The first year after leaving a steady income job for freelance or part-time work is always a challenge because you have to pay local taxes and national health insurance for the previous year of regular income. You have to live off your hump so it’s important to plan ahead and make every yen count.
The biggest pain for me is paying local taxes and national health insurance. Like everybody else these days, I want to earn reward points on the money I spend and use a credit card as much as possible. Suginami Ward has had a credit card payment option in place since 2021 but the transaction fees are pretty steep:
My monthly National Insurance payment is in the ¥50,000 category, quarterly local taxes in the ¥110 per ¥10,000 category. I like the idea of paying with my VIEW card to earn JRE POINT, but the annual extra cost of paying credit card transaction fees adds about ¥8,000 to my taxes and wipes out the reward points. Not cost effective. My partner tried using the dBarai tax payment option but it required registering a bank account and, of course, there were no reward points when paying taxes.
Fortunately there is a way to earn JRE POINT without transaction fees: pay with Apple Pay nanaco. Wait what? Yes, JRE POINT not nanaco points. At 7-11 you can pay taxes, etc., with cash or nanaco. There are no reward points when using the nanaco option, but you can earn a 0.5% JRE POINT return when recharging Apple Pay nanaco with a VIEW card. It works like this, first of all you cannot use a VISA brand card to add money to Apple Pay nanaco. For VIEW card users this means having a JCB or Mastercard branded VIEW. The second point is paying attention to Apple Pay nanaco recharge limits. The nanaco balance limit is ¥50,000 but Apple Pay nanaco recharge has a daily ¥30,000 limit. Fill the nanaco card over 2 days. If your tax payment is more than 50,000, pay using multiple Apple Pay nanaco cards.
Paying taxes with Apple Pay nanaco is a completely manual process compared to paying with your bank account, but I earn 250 JRE POINT every time I fill the card to the limit and there’s no transaction fee. And because I use a BIC CAMERA VIEW card, I get 250 BIC CAMERA points too. Small stuff, but every bit helps when money is tight.
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