roommate

The original plan was for Miles to cover his portion of our apartment rent even after leaving, but for various reasons, I’ve decided to just cover it myself. It’s quite pricey for just an individual in Tokyo to cover, so I started passively looking for roommates. I’ve found Facebook is still the best method to reach large groups of relevant people, but unfortunately, some of the Facebook groups are just flooded with (what really seems like sketchy) realtors spamming their apartment listings. I actually tried making a post in one of the groups, but I guess it never got approved, so instead I’ve resorted to browsing the pages for people looking for apartments. I did a few cold reach-outs, but I’ve been needing to carefully evaluate inviting a random person to live in my apartment vs. the monetary savings it comes with. I’ve even considered just fully subletting the apartment since sharing a place is not popular or necessarily ideal for most people, but finding a new place to live isn’t that trivial either (see: original apartment hunt blog posts), and my apartment is really quite nice. Also, I’m technically not allowed to sublet my apartment.

My latest cold reach-out seemed to be the most successful so far. Someone was looking for a 1-year fully-furnished apartment, and I honestly felt his pain because if you don’t plan on living in Japan for a while, it feels like such a pain and a waste to have to do the whole song and dance of finding an apartment, paying the huge upfront costs, and buying furniture. Also, the location seemed pretty ideal given his post. He toured the apartment this morning and seemed to be interested, but it is quite expensive, especially for a shared place. I also have to consider if the cost savings is worth sharing the apartment for me too. But I do really like the idea of not letting all the effort Miles and I put into furnishing the apartment go to waste, and my pitch was that I’d move out at some point to find my own smaller place eventually. I’ll have to think about a split that seems worth it to me (and of course the plan might fall through anyways).