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3000 Euro,too. If you dont spent more than 1000 Eur per Month on rent. Enough for a nice, but not very luxury life. Economy class - not Business Class. Mallorca or Turkey - not Maledives or USA, Steaks - no Lobster, Opel or Ford - not Mercedes or BMW, ..... ;-)
M - Germany
I don't have a mortgage anymore, no rent , (I bought my flat 16 years ago), and I don't need a car-live in town- (rent it when I need it, 3 weeks in the summer, there are cheap rentals on the Web). I pay only 51€/month for SS. And yes I am able to travel to the USA-not the Maldives, for sure, but I'm not interested, anyway!
Family of three in Seoul, South Korea. We need 300 dollars a month to be happy, that is roof over our head, food on the table, and water to drink. We do other things to make ourselves happy that don't cost money.
Korea has a unique housing lease system where renters can deposit 50 percent of a property's value and live rent free for the term of the lease. After completion, the renter gets 100 percent of their deposit back. With this system, if you have about 100,000 dollars in the bank, you'd never need to pay rent or have a mortgage in Seoul, the figure is about 50,000 outside the city.
I just saw a Norwegian documentary about poverty in Norway. One of the persons interviewed was a 42 year old (semi) disabled woman with a 15-16 year old daughter. She received around $3,500 in welfare from the government every month. She described herself as poor. Yes, it's expensive in Norway but $3,500 should be enough to make a decent living for two even here.
In Australia any non home owning (rent paying) family of two adults and two children earning less than $750 US/AU per week is officiially classed as living in poverty. To live comforably i suppose you would as a conserative estimate have to increase that amount by 50% which would comes to around $5000 a month for a family of four. Terrible i know!
I'll need about 350.000 francs/year (about 365k$/year) in Switzerland or 200.000 euros/year (about 280k$/year)in Romania. This will be enough to live an upper middle class life. I do well with 1/3 of it too but I don't feel comfortable.
Romania is an expensive country! The rents are almost as in Germany (in fact I payed the same money when I lived in Germany (8 years ago)). The food is very expensive (but is very good also(just to give you an example the milk is 2 times more expensive (I drink a lot of milk)). I really don't know what's cheaper in Romania than in West.(the clubs/bars and the restaurants are cheaper but not that cheap) During the housing bubble the homes in Romania were as expensive as in Paris.
I really don't know how most people survive (probably because they own their homes don't have some expenses but they live paycheck to paycheck).
Some things are even more expensive than in Western Europe (like clothes).
I just saw a Norwegian documentary about poverty in Norway. One of the persons interviewed was a 42 year old (semi) disabled woman with a 15-16 year old daughter. She received around $3,500 in welfare from the government every month. She described herself as poor. Yes, it's expensive in Norway but $3,500 should be enough to make a decent living for two even here.
The word "poor" is understood differently by different people. Some places they just define the lowest-earning 10 % or whatever as poor. (So they'll always have a poverty rate of 10 %)
Note that much of the welfare the woman recieves will be to insure that her daugthter is not disadvantaged by her mothers life situation. If the daughter as a result grows up to be a normal taxpayer, the goverment is making a monstrous amount of money from their investment.
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