The budget

When we started investigating moving to The Netherlands, it was very difficult to figure out what budget we needed and what type of salary we needed to look for in order to be able to pay all the living costs.

I spent hours googling and all the sites I found weren't as helpful as what they seemed, giving estimated costs of milk and bread did not really help me to figure out what our groceries would cost. I've always worked with a budget and I've always recorded what we spend money on each month.

So therefore I am sharing a budget with you, these costs are estimates and are based on a 2 adult household with 3 dogs. They might not reflect what you will ultimately spend but it should give you a better indication so that you can plan accordingly.

When we first moved over, we had a rental in Nieuw Sloten in Amsterdam, it was 10km's away from my work in Amsterdam Zuid. It had 3 bedrooms and a tiny (4mx4m) brick backyard (if you can even call it that), our rent was €1850 per month.

We decided that we wanted to buy our own house and hopefully find something with a bigger back yard for the dogs. I will cover what we did here in Buying a house. We did find a house with a bigger back yard about 70km's outside of Amsterdam and our mortgage is €1110. We've listed what we pay in the budget file but please adjust that once you've found a place to stay (I will cover that topic in Preparing for the move. 

Most houses have Water, Electricity and Gas, our house has Water, District Heating (warm water and radiators for central heating) and Electricity - but we also have solar panels so our bill is not as high as others. These companies charge you a set fee each month and at the end of the year, you will receive an annual bill which will be based on your actual meter readings and you either need to pay in, or you will be refunded depending on your usage.

Once a year you will also get a bill for water tax, sewerage etc which was about €600 for us this year. The fee depends on how many people are registered and which area you stay in. This amount has been added to the bottom of the budget sheet along with some other annual expenses.

We are with KPN which has the widest coverage across The Netherlands. We have 2 cellphone contracts each with unlimited calls, unlimited SMS's and 3gb of data per month. This costs about €17 each per month however we also got new phones so the amount in the budget sheet includes what we pay for the phone installment.

We have a uncapped 100mb line which works well for us, I work from home and my husband games in the evenings and this is more than enough.

Our food bill is quite high because I don't like to cook, we subscribe to Marley Spoon and we opted for 4 meals a week for 2 adults. The food is delivered weekly and we enjoy it. We buy takeouts for the other 3 days of the week. You can save month on your food bill depending on how you plan. If you buy your groceries from the shop or market you can reduce the amount catered for in the budget.

For our weekly shop, we normally get Bread, Milk, Hams, Cheese, Fruit, Yoghurts, some toiletries (different each week).

Takeout prices are different based on what food you are buying, some nights if we do McDonalds, it costs €25 for 2 people, when we do sushi and chinese it costs €40 for 2 people.

When we go to our favourite restaurant (which is between Cattle Baron and The Hussar Grill) it costs €90 for the 2 of us.

We've budgeted an average of €30 for 2 people per night, 3 nights a week. We did not cater for going out to restaurants that much as we rarely go out.

Insurance is very important in The Netherlands, you have to take out medical insurance as soon as you have your BSN number. All the providers charge approximately the same amount for the basic cover and then you can pay for extra's. We have the basic plan with a dental extra.

Personal Liability insurance is also a thing here and its in case you are at someone elses house and you damage something, then you are liable. Similarly if you are riding your bicycle and damage someones car or property, personal liability insurance covers that claim.

Other insurances would depend on your situation, we have the car and the house so we have car insurance, structural and content insurance as well as life and legal insurance.

We have an insurance broker which takes car of all our insurance needs (except medical) and we find this easier but we do pay a monthly broker fee which is included in the amount listed in the budget.

When we arrived in The Netherlands, we basically started our pension from scratch so this means we pay extra into our pension so that we can achieve our goal for when we retire. The retirement age in The Netherlands is 67 years old.

You get pension from the government (AOW) as well as from your company if its a benefit they provide. The government limits how much you can contribute to pension so I would advise having a session with a pension consultant to advise you on the best setup for your retirement needs. I will cover more on this in Other topics. 

We don't really go out much so we pay for HBO and Netflix. You can get the "cable" tv with your cellphone/intranet provider as well but we've opted not to buy that for now.

If you want to go out a lot and experience the museums etc then I would recommend getting a museum card, you pay for it annually and it allows free entry into most of the museums around The Netherlands.

We have 3 dogs so we spend quite a bit of money on their food, 2 of them are on raw and the other one is on special Royal Canin food for her allergies. We also have medical insurance for the youngest one as the other 2 were too old to go on it. You can check out Zooplus or Animal Food Express if you want to have a look at the prices of dog food.

We have a car so we have to pay road tax, this amount depends on the type of car you have and what its euro rating is. You can find this easily when looking for cars to buy as its normally mentioned in the ad or you can find it on Finnik.nl by putting in the license plate number. You can either pay your road tax each quarter or monthly, I will cover this topic in Buying a car.

Some other expenses that you should be aware of besides the monthly/quarterly road tax.

We did a service when we first received our car, we had to take our car to an offiical VW dealer as the service book is online and no longer a physical book. A small service cost €450 which was mainly a oil change and an inspection. We had to take it for a service again about a year later and this time there were a few problems that we had to fix. It was an oil change, brake pads, windscreen wipers, balancing of tyres, cleaning the sun roof rails and spark plugs, this cost €1000.

We also had a slow puncture in the one tyre so we decided to buy new summer tyres which cost €700 with alignment included. We purchased the hancook brand as they are rated for wet weather as well, they were not the most expensive tyre but also not the cheapest. The car originally came with Hancooks from VW so we decided to stick to that brand for now.

Salaries work a little different in The Netherlands and I got a few surprises when I finally arrived and received my first payslip.

Companies work on annual salaries here, so when they make you an offer, it will be an annual amount. Its very important to understand what that annual amount comprises of as they have "Holiday Pay" which is 8% of your annual salary that is paid to you at the end of May for the summer holidays. It kind of like a 13th cheque, however the annual amount they give you in the offer letter will include that 8% so in order for you to calculate the nett salary correctly you would need to deduct the 8% and then divide the amount by 12.

You also need to consider the benefits that could be deducted, like pension, insurance etc. This should be stipulated in the offer letter they provide you with.

You can use this site thetax.nl - there are a few settings you need to be aware of so that you can get the most accurate nett amount.

• Holiday allowance included - if you check this, it will calculate the monthly amount without the 8%

• 30% ruling - if you qualify for the 30% ruling, then you only pay tax on 70% of your salary. I will cover more of this under Arriving in The Netherlands. This site does tell you what the minimum salary you have to receive is to qualify for the 30%.

• Show extra options - this is just the different amounts you can view, either weekly, monthly or yearly.

I used this site to calculate my nett and except for the pension which I did cater for, the calculation was almost 100% accurate.