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by vineyardmike
1194 days ago
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> Is there something I'm missing? Is rent in the valley $80k a year or some bizarro world number? Kinda yea. The average rent in the bay is around $3500, but for a house that is big enough for a family (eg. 3br, garage, etc) you're probably north of $6k. Don't forget, in America, you have to consider healthcare and other costs that may not be priced equally in Norway. The bay also has more expensive food, gas, and other daily expenses etc than the much of the rest of the US. For example, I pay ~5k a month for a 2Br unit with a garage, at roughly 1k sqft. |
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And that's it. Overnight admissions to more or less any health institution is completely free of charge(dental care is a whole other ballgame though, it's not socialised very much yet for adults, though slowly getting there). Similarly if I had kids, future tuition would not be an issue since Norwegian universities don't have tuition.
Thinking about it more it wouldn't be possible for me to live as frugally as I do in the US. Not without sacrificing health care.
To put my frugality in context:
Rent is ~$1K/mo(including electricity and fiber internet), which is about 60% of my income(or rather, 60% of 1/12 of what I earned total last year after taxes. It's complicated since I only take short-term consultancies through friends if they look fun. Most of the time I don't work, except on passion projects). That rent gets me a ~50sq. meter basement apartment on the outskirts of oslo, right on the edge of a beautiful river valley in an affluent neighbourhood. Apartment is nice, the juxtaposition of suburb and wilderness is ideal for my outside cat, who has a cat flap and is almost entirely independent if I fill his bowls once or twice a day. I still manage to afford good pet insurance, and a little saving headroom which I split 50/50 into a rainy day fund and fairly risky(but tiny amounts, so it doesn't feel so scary), cheap stocks. 4x so far. I save half my stock returns and reinvest the rest.
I buy dry foods in bulk, perishables at a discount. My annual transportation budget is about $300(public or legs only).
I guess you could say if SVers are in a high cost, high income bubble, I exist in the opposite cut every cent because I like the challenge and I hate working bubble. So I get pretty flabbergasted sometimes when exposed to the numbers floating around the SV bubble.
Mind you Oslo is the most expensive part of Norway in terms of property; I could go rural and probably decimate my rent but I'm too urban for that.