People keep asking me whether it is cheaper here, and the honest answer is that it depends entirely on what you spend money on. After a year of tracking, here is roughly how it breaks down for me. Housing is the big one, and for me it is clearly cheaper for the equivalent space, though a lot of that is because I chose to live further out and accept a longer commute. Friends in the middle of the city do not see anything like the same gap. Eating out is where the difference is most obvious. A decent lunch here costs less than I expected and the quality floor is high. It is genuinely hard to eat badly at a reasonable price. Back home I would have said we do casual food well, and we do, but the consistency here surprised me. Groceries went the other way. Fruit in particular still shocks me. I have adjusted by buying what is in season rather than what I feel like, which is probably a better habit anyway. Transport is roughly a wash. More expensive per trip than I expected, but I walk far more here, so the total is similar. The hidden cost nobody mentions is the setup. The first few months involved a lot of one-off spending, deposits, appliances, furniture, paperwork-related fees. If you are budgeting for a move, that first quarter is not representative of anything. The other hidden cost is flights home, which I had mentally filed under holidays rather than living costs. That was naive. Overall I spend a bit less than I did back home, but the shape of the spending is completely different. What I did not anticipate is how much less I spend on things I do not care about, mainly because impulse spending is harder when you are less familiar with everything. Curious how this compares for others, especially anyone living in the city centre or with family here, since I imagine both change the picture a lot. #singapore #costofliving #livinginjapan