the UK and you don't have to struggle trying to add a new number that you may not even have. 
• Be aware that things in Japan are very very expensive. I'm coming to learn and to accept that things I take for granted in the UK are just lots more pricey here and you have to really think about it. Expect your phone, rent, electricity, travel, food... everything to be a lot of money and budget/prepare for that in advance.
• When your university tells you that you will need about £7000 for the year like ours did they are lying. You will need more than that. I have run through my first student loan already and the next one doesn't come until January. And I don't spend a lot of money on things, I don't go out drinking a lot and I don't buy expensive clothes or makeup very often. You will have to save money if you want to live easily in Japan - I have £4000 in savings to live on, and without that I would have NO money at all right now. 

Okay =] and now I'll talk about my new phone.

I went to Softbank yesterday still unsure if I was going to get a contract or a prepaid phone. Everyone seemed to have decided to get a prepaid phone, but I was really confused and unsure. I talked to Adele about it, who is very clever and settled and seems to know what she's on about and she said she thought the contract was better value. I had done my maths (and my mum helped me with that on skype before too) and thought that they worked out about the same price including the fee at the end of the year for the contract phone, and that you get a bit more with the contract. SO I decided to go for that =] and then everyone else changed their mind as well so we all have the same phone type and the same contract.

I went with White Plan from Softbank (who very helpfully have a website in English) which is 980yen a month for the calls, 315yen a month for texts and a free phone. You can't call between 9pm and 1am but I doubt I would anyway, and you can only call and text other softbank mobiles within that price but it was the best value plan they had. I also will hopefully get three months without having to pay the 980yen fee because of some scheme they have, I'm not sure.

My phone is blue and it's a ColorLife 2 (002p) and I put my cute kitty chain on it already. It's a pretty good phone, you can use it in English as well as Japanese. It has mailing and cute little animated emoticons, different coloured message screens, a cute light on the front that you can change the colour of,a 3.2megapixel camera... I need to buy a USB cable for it to be able to transfer pictures/songs to use as wallpapers and ringtones and stuff.

Everyone got all different colours - red and black and green and gold. Fun times. It took about 2 and a half hours in the store to get all the contracts signed, but there were a lot of us. And at the end we got to choose 3 free gifts of food - so I got 2 packs of instant ramen and some コアラのマーチ which are cute koala shaped cookies. Unfortunately, because of the lack of understanding between us (despite the super good help of a Japanese guy called Shin and Adele) I ended up using my bank book instead of my cash card and so will have to go to the Softbank store every month to pay my bill instead of it coming out of account. And apparently that can't be changed =/ because it's the same bank details or something. I don't understand, but at least the shop is very close to uni so it won't be a big journey.

I have a kanji test tomorrowat 9am so I have to go and sleep. I studied some earlier this evening, but I want to get up a bit early if I can manage it and get some work done. I hope I will sleep though, because I passed out today at around 4 and didn't get up for 3 hours >.< hurp.

I've eaten instant ramen and tofu for a couple of days now and I'm tired of it. I want to cycle to the the bigger supermarket tomorrow and buy some nice things. And maybe even go to Daiso the hyakuen shop and see what I can pick up to decorate my room.

I really want to buy a denshi jisho but wow are they expensive!!

I had a pretty fun weekend, although not much big news. On Friday night we went to the Izakaya - sort of like a pub and sort of like a bar. It was very interesting. We had to take our shoes off at the entrance and then sit at some low tables which were already laid with some food - edamame beans, fried noodles, potato wedges with ketchup (!) and some other things I could not identify.

There was lots of graffiti on the walls around us, that people who visited there had drawn. I even found some from Leeds! There were also lots of photos of different people who had been there and drawings and stuff. It had a lot of character. They also continued to serve us food throughout the night at no extra charge, and no one asked for it. They just gave it to us! 

The drinks were very expensive though and it worked out 2500yen each! Although I only had one drink and the Japanese guy I was sitting with called Shin insisted I paid only 500. Everyone was very very drunk and we had a strange walk home with everyone singing and messing around.

I went to bed not soon after coming back.

On Saturday we went into Tenjin and had a look around a really beautiful department store called Vivre. There were lots of amazing clothes, but very expensive prices =/ I bought a pair of red heart shaped sunglasses that I think are very cute <3 and we found a second-hand section that had some more reasonable prices. I'd like to go back there to buy some cute clothes when I have my bank account sorted properly. On the top floor there were some lolita brand sections on sale - Baby The Stars Shine Bright, Metamorphose, Alice and the Pirates! I was super excited and wanted to just take lots of photos. Very pricey though. 25,000yen for a dress. =0 Beautiful though.

Today I bought a new bike! I will post a photo as soon as I can. It has been very rainy today because the typhoon came in. Lots of sudden strong rain =] we had a nice walk to the station to go into Tenjin to check out phone contract prices and pick up Kanji in Context for Sophie.

The phones were much more expensive than I think any of us anticipated. A contract costs around 3000yen up front and 1200yen a month which is reasonable. However they are all 24month contracts and to break the contract costs 9000yen! Which is more money than I'm willing to pay when the only reason is that the company won't offer 1 year contracts. So we have to find somewhere that will sell pre-paid or pay as you go phones. I think these will cost more up front - something like 7000yen, and then you can top up with 3000 or 5000. You then can select to spend 300 of that on unlimited email messages (that are used like texts here). If you don't spend the money within 2 months you lose it though so it's a bit like the pay as you go phones in the UK that is like free texts if you top up £10, except you don't get to keep the £10 =/

Yes, using a phone is expensive in Japan! I'm surprised anyone can use one >.< I'm not going to struggle for money this year and I still don't feel like I can justify almost £80 to break a contract at the end of the year. Lame.

This is just softbank though so I need to check out docomo and anything else as well. I think I might have more success if I go alone and study the options myself rather than relying on other people. Although it is very helpful, I feel like I understand better if I organise it alone.  

Anyway, we went to Starbucks and our favourite 280yen ramen shop in Tenjin and then came home and studied a bit. And now I have to go to bed but I'm achey and awake for some reason so I decided to write a blog post instead. =] But I will go to sleep now.

Banking For A Year Abroad

Well first of all my visa arrived =D I got it on the friday of the week that I bought it. They posted it really fast. And it's really pretty! There are cherry blossom flowers on the top and my face in black and white in a little circle. It's very nice and really exciting to see my actual student visa, valid for 15 months all ready stuck into my passport.

I have 15 days until I leave for Japan. My massive list of things to do it getting shorter.

I bought my insurance a couple of days ago from Leeds University. They have a pretty good cover that's designed for Leeds year abroad students and only costs £50 when you're going to Japan because you have to buy another japanese insurance on top of it. I could have looked around to see if there was a better offer, but I figured Leeds would have it sorted.

Anyway, what I mostly wanted to talk about in this post was how to sort out a bank account for year abroad. I went and asked at a few high street banks and frankly, they were very unhelpful. The man at HSBC was very determined that the only way to do it was to buy a monthly fee account, which I don't really want to do. But this is what I found out from the few places I went any how:



Halifax
To send money to a foreign bank costs £9.50 per transaction online.  I already have my student account with Halifax so this seems like a simple deal.

HSBC
Sending money to a foreign bank costs £17. To open a HSBC account in japan you need a premier account which has a monthly fee which I think is £25 a month, although their website has SO much information and the prices are in the super small print it's hard to tell >.< They also have an aadvance account, which is £12.95/month and includes travel insurance and apparently you can take money out of any machine with your visa card without any charges.


Natwest
£20 to transfer money, but they don't do it online.

My friend Hillary linked me to this site http://www.caxtonfx.com/  which is apparently a free way of transfering money from one bank to another. It seems a bit like paypal to me, but maybe less expensive! And of course, Paypal does something similar with fees, although I think the fees are quite high for large sums of money.



Money is a little bit of a worry, as always. Going to japan is a very expensive trip. Although I'll be getting a lot from student finance, and I have about £4000 savings from working/an account my mum put in for me when I was a baby that has accumulated over the past 20 years. So I will have around £10,000 for the year.
It really seems like a lot to me, but of course, there's a lot of payments I'll  have to make.

I guess I need to budget and make sure I'm all sorted out.

Things I have left to do:

• Get some yen
• Make sure I have a list of everything I need to pack
• Pack it all and weigh the suitcase etc. 
• Sign a form to get my money from the bank.

Tomorrow I'm heading back up to Leeds for a couple of days with my boyfriend. And then on the 27th I'm having a leaving party as well as an early birthday party, because my 21st is on the 12th of September when I'm in Japan. Looking forward to that =]