. For instance, the fire insurance we have for our 90-square meter house pays out a maximum of ¥23 million for house and property in the case of a fire, but only a maximum of ¥3.4 million in the case of an earthquake that makes our house uninhabitable. Our yearly premium for both is ¥16,484. Of course, the homeowner can choose a more expensive plan that pays out more, but the quake benefits will always be limited.

Lovely Writing.

Have you considered purchasing a decent policy? You have opted for the bare-bones.

Decent policies tend to payout 50% of the housing cost if the structure is considered a write-off.

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I think the premiums are high for two reasons:

Even though we are low risk we pay high premiums because we are paying for floods and bushfires in other parts of Australia and the insurance companies are recouping their experiences and

Everything in Australia is expensive because they can charge more. It’s called the Australian tax.

And by the way there are no large trees around our house so they can’t fall on is and in over 30 years we’ve never experienced a hail storm.

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if my memory of weather events in Australia serves me , major damage is not just limited to designated disaster prone areas. There are hail storms that destroy things over entire neighbourhoods and the ever popular fallen trees that do significant damage to the buildings they fall on. I suspect the insurance companies collect the disaster statistics and calculate accordingly. That Australia is in many ways a more collective society then Japan show how little accuracy there is in national steriotypes.

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The insurance premium for your house seems to be very cheap compared to what we pay on our house in Australia.

We live in a flood free zone with the chance of a big earthquake being close to zero.

No cyclone danger and we’re are not in a bushfire zone either.

So in other words we live in a pretty safe area as far as natural disasters are concerned.

So moving on to insurance costs for our house. The premiums have skyrocketed over the recent pay and we pay around A$2500 a year or 250,000 yen.

In addition to that the state government slugs us with another couple of hundred dollars levy when we pay our real estate taxes for “Essential Services” or the fire levy.

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Water charges in Toronto: C$4.93/cubic metre (1000L), sewarage is included in that cost. There are no fixed fees unless you are connecting or disconnecting for new builds and construction. There are also no daily limits, and if you use an enormous quantity of water, you can get commercial rates that are cheaper than the above.

In rural areas where there is no sewarage/public water we pay about C$265 to have our 3800L tank emptied. There are no annual inspections or fees that need to be paid. Although we do buy a new lightbulb for the UV treatment system every year to keep any potential bacteria out of the well water and that costs roughly C$120.

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Water variable:

A$3.76 per 1000 litres for up to 440 litres per day. Over that it is $4.80 per 1000 litres.

That includes a variable sewerage change of 76 cents and 97 cents per 1000 litres respectively.

The fixed fees are A$87.90 per year for water and A$401.65 for sewerage.

Those are for homeowners .

If you rent and have a lease of (IIRC) two years or less the landlord has to pay the fixed fees and you only pay for the usage fees.

Of course the landlord includes those costs when determining tent for the property.

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Interesting article and once again it shows how different the situation two countries can be.

Here in Melbourne, Australia we pay a fixed fee for both water and sewerage plus a variable fee for the amount of water used for both water and then also applied for the variable sewerage fee.

On top of that the water bill also includes a fee for waterways and one more for Parks. These two fees are based on the value of the property.

I’ll find our last bill and post the costs to show what it costs here in Melbourne for the water and sewerage.

And another interesting fact is that even if you disconnect from the water system you will still be billed for the fixed fees for the above services.

And unlike Japan our population is increasing and increasing too fast. Over 1.1 million in the previous two years and mostly from immigration.

The government here wants to have more high density housing built near train stations and have designed certain areas as activity centres for this development to occur.

There are numerous questions about the ability of infrastructure to handle the proposed increase in housing units especially for sewerage

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Yes, we saw that. It’s obviously the case of a house that should have been torn down years ago, even if the initial problem was the foundation. That kind of embankment, called morido in Japanese, is common and older ones have poor drainage that undermines the house above it. During our house hunting days we often inspected homes built on morido that were perceptively unlevel. They’re usually built to compensate for some kind of geological situation, like a slope.

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