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The story
In response to the well-worn advice that “in your youth, you should prioritize experiences you can only have now over savings and investing,” a thread on 5ch saw young posters push back, arguing that “there’s no spare money to use in the first place.” The median income for full-time employees is said to be 3.84 million yen, translating to roughly 250,000 yen take-home per month — and some calculated that setting aside 100,000 yen a month for savings would leave living standards uncomfortably tight. On the other hand, there were voices favoring experience, arguing that “building earning power matters more for maximizing your assets” and “you won’t be able to enjoy fancy meat or trips abroad once you’re older.” Opinions split over whether to prioritize investing or experiences. The discussion further branched into a debate over whether index investing really never loses principal.
What people said
Just living expenses, basically.
The reason I'm saving is that I'm low-income, so it's to survive in case I get laid off or fall sick.
Since you can't count on the government or social security, self-defense is the only option.
If you feel like you can't count on the government, then saving money doesn't really mean anything either, does it?
Someone as steady/reliable as you isn't the type who gets fired.
Well, young people themselves keep saying they have no money.
It's because a small minority who go all-in on saving and can't afford to have fun get put on TV and it spreads…
Well, for young people, once you subtract living costs and investment money, there's barely anything left, right?
Living stingy and stacking up some pathetic little amount every month — the total you'll end up with is limited anyway.
I'm on the bottom rung with a disability hire (developmental disorder, or "hattasho" in net slang), so my earning power is hopeless — I'll just quietly save and invest instead.
But I think it's fine for able-bodied/neurotypical people to work on building their earning power.
Well, I think it's fine for people whose hobby is watching investing and the economy move, even if their income is low, and who do small-scale investing because of that.
So I'm not saying it's all wrong.
If someone genuinely enjoys a steady, frugal, invest-a-little life, they should go for it.
Just putting away 100,000 yen a month is enough to remove hardship in old age. Is that too hard for you?
This guy's a real looker, huh.
I'm not saying "it's too hard for me" — I'm saying it's too hard for most salaried workers.
The median income for full-time employees is 3.84 million yen.
Take-home on a 3.84 million yen salary is about 3.04 million, which works out to roughly 250,000 yen a month.
Put 100,000 of that into NISA every month and your living standard drops to about welfare level.
Even just 50,000 yen a month is better than not doing it at all.
It grows with the power of compounding.
Yeah, you definitely can't live extravagantly.
But as long as you don't overreach, a normal life still seems doable.
You don't actually know if it'll pay off and make old age easier lol.
You might die tomorrow,
or the economy could collapse and whatever you invested could go to zero.
All you're doing is saying "might, might."
That's just a personal opinion piece, not an argument.
If there's ever a crash bad enough to wipe out index fund assets, the world will have moved past capitalism as a system by that point.
You can imagine dying tomorrow, so why can't you imagine living to 120 thanks to medical advances?
You seem to be under a misunderstanding — there's no such thing as guaranteed "compound interest" in index investing.
It's just a convenient way of describing past growth rates and reinvested gains.
If anything, if a panic/crash hits, you could even end up below your principal.
"Losing your principal" is just talking about face value.
In a world where something that terrifying happens, do you really think the yen or dollar that Japan and the US print will still have value?
In a world like that, companies making weapons, food, and electricity would obviously hold more value than cash.
But whether that recovery takes 10 years or 30 years, only God knows.
The Nikkei average took 30 years to recover.
People who trash-talk investing always bring up the Nikkei average lol.
It's not even a market-cap-weighted index, it's a bogus one — and on top of that, it's just a single country's fund lol.
It's fine if you're investing with spare cash, but if you go all-in and suddenly need money, you'll have to sell at a loss.
You should keep at least 2-3 million yen on hand in cash or a fixed deposit.
Things like the raw scenery you see while traveling, but also music and novels (manga these days?), paintings, fashion, and so on.
I heard this here and there when I was young, from senior coworkers much older than me —
that your sensitivity dulls with age, and you stop being moved by things as easily.
But honestly, by your mid-20s I feel like that window's already starting to close.
That's a good point too.
Thanks ("sangatsu").
None of that costs much money anyway.
Once you're past 30 it gets rough.
Past 40 you basically can't eat it anymore.
Also, everyone talks about overseas travel, but leisure trips in general too — once your kids drag you around and you're forced to go along, it's genuinely rough.
Yeah, people always say to eat the fatty stuff while you can.
Thanks.
I do think I should've traveled abroad more as a student, but I don't find myself thinking "I wish I'd eaten more fatty karubi," so that's not really an experience I feel I'm missing out on.
Even when you're older, you can still enjoy tongue or fillet cuts just fine.
It might not always turn a profit, sure, but according to past data, holding for 15 years straight ("gachi hold") has a zero rate of ending up below principal.
Can't say for certain what happens going forward, but as long as it beats the bank's garbage interest rates, that's a win, so it's fine either way.
That's just because market conditions over the past 15 years happened to be good.
If a global depression hits, it'll crash hard, plain and simple.
At the very least, anything physically active is definitely more fun while you're young.
But isn't there also a chance that older people can enjoy it more because they have more knowledge and cultural background?
That's true for leisure activities, but sightseeing in the West is pretty much the same whether you're young or old, no?
Overseas travel doesn't actually cost that much.
You should just backpack while you're a student.
Background and Key Points of This Discussion
With the spread of the new NISA program, there’s a growing sense that “of course you invest” — yet the thread repeatedly pointed out that the median income for full-time employees is 3.84 million yen (roughly 250,000 yen take-home per month), making it genuinely tough to realistically set aside 100,000 yen a month for investing. The debate broadly split into two points. One was skepticism toward the “experience vs. savings” framing itself, with many arguing that young people simply don’t have much spare money to spend, which is why they’re saving in the first place. The other was over the merits of investing: against the claim that “looking at any 15-year window over the past 15 years, principal has never been lost,” came the counterargument that this is only because recent markets have been favorable — if a panic hits, that’s a different story, and the Nikkei average famously took 30 years to recover. One commonly misunderstood point: the “compounding” talked about in index investing isn’t a guaranteed increase — it’s simply a convenient way of describing the reinvestment of past gains. It’s also worth noting, as background for readers, that the clash between the savings camp and the investing camp starts from a shared problem — low disposable income — well before the question of whether there’s money left over for “experiences” even comes into play.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Nandemo Jikkyo G) thread “A mysterious faction claims ‘In your youth, prioritize experiences you can only have now over savings and investing!’ — really?“.
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