groceries

Starter Kitchen

Stocking your Starter Kitchen on a Budget

Melissa

Last week, when I posted about how to budget when you don’t know your expenses, a reader asked me how I get my grocery costs so low.  I was able to maintain a 65 euro a month grocery budget for a year in Vitoria-Gasteiz of the Spanish Basque Country. Part of this was due to cost sharing with my partner. However, even when I shopped on my own in Huelva, Andalusia, I still averaged a budget of about 80 euros a month. How? The key here is in having a well stocked kitchen. Let’s build your starter kitchen.

What is a Starter Kitchen?

Cooking at home is one of the best ways to save money when you’re on a tight budget. But what do you do when you’re starting from scratch? Let’s say you’ve just moved to a new city. Your starter kitchen is all of the food products you will need to buy to have a functioning kitchen. Before we dive deeper into building your starter kitchen, let’s take a look at what some of my frequent purchases are and what they cost.

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Living Expenses in Spain

Living Expenses in Spain

Melissa

Research Your Living Expenses

Before moving to Spain  to teach English with the Auxiliares de Conversacion program, I did a lot of research to try to figure out what my living expenses would be. There are some really great resources with sample budgets from different cities, like this series by COMO Consulting. Obviously, there won’t be information for every possible city. Neither of my two cities (Huelva, Andalusia and Vitoria-Gasteiz, Basque Country) were included, but you can still use them as a benchmark to get a pretty good idea.

Something to keep in mind when looking at other people’s living expenses is that even though you see WHAT they spend, you don’t often get a glimpse into HOW they spend. That is what I intend to do with this post. I’m going to use examples of my living expenses from Huelva and from Vitoria-Gasteiz, but the techniques for cutting costs should be applicable in any city.

MY LIVING EXPENSES

Rent: 225

Groceries: 65

Phone: 10

Electricity: 25

Internet: 16

TOTAL: 341 euros

budeting for living expenses abroad
Core Living Expenses: Make a list and check it twice.

 

This is my share of required monthly living expenses in northern Spain. Everything else is variable. If you can keep your core living expenses at around half of your income, you’ll have a lot more flexibility for some of the other things you’d like to do, such as traveling, shopping, and saving.

But how do you keep your expenses so low? The cost of living difference does most of the work for you. The north of Spain is considered an expensive region in comparison to other communities in Spain, but with a little planning, you can make it work. Here is a breakdown of my living expenses in the north and the south, and how different choices affect the price.

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