How much is a month living in California?

Perhaps this post should start with an acquaintance :) This is to make it clear who the costs are. We are a family of two working adults, one of which (it's me) works part-time. In the small town of Silicon Valley, a 30-minute drive from San Francisco, we rent a studio apartment of almost 60 square meters.

We each have a car, since it is simply unrealistic to travel by public transport in our area, especially considering the fact that we work and live in different cities. On weekdays, we cook ourselves and eat mainly at home. We go to the grocery store once a week.

I will tell you in detail about our spending in May - it was a normal month, and I think that in general these expenses will make it clear what’s what.

So, in our budget there are several basic categories of expenses and related. Let's start with the basic, so to speak, life support.

A few comments on the tablet:

1. We pay for electricity on the meter, and this amount varies from month to month, depending on how often we turn on the heating. By the way, the year of life in California convinced me that its climate is slightly overestimated relative to the heat. Here we (residents of the State) actively use heating and wool socks, no matter how epic it sounds :)

2. As for car insurance, for a conditional reference, we can say that we have insurance a la CASCO + CTP - for one car and CTP - for the second.

3. About mobile communications. The amount of $ 70 includes the payment of direct mobile communications - $ 40 and $ 30 - payment of an interest-free loan for a mobile phone. The system for buying phones in America was covered by me in a separate post :)

4. The Internet. The speed at our tariff is 25 Mbps.

5. The cost of our products has increased compared to last year, when we fit in the amount of $ 500-550. You can find out prices for the products of last summer by reading this post, I won’t say that something has changed much. We stock up on products once a week. We have four main stores where we go. In one we buy meat, in the other - fruits, in the third - vegetables, in the fourth - everything else. No, this is not a bit :)

A $ 80 grocery basket in one of the stores might look like this:

6. Yoga I do three times a week individually with a trainer. One lesson costs $ 25.

7. About washing. Just in May, we carried out monitoring of apartments for rent, as a result of which we found out that the cost of an apartment with a washing machine and dryer is higher by about $ 150 per month than apartments without them (as you remember, mostly apartments are rented without a washing machine). It just so happens that we wash once a month. Frankly, if it were not for the budget, I myself would not have believed it. Usually, we start two cars at a time - with color and white, or black linen. Since industrial type washing machines are installed in the laundry room, at least one set of bed linen, towels and all our things fit in them perfectly :) And no, we don’t go dirty. And yes, we have enough clothes for a month :)

Now we turn to the optional categories of expenses.

Comments:

1. Outside the house, we usually eat on weekends and on trips. The rest of the time we prefer home-cooked food, which we cook together with Ruslan. A little about prices in general. For example, dinner at a sushi restaurant with double Philadelphia and single California costs about $ 15-20, depending on whether you take drinks or not. Dinner at a typical restaurant costs approximately $ 30-45 - these are two main dishes and drinks.

2. In May, we traveled overnight once and rented a hotel for two nights for $ 167.

3. As for entertainment. For example, we went to an art party ($ 90), went sport fishing ($ 140) and rode boats along the bay in San Francisco ($ 70). Total bought for $ 300.

4. And after the art party, we were actively interested in drawing, and as a result, easels, large and small canvases, various brushes, acrylic and oil paints settled in our house - all these purchases took $ 140.

Total in May we spent: $ 5264

For mandatory expenses - $ 4236

For companions - $ 1,028