How much does it cost to live in Spain?(Real bills and monthly expenses)

My name is Jo Asprey. I'm a Spanish tutor and a YouTuber and in today's video I'm going to show you absolutely everything you need to know about the cost of living in Spain. I'll show you all my bills, I'll take you into a typical restaurant and you can see what we eat and I'll take you shopping with me into Mercadona and give you all this information so you can work out how much it Before we look at the utility costs I'm going to tell you a bit about myself just to put this video in context. Me and my husband Rob are still British citizens. We're both still working. Now that I'm teaching Spanish online to beginners and filming and editing the videos I'm out here for a few weeks at a time and Rob is to-ing and fro-ing. We don't have to pay any money for our house because we bought it outright so we don't have any rental costs. However I am going to show you briefly a quick look at the town of Calasparra which is in Murcia which is the next province to where we live here in Albacete province and I'm going to ask one of my Spanish friends typical costs for rental in her town. Right then first of all here is a screenshot of our water bill. We pay this amount twice a year however we are non-residents so I Joe I'm here about four and a half months of the year and Rob is here for about half of that time. So then if we were here for more time obviously that cost would go up. You've just seen our IBI or council tax bill that's for the entire year. Also we have to pay non-residents tax that is 212 euros per year. I will show you all of our other bills later in the video as well as a total but now we're going to see an average lunchtime meal in the town of Ayin which is quite close to our house. Well the waitress has just brought our food and so let's have a look at what we've got. Cod does look really good. So we looked at the menu but we just sort of asked if we could have something different. So I've got cod a la plancha with some verduras and David just asked for chicken breast also a la plancha with some patatas and verduras. Well that looks absolutely gorgeous doesn't it. I didn't want dessert because I'm full up for my very large piece of cod but that looks absolutely wonderful. We're going to a Mercadona shop and you can watch me buy a typical week's food shopping and I will show you prices of the main staples so you can work out how much your typical grocery shop would cost here in Spain. Right let's start with something everyone loves a good old pizza. Right so these are fresh ones and you can see they're ranging in price from 250 euros to 90. Okay oh 340 down there. Okay now I'm not buying a pizza today but I am looking for some pasta. Pasta. Oh super look at that that's exactly what I want. Ricotta y espinacas. Lovely and that's 190. Anyway I'm not going to show you the price of every single thing I buy because you can see my shopping list uh not my shopping list my receipt at the end. Let's just look at let's have a look at these roast chicken. They're all priced individually. Well you could get a lovely one from the market or you could pay look seven euros 27 for one of those. Okay let's go look at fresh meat now. All right here we go so you can buy whole chicken breasts there so that is six euros a kilo that seems pretty good. Chicken breast fillets how much are they? Oh they're different prices aren't they? So that's eight euros a kilo. Chicken thighs skin on they're 555 a kilo and a whole chicken price per kilo is 350. So there's some chickens. Wings there if you like wings they're whole wings. Okay so that's chicken but I'm looking for some mince beef. Some mince beef. I don't want cerdo which is pork. I want don't want bacuno cerdo which is a mixture of beef and pork. I want bacuno. See okay 500 grams. How much is that? So 500 grams of mince beef and here they don't have different uh fat contents. So I am just going to buy this. Right so there we go. So if you wanted to um if you wanted pork instead look that's very good that's 275. That's some burgers. Different burgers. Okay there's some more pork. Let's have a look at the sausages. How much are they? Chorizo. Very important if you're coming to Spain you might want some of that. You might want morcilla which is a sort of a bit like black pudding. So eggs. I've got three eggs left because I bought six last week so I'm not buying any eggs today but there you go you could buy 12 for 5 euro 60. Cooked eggs if you like them. Let's look at pastries now. Pastries. Okay right how much is olive oil then at the moment? I like to buy it in glass bottles. I haven't got I don't need to buy any at the moment because I've got some at home. Okay so you could buy a big one 14.55 for three litres. Okay oh very very important for some people anyway not for me because I can't stand it. Ketchup. Oh my goodness yogurt dressing how revolting is that? Okay mayonesa. How much is that? Oh we don't know. Oh there we go mayonesa 130. Anyway right let's just go and look at some something very important. Right if you've watched any of my previous videos or any of our previous videos I should say you might know that I like a nice cake. I'm not buying any cakes from here today because I've got my eye on a very nice donut I'm going to stop and get on the way home in Deer and also Rob's not with me at the moment but there we go. How much would a cheesecake be? Cheesecake 10 euros or that one eight euros. Cookies and cream which one is that? I'm trying to look and see how much the very large one is at the back but I can't work out which price is that one. Oh it might be this. Tarta Selva Negra says 1.9 kilos so yes it must be that. So that rather enormous cake at the back there 14.90. Now if you've been to Mercadona before you might know that they do wonderful pies. So what's this then? Chicken and mushrooms. How much is that? 3.65. Meat pie and tuna pie. Before I went to Mercadona I actually went to the local market because I thought I'd be saving money and also wanted to help support local people. Hello, can you give me 500 grams of tangerines please? Nothing else, thank you. How much is it? 1.25. Okay, thank you very much. It's the day after my Mercadona trip and my plan was originally that as soon as I got back from the supermarket I was going to unload everything and film it straight away. Unfortunately that's not what happened because as I was driving home it started to absolutely chuck it down and when I pulled into my drive and got out I got absolutely soaked. I dropped the potatoes, the potatoes rolled along the drive and the water was coming into the living room and I got really soaked. So obviously that didn't matter but it just made me think, oh blimey, it'll have to wait till the morning. So this is the morning and let's have a look now at what I got from the supermarket and what I got from the market. I bought yesterday then at the market and at Mercadona and I must say I'm going to do this quite quickly because it's making me feel hungry looking at all this food. Okay, so at the market then I bought three potatoes and two bananas from one store. I wanted to sort of spread out my purchases going to a few different stores and you can see, well I actually didn't keep the receipt for the bananas and potatoes but I counted my chains because I gave a five euro piece and that's what they cost. Then I went to buy some mandarins from another store. I actually bought five. They came to one euro twenty seven and I ate three when I got in the car to drive home so that's why there's only two left. Now this here was a bit of a surprise. Now because I was filming I wasn't really concentrating on the price of these peppers. So I asked for a kilo of apples. So I've got these apples and then I also asked for three red peppers because I'm going to make a chili with the mince beef. What I didn't realize was how much each one weighs. They're really heavy and so those red peppers cost four euros sixty nine. Wow, I wish I'd known they were going to cost that much because I would only have bought two. Anyway, they look nice and ripe. So the apples were two euros fourteen. Before I went to because I like this cheese and that came to eleven seventy nine. Well, I do really want to stress that this is not a typical week shopping for me because I've got pasta, I've got rice, I've got salt, sugar, flour, spices, all that sort of stuff. I did actually realize when I got home I didn't buy Before we look at our other bills we'll have a quick look at rental costs in the town of Calasbarra. This is a two-bed property listed for 540 euros a month and then this is a three-bed property just outside nearby Caravaca de la Cruz which is 500 euros a month. This was the cheapest petrol diesel we found at the time of filming but did you know you can see petrol prices on Google Maps? So then I've showed you shopping costs, some eating out costs and petrol and now I'm going to show you a list of what it would cost to run this house for a year. It's difficult to give you an exact figure for electricity costs so we'll work it out on a cost of one person living here for a year and we're just going to estimate that as I've said before at approximately 50 euros a month so that is around 600 euros per year for electricity. If you were living here all year you wouldn't have to pay non-residence tax because you would need to get a visa. Your gas let's say approximately 36 euros for two bottles. House insurance 298 euros a year. So our water cost then would be approximately 160 euros for the year. Our IBI property tax as we've just seen is 80 euros and 20 cents. The internet at 35 pounds a month is 420 euros. And then you would have to add on to this your other costs. I hope this video has been useful. Any questions at all let me know in the comments and don't forget to subscribe for videos about how we're renovating this house, our journeys to and from Spain and more information about buying property in Spain. Thanks very much for watching.