If I had a million dollars

Our expenses so far (48)

One of the biggest questions we had was do we have enough money to retire? We did all the calculators available online, read all the articles about when it’s ok to retire early. We know we are fairly frugal (ok, one of us is downright cheap). We also knew that we wanted to not live on rice and beans. We wanted enough that we could do some traveling, go out to dinner when we wanted, that sort of thing.

One thing that helped us retire at 54 and 51 was the fact that we did not raise children. The other thing was that for the first ten years of our marriage we lived like paupers. We had a 15 year mortgage and our anniversary dinner was the Burger King drive-through, and we followed strict budgeting. The FIRE folks would have approved heartily, we’re sure.

For the next ten+ years of our marriage we loosened it a bit, and one of us was not able to work. It was an awesome, fulfilling life, that was a lot of refried beans and red beans and rice. One of us is a pretty good cook, and those are hard to get tired of!

We were living in one of the least expensive areas of the country, so we weren’t sure what that would translate to living somewhere else.

We knew that for us to retire, it meant that we’d have to move to a place where we could afford the health care. Portugal checked that box, along with a lot of others. Of course, you never really know if it matches up to your expectations until you are living there.

Once the madness of arriving here and buying this and that to make the apartment work for us was over, we started tracking every expenditure, cash and debit card. We now have four months’ worth of expense data to share. We started out hoping to be able to spend less than 5.000€ a month.

Let’s see how that actually worked out. These are our average costs per month broken out by category:

Rent: 1.150€, with the exception of the month where we paid for a regular-sized refrigerator instead of a dorm one, and then the amount was taken off our rent.

Utilities: 147,98€. Electricity (55-56€), phone, internet, and water.

Medical: 935,74€. For those who have been following us for a while, you know we’ve had the …. pleasure of engaging with the medical system here more than most, and right from the get-go. Without our SNS number, we only have the private system available to us, and this is all without insurance. In the US, we expect this number would be much higher. It also includes three months’ of health insurance premiums (220,96€ for quite good coverage). Our 90-day waiting period for coverage to start ended December 1, though pre-existing conditions won’t be covered until September 2023.

Transportation: 80.72€. Metro/bus plus uber/bolt/taxi.

Food: 571,22€. 214,95€ dining out and 356,63€ groceries.

Travel: 622,67€. Ok, we did say we wanted to travel. This was two trips to the US for Visa stuff and one trip to Porto for our SEF interviews.

Home Stuff: 229,42€. Decor, stuff for cooking and baking, office supplies.

Portuguese Lessons: 149,75€.

Clothes: 22,67€.

Dog: 109,70€. Includes, foot, vet, and items like toys/mats.

Entertainment: 44,60€.

Gifts/donations: 44,05€.

Health & Beauty: 38,73€.

Bank/currency exchange Fees: 9,74€. It’s hard to get away from bank fees here.

GRAND TOTAL: 4.281,43€ per month. One month we had to fly to the US to take care of Visa issues. One month we just laid in bed with Covid and didn’t eat much.

Some things to consider:
We are living in a nice T1 that is small but in a central part of Lisbon.
We don’t go out to eat as often as most people are likely to.

If you have any questions, put them in the comments and we’ll do our best to answer them.

That’s all for now.

Love from Lisbon,

Scott & Amy