• Aceticon@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    I’m paying $5500 a year for a normal (about 80 m2) one bedroom appartment 10 minutes walk away from the center of a mid-sized Portuguese city about 150km from the capital Lisbon (granted, commuting to Lisbon would be about 1h 40m each way, but that’s something I don’t have to do).

    I’ve chosen to not even own a car because I can actually make that choice here and 15m walking commute to the Coworking space from were I work is actually important for my health (it’s not really poluted around here, certainly less than Lisbon and way less than London)

    It would be about 3x as much in the outskirts of Lisbon with a commute to Lisbon city center of about 30 - 45 minutes.

    And Portugal actually has a house price bubble (the same place would’ve been about $3200 a decade ago), though it’s especially bad around the two major cities and the touristic area on the southern coast.

    There’s apparently quite a number of Americans moving over here and working remotelly thanks to the country having a Digital Worker Visa system.

    I’ve actually lived in Amsterdam, London and Berlin and whilst the first two are very expensive (London is just silly), Berlin was actually not (about $10k for an unfurnished one bedroom appartment about 5 years ago) and it’s quite a nice place to live, though for those like me who are self-employed, to that adds the mandatory health insurance in Germany which about $400 per month. Oh, and you can also chose not to own a car over there because it’s cycling friendly, has great public transportation and there are also some pretty good car rental schemes.