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Costs and requirements for moving to Portugal (Lisbon)

Moving from Sao Paulo, Brazil, these are few things I'll need to know, that are probably common knowledge from people who live in Lisbon. Sorry for the huge checklist, I'll be researching them myself. I do hope someone will chime in, but I also wanted to share once I start finding good info. ;)

- Renting: What are the requirements? How the contract usually works?

Here in Brazil we always need some form of "insurance", which is either sold by companies or you get a "fiador", someone you know who own their own real estate and are willing to sign in the papers. And we hardly ever find anything with a time frame less than 30 months.

I know in USA, for instance, things are much much simpler. All you need to do is agree with the landlord. And they'll usually ask for 3 or 6 months in advance. That's all.

- Health Insurance: How much does it cost in average?

Again in Brazil I can say there are very cheap plans which won't worth much more than the public service, starting at R$50 probably. But you will want to take at least the R$100 ones, so you have access to better doctors, hospitals and services in general.

- Food Costs?

This will surely vary a lot depending where you live and how you eat. In Brazil you can find good food for less than R$ 5 per meal but for an average worker in Sao Paulo you're more likely to need at least R$ 20 per meal, if you go on the cheap. Yeah, that can easily go up to far more than R$ 1.000 per month if you take 2 meals per day. Going on the marketplace won't reduce that much, as food is just very expensive here.

- Water Shortage?

Are you guys having any issues with this? In here it is becoming a serious problem and although it's not the main reason we're moving out it would be very important to know if there are any well known issues there!

- Total Living Cost?

I know this is highly subjective, but you know there's a minimum and an average. For instance here in Sao Paulo you probably can't live alone in an apartment outside the poor areas with less than R$ 3.000 covering all costs I've asked above. If you share the apartment, you can reduce that to R$2.000 and if you only eat noodles at home, maybe down to R$1.500. On top of it all, if you want to live in the far away regions, and get huge traffic everyday, you can even go below R$900, but not much less than that if you live on a rent.

I'm not including transportation costs at all here, because that's usually "paid by the employer", and it won't cost much more than R$200 per month anyway.

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