The Cost of Living / Der Lebensstandard

Europe gets a bad wrap when it comes to cost of living. For some reason people think Europe is expensive. Perhaps it's because the exchange rate makes prices look different. Perhaps it's because there really aren't deep discount chains that sell cheap goods from China like Target and Walmart. Perhaps it's because when people come to Europe they are looking to buy American name-brand goods and stay in American chain hotels which do cost a lot and lack the character and culture that Europe is all about. After ten months in Europe, I would have to say that living here is actually cheaper than living in the United States. Seriously.

The health insurance thing really has me going, comparing here with there, and what costs what. We've gotten more information about the insurance plan (thanks everyone for your detailed analyses and ground work) and have learned that even if our doctors were in the Oxford network, we wouldn't want to choose the cheaper HMO network plan anyway. Why? Because the cheaper plan only covers 80% of hospitalizations. Now we're not planning on having to be hospitalized, but those costs add up quickly should we be unlucky. So, we're left with the "buy up" plan which has a hefty deductible, hefty copays, and a starter price tag that is 16 times more expensive than what we pay here for more comprehensive coverage that has no additional costs.

Moving on from there, I land at child care. Nikolas' kindergarten costs us $120 per month for a half day program. If he were to stay all day, it would add only $25 to the bill. Now we have opted for the home-cooked lunch plan which costs an extra $70 a month, an unnecessary luxury, but one that we've all enjoyed very much. In New Jersey next year, Nikolas will be enrolled in a half day pre-kindergarten program. His child care center is approved by the National Association for the Education of Young Children so it is a good program, but price-wise it lies somewhere in the mid-range for the area. It costs PER WEEK approximately what we pay here per month including the home-cooked meal.

On to tennis. Nikolas has thrived at the Salzburg Tennis Club kids' club. It has been my favorite experience in Salzburg because Herr Reiter and Herr Mandl are fantastic with kids and the advertised "fun with tennis" is really great fun. Sparkasse Bank sponsors/subsidizes the kids' club. It's ingenious really. For a small investment on their part, they hand out Sparkasse t-shirts and baseball caps and bags, and suddenly they are advertising themselves all over the city. What it means for us is that a twelve week session of hour-long "lessons" costs us $64. I've been researching an equivalent sort of program for when we head back to New Jersey and there are a handful to choose from, all costing the same. For a fourteen week session of 45-minute "lessons" (which actually puts you at 90 minutes less playing time per session than in Salzburg), you pay $230!

Food. Quite frankly, food here is cheaper than at home. Produce is fresher and sometimes seems too cheap to be possible. You can buy a pound of strawberries for $1.20 and a pound of grapes for $1.00. Two pounds of carrots might cost you $0.50, and 4 pounds of potatoes or 4 pounds of onions will run you somewhere around $0.90 a bag. Bakery-fresh rolls cost 40 to 50 cents each in New Jersey, but here you can buy still-warm-from-the-oven rolls for 23 cents a piece. You have to really try hard to buy a bottle of really tasty wine that costs more that $4.00 and for a large half liter (17 fl oz) bottle of micro-brew quality beer from breweries that have been making beer since the fourteen and fifteen hundreds, you pay less that a dollar.

College. Shortly after Nikolas was born, we started putting money into a college savings account. The account is linked with over 200 private colleges and you "lock in" at today's tuition rates. We've almost paid for a year's tuition, and should tuition be twice as much when Nikolas is ready for college, it won't cost us a penny more. It's a plan that's based on a lot of assumptions. It assumes that Nikolas will want to go to college. It assumes that he'll want to go to one of the colleges on the list, and that he'll get accepted at one of them. It assumes that he won't get an amazing scholarship and so will need to pay tuition. If any of those assumptions is false, we will get back what we've paid in, but nothing more. It seems silly that we need to consider college costs from the moment a child is born, but in the US, I think that is a reality for many people. Here, parents don't need to worry about where the money for college is going to come from because if a student does well in school and wants to go to college, then they register and go. For free. Even for international students, who have to pay fees, college is a bargain and not something you need to spend a lifetime saving for.

Lastly, travel. We have done a lot of traveling this year. We've seen amazing things and stayed in amazing places, and none of it has been particularly expensive. There are an abundance of high quality low cost airlines that fly all over Europe. The train system is efficient, clean, and well priced. Small family-run hotels offering outstanding accommodation at decent prices are the norm. Travel agents offer package holidays that are tremendous value for money, and make renting a house/cabin on the Jersey Shore or at a lake in Maine seem like a truly bad deal. People here travel a lot, because it is so affordable, and I wish we had more time to head off to the beaches of Croatia and Hungary and Italy this summer!

I guess I am surprised that Europe is so affordable when you start breaking things down. We've been living with less than half of our usual income this year, and it really hasn't been all that hard. There has been nothing that we haven't done because it costs too much. Well, come to think of it, we did skip Windsor Castle in England, but that was more a matter of principle rather than really not being able to afford it. We came with a travel savings account that we had built up so that we'd be able to do the traveling that we wanted to do without having to worry about whether we had the money for it or not, and that account is still pretty much in tact even though the year is almost over. While we've taken money out, we've also been able to save some money and put it back into the account. That truly amazes me. In some ways I feel like we've been living a social experiment: can we survive and thrive in Europe on a limited income? The answer is a resounding yes. I'm not at all confident that we could have had a parallel experience in the US. America is just too expensive!