We’re saving $100,000 to move to Japan, and these ten things are doing the work.
No budgeting app. No side hustle. No windfall you’d need to already have. Some of it is boring. One of them doesn’t work the way people think it does. And there’s one plenty of people will tell you not to do.
The short version: we picked one number, automated a small monthly transfer so we never went backwards, and then sent every lump sum straight at it. A car sale, the things we sold off, and the money from a house we renovated ourselves. Half of the $100,000 came from that house. The other half came from not spending our raises.
One thing before we start, because it changes how you should read the rest: we have not hit $100,000 yet. We’re still saving toward it, and we fly out in early 2027. I’m writing this from the middle of it, not from the other side.
This post contains affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases, and I earn from some of the other links here too, at no extra cost to you. I only include things we actually use. This is not financial advice, it’s just me sharing what worked for us.
Why we’re moving to Japan
On New Year’s Eve 2019 we got married, and instead of gifts we asked for money toward our honeymoon. We were going to Japan to watch the Olympics. Then COVID happened and everything got canceled.
Fast forward to early 2027 and we’re finally going. Just not the way we planned. Instead of a two week trip, we’re moving there for six months to buy and renovate an akiya, which is what Japan calls its abandoned houses. There are roughly nine million of them.
Our goal is to have $100,000 saved by the time we leave. That covers six months of living there, buying the house, and renovating it. I have no idea if it’s enough. I’ll come back to that at the end.
The hard rule that we agreed to, and we applied it four separate times over nine years: if money shows up outside our normal paycheck, it never enters normal life. It goes straight to savings before we’ve had a chance to have an opinion about it.
1. We didn’t touch the honeymoon money
That wedding money has been sitting untouched since 2019. Six years, through a pandemic, a renovation, and two job changes.
Almost everybody gets a windfall at some point. A tax refund, a bonus, a gift, an inheritance, a raise, etc. The hard part usually isn’t getting the money. It’s leaving it alone. We were adamant about keeping the money our family and friends gifted us for our Japan honeymoon, earmarked towards that trip, no matter when it would be.
2. We wrote an actual budget
Not an app. Not a vibe. A real budget with a real number at the top of it.
The part that actually mattered was doing it together. We sat down and built it as a couple, which meant neither of us was the person policing the other one’s spending. If you and your partner only talk about money when something has already gone wrong, that’s the thing to fix first.
We now sit down on the first of every month to talk about the previous month’s spending and saving budget and make any adjustments for the next month. We treat this as a date night and it actually makes it fun and something we look forward to!
The question we ask before anything gets bought: is this a need or a want? Not because wants are bad, but because we decided what we want most is Japan. Everything else gets measured against that.
3. We automated our savings so we never saw it
This is the least interesting thing on the list and probably the most effective.
Money you never see is money you never have an opinion about. Willpower is a bad system. Friction is a good one. We set the transfers to happen automatically and then stopped thinking about them. Once the money goes out, it’s like it never existed in the first place.
Here’s exactly what leaves. We each max out a Roth IRA, and instead of doing it as one painful lump at the end of the year, we take the annual maximum and divide it by twelve so it goes out monthly like any other bill. On top of that we each put $100 a month into an investment account and $100 a month into the high-yield savings account.
I want to be precise about that last one, because it’s smaller than people expect. The Roth and the investment account are retirement money, not Japan money. The Japan fund gets $200 a month between the two of us on autopilot, and then every lump sum further down this list lands on top of it. The automation is not what built the $100,000. It’s what made sure we never went backwards while the lump sums did the heavy lifting.
4. We moved our savings somewhere that pays us
Our savings sits in a high-yield savings account, or HYSA. Right now it pays 3.3%, and it’s been as high as 4% in the time we’ve had it. A regular savings account at a big bank usually pays a fraction of that, which means money sitting still is quietly losing value to inflation.
There are many great options for high yield savings accounts, we use Wealthfront. If you open an account with my link, we both get a rate boost for three months. Yay!
5. We read one book that changed how we think about money
Before we read Quit Like a Millionaire by Kristy Shen and Bryce Leung, moving to Japan was a pipe dream. After, it was a spreadsheet and a plan. We not only set up a plan to save $100k for Japan, but we set up our retirement plan at the same time.
You can’t save toward a feeling. You can save toward a number. That’s the whole shift, and it’s the reason every other thing on this list worked, because suddenly all of it was pointed at something specific.
Shen and Leung are a married couple who ran the numbers on their own life and retired in their thirties. We’re not retiring (yet), and what we’re doing is a lot smaller than that, but the method transfers exactly: pick the number, work backward from it, and stop calling it someday. Their case that you can cut your spending without lowering your quality of life is the reason number eight on this list works, and it’s the part I’d hand to anyone who thinks saving has to feel like punishment. We actually listened to the audiobook on a road trip and immediately purchased a hard copy so we could refer back to it as we made our plan.
6. We sold one of our two cars
It sold for $14,500, and that went straight into the HYSA. But the sale price isn’t the part worth paying attention to.
The real win was everything that stopped going out every month. Insurance dropped $100 a month. Registration dropped $80 a year. Maintenance on that car went to zero. And our gas bill went to zero entirely, because the car we kept is electric.
Run those numbers on your own cars for a second. Do you need a car at all? Do you need multiple cars? Can you sell a car and buy a cheaper one to get rid of a car payment?
A one time sale is nice. Deleting recurring bills is even better, and it’s the thing that can really improve your budget.
7. We sold everything we didn’t need
Poshmark and Facebook Marketplace, mostly. It’s slow, it’s a little annoying, and you will spend a weekend photographing things nobody buys for three weeks. But it’s easy and the money adds up over time. Especially if you have a closet or garage full of things you don’t use or need.
There’s a second effect that’s harder to measure: once you’ve sold thirty things, you stop buying new ones. Nothing kills an impulse purchase like remembering what it takes to get rid of it later.
If you want to start, my Poshmark link below will give you a $10 credit. But remember, we’re here to sell, not to shop! 😉
8. We stopped raising our spending
This one did the heaviest lifting of anything on the list.
As our income grew over the years, we didn’t spend more. We saved more. We lived exactly the same way we had been living and banked the difference. No bigger house, no newer car, no upgraded anything. We don’t buy into the “Keeping up with the Joneses” thing. We live the way we want and we don’t care what anyone else thinks about it.
Here’s what that looked like in my business. In 2023, when I first started my business and I still had a full time job, it made $18,377 and I paid myself none of it. In 2025, after quitting my job and going all in on my business, it made $75,865, and I paid myself $2,000 a month. That was the least I could survive on, and choosing it was the entire point. The number that was growing and the number we lived on were never the same number.
Most people wait for a raise to start saving, and then the raise arrives and the life expands to match it. The raise isn’t the plan. Not spending the raise is the plan.
9. We use one credit card for everything and pay it off in full
This is the one people will argue with me about, and I understand why. Credit card debt is a huge problem and I’ll be the first to acknowledge that. However, if used correctly, they can be a helpful tool with a significant upside. There’s just one catch, you have to stick to your budget and live within your means so you can pay it off in full every month.
Every dollar we spend goes on one credit card, and it gets paid off in full every single month. We haven’t booked the flights to Japan yet, but they’ll run somewhere around $2,000 and we already have enough points to cover them, plus seven nights of hotels banked the same way. Our card has lots of other benefits too, most of them relating to travel.
There’s exactly one rule and it’s the only one that matters: never carry a balance. The second you carry a balance, the interest eats the points and you’ve lost. If you’re not certain you can pay it in full every month, this strategy isn’t for you, and there’s no shame in that. It’s the reason plenty of people are told to avoid credit cards entirely, and for most of them that’s good advice.
10. We did every renovation ourselves
Here’s the part people get wrong about DIY. It does not put money in your account. It’s money you don’t spend, and money you don’t spend isn’t money you make.
Until you sell. That’s where it pays off, and it paid off for us all at once.
Three examples with real numbers. Our guest bathroom renovations cost about $4,000 each in materials. A contractor would have been around $15,000 per bathroom. Painting the whole house cost us under $1,000 for paint, supplies, and a very tall ladder, and hiring it out would have run somewhere near $4,000. These are just a few of the projects we did, but the ones that moved the needle the most.
| Project | What we spent | Contractor estimate | Labor we didn’t pay |
|---|---|---|---|
| Guest bathroom | $4,000 | ~$15,000 | $11,000 |
| Master bathroom | $4,000 | ~$15,000 | $11,000 |
| Whole house paint | under $1,000 | ~$4,000 | $3,000 |
| Three projects | ~$9,000 | ~$34,000 | $25,000 |
Three projects out of twenty five, and the labor we didn’t pay for came to $25,000. The renovating isn’t the investment. The labor is, and most people hand it to somebody else.
I had a real estate agent go through all twenty five projects in our house and score each one the way a buyer would. If you want to know which DIY projects actually add value and which ones are a waste of a weekend, that’s all in the blog post linked below.
Where the biggest piece actually came from
We bought our house in 2017 for $187,000. We sold it in June 2026 for $377,000. That’s a $190,000 difference, and I want to show you what actually reached our bank account, because those two numbers are not the same thing.
| Sale price | $377,000.00 |
| Agent commissions (3% + 3%) | ($22,620.00) |
| Solar panel loan payoff | ($22,000.00) |
| Mortgage payoff and remaining closing costs | ($175,808.01) |
| What we walked away with | $156,571.99 |
One thing worth explaining, because the mortgage payoff line looks high for a house we’d owned for nine years. During COVID our mortgage went into forbearance, and afterward we took a modification with a lower interest rate that reset the loan and tacked on the missed payments during the pandemic. So we owned the house for nine years but only spent about five of them actually paying down principal, and early mortgage payments are almost entirely interest.
Which means almost none of that $190,000 came from paying down the mortgage. It came from two places only: what the market did, and what we did with our hands.
Of the $156,571.99, we invested $106,571.99 and put $50,000 into the HYSA for the Japan fund. So half of our $100,000 goal came out of one house.
I want to be straight about that, because it’s the part of our situation that is ours and not yours. If you rent, that half doesn’t transfer. The other half does, and it’s the half that took years and shows up in the nine things above. The house is our circumstance. The saving is the method.
And the method is the ten things above. I put all ten on one page with every link in one place, and I’ll send it to you.
What we got wrong
One mistake, and it took us an embarrassingly long time to see it.
We didn’t start investing soon enough. We were good at the not-spending part and bad at the where-does-it-go part, and I think a lot of people who consider themselves good with money have exactly that same gap.
I’ll also say the obvious thing: some of this was timing and luck. We bought a house in 2017 and sold it in 2026, and the market did part of the work. Two incomes helped. Pretending otherwise would be a lie.
Is $100,000 enough to move to Japan and renovate a house?
I genuinely don’t know yet, and I’m not going to pretend I do. Here’s the budget as it stands. We haven’t bought the house yet, so two of these lines are targets rather than facts.
| Six months of living, at $4,000 a month | $24,000 |
| The akiya itself (target) | $20,000 |
| The renovation (target) | $20,000 |
| Flights, visas, shipping, and contingency | $36,000 |
| Total | $100,000 |
Every one of those first three lines has a contingency built into it, because every single person who has renovated an old house in a foreign country told us the same thing about surprises.
And that last line is deliberately large. It’s the flights, the visas, the shipping, and a cushion, and if I had to bet on which part of this budget disappears first, it’s that one.
We fly out in early 2027. I’ll be sharing every number along the way, including the ones that go badly.
Frequently asked questions
How long have you been saving for this?
Seriously saving for about two years, and we’re not finished. Even though we set the actual number roughly two years ago, we’d been putting money away before that without a specific target attached to it. The honeymoon fund we’d been saving since our wedding in 2019. The long timeline is a feature, not a problem. It gave us a lot of chances to change our minds and we never did.
Do you need a high income to save $100,000?
No. Our income did grow over the years, but that isn’t what saved the money. What saved it was not spending the increases. The single biggest factor for us was keeping our lifestyle flat while our income went up, which is available to almost anyone whose income moves at all.
What is an akiya?
An akiya is an abandoned or vacant house in Japan. There are roughly nine million of them, largely because of an aging population and people moving to cities. Many are cheap to buy, and many need serious renovation, which is the part we’re actually looking forward to.
Is a high-yield savings account worth it for a big savings goal?
For us, yes. Ours pays 3.3% right now and has been as high as 4%, compared to a fraction of a percent at a traditional bank. For money you’re saving over several years toward a specific goal, the difference is real. Our honeymoon money (along with the rest of our savings) has been sitting in ours since 2019 and we’ve been consistently adding to it.
Does doing your own renovations actually make you money?
Not directly. DIY doesn’t put money in your account, it just means you don’t spend it, and that only turns into money when you sell. On our house, three projects saved about $25,000 in labor we’d otherwise have paid a contractor. That’s the entire argument for doing it yourself.
Should I use a credit card to save money?
Only if you pay it in full every single month, without exception. We put everything on one card, and it’s covering our flights to Japan and seven nights of hotels. If there’s any chance you’ll carry a balance, the interest will cost you more than the rewards are worth, and you’re better off not doing this one.
Want the $100K Plan?
I put all ten of these into the $100K Plan, a one page version you can keep with every link in one place. Or you can simply bookmark this page to come back to if you prefer.
If you’d rather start with the DIY side of this, here’s which DIY projects a realtor said actually add home value, and the beginner tools I’d buy first if you’re starting from nothing.
What’s coming next
I put $20,000 in that budget for the house and another $20,000 for the renovation, and I wrote target next to both because I’m honestly not sure those are real numbers yet. So I went and found out. Akiya 101 starts here next: what a free house in Japan actually costs once you add everything up, whether a foreigner can even buy one, the fees that never show up on the listing, and what I’m legally allowed to renovate myself once we’re there. Some of what I found changed our budget, and I’ll show you which parts.
Until next time,
Selene
