Cost of living is a combination of all the costs that you will face during your stay at Leiria. Long story short: cost of accommodation (rent, electricity, water etc.), public transportation, food and shopping basically. Some of these are of course optional and you might have some other costs. Generally you could say that Leiria is quite cheap place to live. It’s a small city so the rents are usually somewhere between 200-300 euros per month which is very very cheap compared to my Finnish ones.
The pricing is a thing that is changing all the time so it is hard to make a precise analysis about it. Luckily I don’t have to because the Internet is doing it for me. Numbeo.com is one of the places to look at. It’s updated monthly and gives you a good approximation about the cost of living. Here’s Portugal for you:
http://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/country_result.jsp?country=Portugal
I didn’t investigate this thing at all back in Finland because I had the basic knowledge I needed: Portugal is a cheaper place to live compared to Finland. Well I was partly right and partly wrong. Living, eating, drinking and everything like that is much cheaper but on the other hand electricity and those smaller electronic things like headphones and such are quite a bit more expensive here.
Here’s Portugal compared to Finland:
http://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_countries_result.jsp?country1=Finland&country2=Portugal
It’s difficult to calculate an average cost of living in Portugal, as it depends very much on each individual’s particular circumstances and lifestyle. The actual difference in your food bill will depend on what you eat and where you lived before moving to Portugal. Food in Portugal costs around the same as in the USA, but is cheaper than in most northern European countries. €200 to €300 should feed two adults for a month, including (inexpensive) wine but excluding fillet steak, caviar and expensive imported foods.
A couple owning their home can ‘survive’ on a net income of as little as €1,000 per month (many pensioners actually live on less) and most can live quite comfortably on an income of around €2,000 per month (excluding rent or mortgage payments). In fact most northern Europeans who live modestly in Portugal without over-doing the luxuries will find that their cost of living is up to 50 per cent lower than in their home country. (Justlanded.com. 19.9.2014.)
