Japanese Savings
Tim Stay wrote about Japan’s Rising Sun on April 13th at Business News.
It is true that Japan seems to have FINALLY started spending again. And now that they have, watch out! Because the Japanese have money to spend.
According to the ASAHI 2006 Japan Almanac, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications estimate that the average Japanese household has about 12,730,000 yen in savings and 6,550,000 in debt. At 117yen/$1 that is $108k in savings per household.
There are approximately 26 million households in Japan.
26 million households X $108k = A whole lot of money the Japanese have to spend on houses (well, not really – the land is pretty much saturated with houses and there is not a lot of room to build more – hence 2, 3 or sometimes 4 generations live under the same room), cars (the Japanese will buy a new car every 3-5 years) and sneakers. (The Washington Post).
It will be good for business in Japan and elsewhere when Japan really gets down to busines.
BTW, my household does NOT have $108k in the bank, so that means someone/somewhere has more than $200K in the bank.
How about you? How much savings do you have?
Very interesting. I had no idea that Japan had that much spending power. Well… I kinda did, but not really. To answer your question, I have next to nothing in my savings. And since I’ve been planning on visiting Japan in a few years and maybe staying there for a while (living with my relatives of course) I should start to save.
Its interesting how they have saved alot of money. It seems they are conservative on buying things like sneakers every 3-5 years. I think that they also save a lot of money due to the fact that housing is small and limited.
Chris,
Japan is indeed an expensive country. Even it is the size of CA, travelling across country still costs cross country prices.
Where are your relatives in Japan at? If I may ask.
When not so much money is spent on housing and mortgage, it makes for a LOT of disposable income for other things.
I saw an interesting figure in today’s San Jose Mercury News. The top 150 companies in Silicon Valley had a combined market value on Friday of $1.18 Trillion Dollars. That’s Google + Intel + Yahoo + Sun Microsystems + 146 other…
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