We Invest 62% of Our Take-Home Pay — Here's Our Entire Dual-Income Budget

Out of our combined take-home pay of ¥600,000 (about $4,000/month), we invest ¥370,000 (about $2,500) every single month.

Writing that out, I realize it sounds insane. Honestly, even I look at that number and think “man, that’s aggressive.” But this is our real household budget — no rounding, no cherry-picking. I’m going to show you everything, embarrassing parts included.

What “Dual Income, ¥600K Take-Home” Actually Looks Like

My wife and I both work full-time. Combined take-home pay is about ¥600,000 (about $4,000) per month, split roughly 60/40 with me earning a bit more.

A $4,000/month household income might sound comfortable, but the reality isn’t that simple. We’ve got a mortgage to pay, our daughter’s education costs, insurance premiums. Two people running full-speed at their careers just to keep everything spinning. Pretty standard stuff for a dual-income family in Japan.

The one thing that isn’t standard is the amount we pour into investments. We’ve been doing this for two years straight.

Every Yen That Leaves Our Account Each Month

Let me start with expenses. Nothing hidden.

Mortgage: ¥80,000 (about $530). We own a condo — “mansion” in Japanese, though it’s really just a regular apartment unit. Standard stuff.

Condo management fees + parking: ¥40,000 (about $270). In Japan, condo owners pay a monthly management fee (管理費) that covers building maintenance, shared spaces, and a repair reserve fund. Plus parking. It’s a quiet, relentless fixed cost — like getting body-punched every month.

Daughter’s education: ¥60,000 (about $400). She’s eight. That might seem like a lot for an elementary schooler, but in Japan, after-school tutoring (塾), lessons, and enrichment programs add up fast. This is one area where we don’t cut corners.

Insurance: ¥60,000 (about $400). This is an endowment-type policy — part insurance, part savings vehicle. It’s completely separate from our investments, but the money leaves our account every month all the same, so I count it as an expense.

Phone/internet: ¥5,000 (about $33).

And then there’s food: ¥200,000 (about $1,300).

Total monthly expenses: roughly ¥445,000 (about $2,970). If you read through that list and one number made you do a double-take, I already know which one it is.

Let Me Explain the $1,300 Food Bill

Yeah. ¥200,000 on food is a lot. I know. I cringed writing it.

But here’s what happens when both partners work full-time in Japan. We each eat lunch near our offices — eating out is the default for Japanese office workers. By evening, neither of us has the energy to cook a full meal, so we eat out more often than we should. A couple of times a week, the whole family ends up at a family restaurant or ramen shop.

“It just kind of happened” is the most honest way to describe it.

Lately, I’ve been trying to course-correct. Even on days when cooking is off the table, I try to at least swing by the supermarket and pick up ready-made dishes (惣菜 — prepared foods sold at every Japanese grocery store, and they’re honestly pretty good). Switching from restaurants to supermarket prepared foods should make a real dent.

My wife and I have never actually argued about the food budget. As I wrote in When Your Partner Has Opposite Money Values, there’s an unspoken agreement between us: we both work hard, so spending energy fighting about food isn’t worth it. Whether that’s the right call, I genuinely don’t know. You could call it the cost of maintaining peace in a dual-income household. At ¥200,000 a month, though… yeah, it’s still too high. That’s why I’m working on it.

Where the $2,500/Month Goes

Now for the main event.

¥100,000 (about $670) into FANG+ — a fund tracking Facebook/Meta, Amazon, Netflix, Google, and other mega-cap tech stocks.

¥50,000 (about $330) into NASDAQ 100 — tracking the top 100 Nasdaq-listed companies.

¥200,000 (about $1,330) into “All Country” (オルカン) — Japan’s wildly popular nickname for an all-world index fund (think MSCI ACWI or the Vanguard Total World Stock equivalent).

¥20,000 (about $130) into iDeCo — Japan’s version of a 401(k). Contributions are tax-deductible, but the money is locked until age 60.

Total: ¥370,000/month (about $2,500). That’s 62% of our take-home pay.

I ran the numbers again while writing this and honestly surprised myself. That’s… a lot.

If I’m being completely honest, I wanted to go all-in on FANG+. But that felt too aggressive, so I spread things out. I like the NASDAQ approach too, and the all-world fund is the largest allocation — that’s my anchor of stability. I’ll break down why I chose each fund in a separate post.

Japan’s New NISA Lit the Fuse

We started investing at this pace two years ago, and the trigger was Japan’s revamped NISA program.

Quick context for international readers: NISA is Japan’s tax-advantaged investment account — think of it as Japan’s answer to a Roth IRA or ISA. The original NISA had fairly limited annual contribution caps. Then in January 2024, Japan launched the “New NISA” (新NISA), which dramatically expanded the tax-free investment limits — up to ¥3.6 million (about $24,000) per year in the growth bucket, with a lifetime cap of ¥18 million (about $120,000). For Japanese investors, this was a game-changer.

I’d wanted to reduce our cash-heavy allocation for a while, but the old NISA limits kept things small. When the New NISA opened up, I ran the math: set a target cash-to-investment ratio, calculated how many years it would take to get there, and landed on roughly five years. That’s how I arrived at ¥370,000 per month. It’s not “the maximum we can afford” — it’s “the amount that gets us to our target ratio in five years.”

For the record, this investment strategy is entirely my call. My wife isn’t particularly interested in the details of portfolio allocation, so she trusts me to handle it. I’ve essentially become our household’s fund manager — a role that works precisely because she doesn’t micromanage the investments.

This Budget Is Running a Deficit — On Purpose

You might have noticed the math doesn’t add up.

Expenses: ¥445,000 + Investments: ¥370,000 = ¥815,000. But our take-home is only ¥600,000. That’s a monthly shortfall of about ¥210,000 (about $1,400). A $1,400/month deficit sounds like financial collapse.

But we’re doing it intentionally.

The secret: we’re systematically drawing down our cash savings and converting them into investments.

Living with the Fear of Shrinking Cash

I’ll be honest — it’s a little scary. Cash is the ultimate comfort asset. Seeing a healthy balance in your bank account just makes you feel stable. That’s universal, I think.

But sitting on too much cash has its own kind of anxiety. This is the tricky part — there’s no perfect answer.

I track everything through MoneyForward (Japan’s most popular household finance app — it aggregates all your bank accounts, brokerage accounts, and credit cards into one dashboard). I check our asset breakdown every morning. I probably shouldn’t look that often, but I can’t help it. Watching the cash number shrink while the investment number grows, day after day. Whether that’s reassuring or anxiety-inducing, I honestly can’t tell.

Rationally, I know lump-sum investing beats dollar-cost averaging most of the time. But I chose the approach that keeps my mind steady. Moving the money gradually, ¥370,000 at a time, over five years. I don’t have the guts to move it all at once. But I can handle doing it month by month. My mental health can sustain that pace.

That’s the real reason behind this “insane” monthly investment amount. I can’t do it all at once, so I do it every month instead.

The Shift from “How Much” to “What Ratio”

When I first started investing, I was obsessed with the monthly amount. Should I invest ¥100,000? ¥150,000? That’s all I thought about.

Then one day, my entire mindset shifted. The number that actually matters isn’t how much you invest per month — it’s the ratio of cash to investments across your total assets.

My current target: get our cash allocation down to 10-15% of total assets. That means 85-90% invested. To reach that ratio, I reverse-engineered how many years it would take, and that gave me the monthly number: ¥370,000.

About two more years at this pace and we should hit the target. After that, I plan to dial the monthly investment back to around ¥200,000 (about $1,300).

Will I spend the extra ¥170,000 on luxuries? Probably not. Lifestyle inflation is how wealth evaporates. I’ll keep living the same way.

That said, I do have a quiet dream of side-FIRE or eventually full FIRE. All this aggressive investing is really about the freedom waiting on the other side.

When You Think in Ratios, You Can See the Finish Line

When I was stuck in “how much per month” thinking, there was no end in sight. Earn more, invest more, push harder. It felt like running a race with no finish line.

The moment I switched to ratio thinking, a goal appeared. “Two more years to hit my target ratio. Then I can ease up.” When you can see the end, the discomfort of right now becomes bearable.

Don’t think about how much to invest each month. Think about the ratio between cash and investments. Calculate how many years it takes to reach your ideal ratio, and work backwards from there. That was the single biggest mental shift in my entire investing journey.

Same amount invested, but a totally different feeling. With monthly-amount thinking, money was chasing me. With ratio thinking, I’m the one moving the money. That distinction changed everything.

What It Feels Like to Bare It All

Before writing this, I hesitated. Putting exact income, expenses, and investment figures on the internet felt like a lot — especially in Japan, where talking openly about money is deeply taboo. Salary, spending, net worth — these are things Japanese people simply don’t discuss, even with close friends.

But after writing it all out, I feel fine. More than fine, actually. Laying out the numbers forced me to look at my own finances objectively. The food budget is definitely too high. A 62% investment rate is definitely unusual. Watching our cash drop by ¥210,000 every month is definitely nerve-wracking.

But there’s a reason behind each of those numbers. The food spending is the “it just kind of happened” cost of both partners working full-time. The investment amount is the calculated result of a five-year plan. The cash drawdown is because I lack the courage to move it all at once, so I move it bit by bit. This isn’t a perfect budget. It’s full of holes you could poke at. But it’s real.

If you’re in a similar dual-income situation thinking “I want to invest more, but there’s nothing left after living expenses” — here’s one idea. Instead of trying to squeeze investment money out of your monthly paycheck, think about adjusting your overall cash-to-investment ratio. You might find money you didn’t know you had.

And for dual-income households: time is the scarcest resource. Day trading or active management isn’t realistic when both partners are working. That’s exactly why index investing works so well for us. Set it up and leave it alone. That “leave it alone” quality is the single greatest value proposition for busy dual-income families. After all, the salary ladder isn’t the only way to build wealth — steady contributions matter more than chasing promotions.

If reading this made you think “oh, it’s not just us” — then laying it all bare was worth it.

This article reflects personal experience and is for informational purposes only — not investment advice. All investment decisions are your own responsibility.