Expenses in Austria

HISTORY:

• Expenses as a student
• Expeses as an employed

Expenses in Austria

For the big picture I would like to recommand my former articles about this theme.You can read this on my former blog page. Click on one of the articles in the left corder. The link will lead you to the chosen article. It is written in Hungarian, but with a few calculation you can translate it in your home country currency. You can find out how much money you need for living

as a student in Hungary,

as a novice engineer in Hungary,

as a not so novice engineer in Austria.

For the cost calculations I used the 1Money App recommended by my friend. It is a freeware Android software with some paid features. You can choose between 3 Months, 1 year and unlimited abbonements. I chose the first one, because I don´t want to make such calculations for a longer period of time. It consumes my time and energy. But it is a good and clever thing, if you know your exact expenses. With abbonement you can easily download a .csv file to your phone, or Google Drive account. I copied the data to notepad, then I imported the date with Excel. After breaking the text in columns I got a pretty good looking table for analysis.

More serious people can see the details here.

Excel-table XLSX: 1Money_kiertekelt

Statistic PDF: 1Money_stat

Excel-table PDF: 1Money_adatok

This is my most detailled cost calculation. The results:

• The foodprices are in Austria is similar to Hungary. If we look the same food categories, I think Austria is cheaper. Don´t forget: Hungary has one the highest taxes on the world (27%)!
• You won´t be a regular in eestaurants neither in Hungary, nor in Austria. Proportionally to the monthly income, Austria has cheaper prices.
• Because of the strict corona interventions my hobbies/freetime activities are almost completely free. Every event in the neighbour was deleted or postponed. Mountainbiking and climbing in the forest are mostly free. Bikeparks may have a fee. Photography is almost a free hobby too. However the analog photography is expensive. Instax photos cost a lot of money.
• The category of purchase includes the accomodation fee. You don´t really have a choice here. You can live alone, go to a WG (where multiple people live together) or you can try municipal housing (where the local government gives you – under the right circumstances – a flat, this is really popular in Vienna). The monthly fee for a flat is morelikely over 600 €. Vienna a bit more expensive than that.
  The territories to South of Vienna is pretty urbanised. You can not categorize them as villages, towns, cities etc. I was happy to be at a quiet place for a couple of months, but I really need some bustle. Controversary Vienna would be too expensive and too active for me.  I wanted to choose something between the two. To the purchase belongs fast everyting, which is not consumable and some luxurious things like:

I could not allow myself these luxurious products in Hungary. Or at least I would have needed a couple of months for each one.

• I rarely buy presents for other people. Sometimes I buy cinema ticket, food, drink, something for birthday, flower etc.
• My transport cost consists mostly of homerides (360-400 km from and to my hometown) and traveling on weekends. I was not pleased with it, thefore I use my bike for everyday shopping and for going to work.
• The health expenses are soap, dishwashing liquid, shampoo, WC-paper etc. You can not reduce this category.

Conclusion:

In the first couple of month I got rid of 950 € pro Month without any luxurious items. With them is the sum ~1300 €. How much money have I left in Hungarian area? Approxometly I have left an average monthly salary. I am not able to save the pre-expected 1000 € pro Month. The taxes has been reduced in August from 25% to 20%. That helps me a lot, because I change accomadtion. I think after a raising it is not impossible to save this money. This would mean that I save up 10x more money than I could save in Hungary.