Our 2023 expenses

Our first full year in Portugal

Since 2023 was the first calendar year we’d spent entirely in Portugal, we were eager to track our expenses. To that end, we asked for receipts often, logged every expenditure in a spreadsheet, carefully reconciled that spreadsheet to our bank statement each month, and had a great deal of fun with pivot tables.

Receipts here can be … large. They take up space. We had a lot of them.

Before we moved we also tracked our expenses, just a bit more loosely. While we’d gone through some years where we’d carefully logged each receipt, we mostly just adding our top line numbers (credit card & utility bills and mortgage payments usually; cash was accounted for by ATM withdrawals). We’ve been tracking those numbers since July, 1999.¹ So we’re pretty confident in saying that from 2019 - 2021, our last three full years in St. Louis, we spent approximately $55,000 each year.

Based on that, we set our budget for Portugal at 5.000 € per month - 60.000 € per year.² We thought that would allow us some room for fun and still be manageable in retirement.

So how much did we spend in 2023?

53.912 €

If we just left it at that and walked away, we’d call it a win. But doing so would hide an interesting dichotomy in the numbers.

2023 was a big year for us. We bought an apartment in Lisbon, moving from our furnished rental apartment to our completely empty new home. The result is that, financially speaking, the first half of the year looks very different from the second half.

This is mostly because we:

• paid rent (1.150 € / month) on the apartment for January through April

• had a significant medical expense that was not covered by insurance

• needed a lot of furniture.

For the most part, all of that was accomplished by the end of July.

As a result, the last five months of 2023 looked quite different from the first seven³. So we decided to wait until the end of January to see six months’ worth of our new “post settled in” expenses.

Here’s how those six months broke down for us:

For this post, we’ve calculated the last half of the year to be August, 2023 - January, 2024. We wanted time to accumulate six months’ worth of data.

If we double these totals, we would spend 35.552 €
over a 12 month span.

We recommend you check out this blog post for a look at recent price comparisons of specific items in the US and Portugal.

Can I Afford Portugal?

Obviously, your expenditures will look different from ours. But hopefully this gives you a sense of what one couple is spending in one of the most expensive places to live in Portugal.

That’s all for now.

Love from Lisbon,

Amy & Scott

1. What can we say, we’re data geeks.

2. You’ll notice that the currency has changed from dollars to euros. We live in in Europe now. In our minds, it’s basically a 1:1 exchange but that’s not really true. Generally, while we’ve been here, a dollar has been worth around .90 euros (at the time of this writing, it’s 0.9189 euros). Which means we lose money every time we take dollars from the US and turn them into the currency we spend here every day. Eight or ten percent of our money disappearing into the ether is not insignificant and we shouldn’t just hand wave it away, but for the purposes of this post, that’s exactly what we’re doing.

3. which were a lot like our first six months here