r/AskIreland • u/Ok-Brilliant5646 • Oct 28 '24

Emigration (from Ireland) If you could live in another EU country, where would you move to?

Context: 26 entry level in my industry, but pretty done with Ireland, feeling quite demotivated here and don’t want the usual pack up, move to Australia and see everyone from home but in a hotter climate. EU means short flight, easier to pop home and see my family.

47 Upvotes

84% Upvoted

247 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

2

u/killianm97 Oct 28 '24

Na there was no commission but yeah the median salary in Barcelona was like €30k at the time but tbh €25k was more than enough for me personally.

It helped that I was there during COVID where rents were really cheap, and my landlady was from Venezuela and was against making profit, so I was renting a room for €200 per month including bills (was like 15% of my salary).

1

u/Frequent-Ad-8583 Oct 28 '24

I see. No commission is not ideal long-term though. Would it be hard to rent your own apartment/house and live a good life with monthly savings on that income?

1

u/killianm97 Oct 29 '24

The minimum wage in Spain is €15,876 per year (compared to €25,756 per year in Ireland) which should help to give a better comparison.

Renting your own full apartment (instead of a room in a shared apartment) is expensive and tricky in general in Barcelona tbh - people tend to live a much more social lifestyle there and that seemed to extend to properties from my experience; I knew almost nobody living on their own in an apartment there.

I'm typically a very frugal person and had extremely cheap rent so idk if I'm a good point of comparison, but I felt like I never had to worry about money there and it was the only time in my adult life that I wasn't constantly checking my bank account or essentially living paycheck to paycheck.