How to save money in Europe and America. Monetary secrets: what are residents of different countries saving on?

On the air of the network broadcasting "VM" the guests of the studio discussed which of the spouses solves financial issues in Italy, Hungary, Spain, Czech Republic, Japan and the USA.

Rome-based journalist and historian Giovanni Savino said that in Italy people usually get married very late. It is important for them to first find a good job, buy an apartment, a car and learn how to provide for themselves and their future family. As for the budget, the situation has changed slightly in recent years. If earlier both spouses had the opportunity to save something, now there is absolutely not enough money.

Renting a house in Rome costs about a thousand euros. Plus utilities: about 100-150 euros for water and 150-200 euros for electricity and heating. Many Italians do not like using public transport, so families usually have 2-3 cars. And these are additional costs for gasoline, - Giovanni Savino gives figures.

In the family, these expenses are usually divided in half. However, if a woman needs to visit a beauty salon, and a man, say, go to football, then it's every man for himself.

But in Japan, the situation is completely different. A woman may have a lower social status than a man, but it is she who completely and completely disposes of the common money.

Many men bear the entire salary of their wives, and they then plan the family budget and allocate a certain amount to the spouses for personal needs, ”says Mikhail Mozzhechkov, president of the Russian Club in Tokyo. - In fact, it turns out that all responsibility for the use of the budget lies with the woman. The man gave all the salary, and the woman is "spinning". Who can do it, who does not ... I know one Japanese couple who got divorced due to the fact that his wife could make spontaneous purchases, and because of this they were always lacking by the end of the month. But in general, the Japanese are quite economic and practical, they don’t throw family money down the drain.

Of the total expenses, about 30% is spent on housing, 20-30% on food, and the rest on entertainment.

But if in Japan the average salary of a young man is 2000 euros, then in the Czech Republic it is not more than 1000. If two people work, their total budget is 1500-1700 euros per month.

It is very important to manage this money wisely. From childhood, Czechs teach children how to plan their expenses and expenses. They, like Italians, are in no hurry to get married and get married, they do it at the age of 30. The Czech Republic is one of the most "credited" countries in Europe, a lot of people live on loans. Mortgage rates are low (1.5-2%), so it is popular, - journalist Vladimir Snegirev describes the situation in Prague.

In Spain, it is customary to conclude marriages even later than in Italy and the Czech Republic - at the age of 35-40. The family budget is strictly halved.

When you first start a relationship, for all of the restaurants, movies, each partner pays half. You can be invited to a restaurant and pay for dinner, but next time you will pay, ”says Daria Kustova, communications specialist at Focus Reports. - When you start living together, the only thing that changes is that you know how much everyone earns, and accordingly you can open a joint bank account. You can make a list of expenses.

Most of the money for a young family is spent on mortgages or rental housing.

The situation is similar in Hungarian families. Only with the difference that each invests in the total budget an amount proportional to his salary. And here all the calculations - and the Hungarians love this business - is a man. It is believed that they do it in a more meaningful way.

About 25-30% of the budget is spent on food and household funds, about 10% - on health, another 10% - on gifts to family members, and somewhere 20-30% is set aside, provided that the family has an apartment, - says Olga Rozhkova, Marketing Manager of the 1000 Roads Travel Company.

In most American families, the budget is also shared. The couple has a bank account, where the salary of both husband and wife goes. They carefully plan their expenses: house, cars, television, internet. Most of the cost goes to the child.

Americans are distinguished by the fact that they live on credit almost all their lives. This is the main item of expenses - housing loan payments. The average interest rate here is 4-4.5%. When a house is bought, it is a loan for 30 years, - says Marina Zolina, QA engineer.

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The New Year holidays swept by, taking away in their whirlwinds the last savings, half-eaten by inflation. Ahead is a year of tight belts and tight budgets. How to save money in order to survive the crisis with minimal losses? The experience of Europeans can tell Kazakhstanis the answer to this extremely topical question.

Warm welcome

… On an early winter morning, I woke up from a dog's cold. Touched the battery - ice. So much for Europe, a communal paradise! The heat chamber exploded, or what? Now they will open it up for two days, and we will clap our teeth like in our native Pavlodar. Displeased mumbling under my breath and wrapped in two blankets, I began to call the most urgent of all emergency services - friends. Having penetrated into the essence of my confused complaints, interspersed with untranslatable Russian expressions, on the other side of the wire they laughed merrily:

Welcome to Belgrade! The heating is turned off here at night, as in all of Europe, if you don't know. You live there, in Kazakhstan, in greenhouse conditions, because your energy is cheap. And here the people will not master the utility bills if the batteries are "fry" around the clock. That's how we live. And you will get used to it.

And I'm used to it. Now, several years after my first culture shock, I can no longer sleep with the radiator on. But my hardened friends are still far from me.

Not everyone can afford the luxury of central heating in the Old World. In winter, houses are heated here in all possible ways: some - with gas, others - with electricity, and others - with classic wood-burning stoves. But no matter how profitable, it still turns out to be expensive, so the heating of the Europeans is strictly metered.

All the best is for children, so the room where the baby lives is usually the warmest in the house. Adults, on the other hand, usually dress in thick woolen cardigans and are content with the Spartan 16 degrees. Moreover, not all rooms are usually heated in the house, but only the "actual" ones at the moment. In the kitchen, most often there are no batteries at all: it is assumed that the hostess should be hot from the stove and exercise with a rolling pin.

Several colds, earned in the icy European living rooms, taught me the obligatory rule: when going to a feast, to the world and to good people, take a fur vest and ugg boots with you. Did you think these things are in trend for several seasons because designers have no new ideas?

Cleanliness is the key to insomnia

I got acquainted with another method of European economy, again in the middle of the night. I was awakened by the rumble of the washing machine behind the wall. At first I attributed this sudden fit of cleanliness to my neighbor's senile insomnia. However, the night wash sessions were repeated regularly, and the cars hummed from above, then below, then from the side.

The Emergency Response Service has shed light on this mysterious phenomenon as well. It turned out that at night almost all European countries have the lowest electricity tariff - four times cheaper than the daytime. Therefore, thrifty citizens (and there are most of them here) prefer to turn on their washing machines and dishwashers in the dark. Moreover, they load the equipment to capacity: no one will waste electricity and water just to wash a couple of shirts or wash a couple of plates.

At night, people also turn on boilers en masse to heat water for morning hygiene procedures. I must say that the presence of these devices in almost every European apartment at first seemed to me an invaluable boon. Gray your water whenever you want, and forget forever about draconian equalization tariffs, about summer blackouts, about breakthroughs of heating mains and about "hand over money to replace pipes in the basement."

But now the boiler is my worst enemy. When I return home on a rainy evening, chilled through and dreaming of a warm bath, I have to wait at least an hour for the water to heat up. If at night I forget to turn on the boiler (which happens regularly), in the morning the whole family involuntarily goes into winter swimming. If one of the household members took a warm shower, the rest have to wander around the bathroom for a full hour until the green light of the boiler changes to red.

But the most regrettable thing: for several years of my life in Europe, I have never had a chance to enjoy what I love the most - a long lying in foamy water with a book, a phone and a cup of chocolate. The point is not even that the baths here are completely "sit-down" (where they are at all; in most houses there are only showers). The problem is that the hot water supply in an economical boiler is only enough for half a bath. To bathe a child is just right. But to indulge in at least half an hour - and there can be no question.

Amazing nearby

The words "Europe", "child", "bath" and "economy", standing in one sentence, evoke one very bright speech in the minds of Kazakhstanis. The former first deputy chairman of the Nur Otan party, and now the akim of Almaty, Bauyrzhan Baibek, once shared his impressions abroad with the people:

"I studied in Germany, and there are such cases: utilities come to some house, they think someone died there, because in general there is a meager amount of utilities. And there my grandmother lives and saves everything. First they wash the dishes, then they wash the floors with the same water, first they bathe the children, then they wash themselves. This is how they save money, "Baibek said.

Frankly, it gave me great pleasure to quote these words to my friends living in Germany. Because I foresaw the reaction in advance.

I don't even know what I liked more: about "they wash the dishes, and then the floors" or about "they bathe the children, then they wash themselves," laughs our former compatriot Victoria Schlatt, who moved to Germany 15 years ago. “Here, most people use dishwashers and vacuum cleaners, and I have never seen someone wash dishes in a basin, and then pour the water into a bucket and spread this slop with a rag on the floor. If it occurs to a European to wash the dishes by hand, he will plug the sink with a stopper, pour water and a special cleaning agent into it, and already there he will wield a sponge. Usually they don't even rinse the cups - but this is more out of laziness than out of economy: cold water is not so expensive to waste time on trifles. As for the bath that adults take after children, I have never heard of this. Unless some tired mother, having bathed the child, could not wait for a new portion of hot water and decided to quickly rinse herself in a still hot bath. But this is definitely not a mass phenomenon, even for such thrifty people as the Germans. Yes, they turn off the faucet while brushing their teeth and turn off the shower while soaping up. This is because warm water runs out quickly. Who wants to stand in the foam, like engineer Shchukin, and wait for the boiler to heat up again?

Family electric blanket

And yet it is fair to say: there is such a country in the world where adults take a bath after children.

Oh yes, I am often asked this question: "Is it true that hot water in Japan is so expensive that the whole family bathes in the same bathtub?" Yoshinori Hayasaki, a design student from Yokohama, smiles. - And every time I shock people with an affirmative answer, and then explain: this is not economy, but an old ritual ofuro. Ideally, the whole family should gather in a small pool, after having thoroughly washed in the shower. But not everyone has pools, so the ritual "migrated" to the bath, where all family members take turns enjoying hot water. They do not wash there, but warm themselves. Do not immerse yourself in the bathtub when dirty.

However, the Japanese believe that there is nothing wrong with combining ancient traditions with economy. They use the water from the bathtub for washing - it goes directly into the machine. And the local inventors connected the sink with the toilet: the water used to wash the hands flows into the cistern and is used for flushing.

We try to be frugal in everything, says Yoshinori. - This is especially true of komservices. Japanese apartments are usually very small, since we don't have much land. There is a big plus in a modest living space: you don't need to spend too much money on heating. Many people here have no idea about central heating. To keep warm, they turn on the air conditioners, but only when it is very cold. And we also have such a great thing as kotatsu: it is something like a low table covered with a thick blanket. It has a built-in electric heater. You sit comfortably under this blanket, place a laptop, a book, or a cup of tea on the table and enjoy life. The whole family and the cat can fit under the kotatsu: we usually while away the winter evenings.

The benefits of yesterday's oatmeal

Kazakhstanis are hardly ready to replace round-the-clock heating with an electric blanket, and "rivers" of hot water - one bathroom for the whole family. But nevertheless, some of the useful habits of the thrifty Japanese and Europeans, perhaps, someone will take.

The most rigorous rule followed by many residents of civilized countries is to set aside part of their income for a rainy day. Even in a crisis. And teach children the same.

The Germans, probably, absorb frugality with their mother's milk, says Victoria Schlatt. - Here, almost every child has a piggy bank. What amazes me most is that children do not spend their pocket money on sweets, but patiently collect them for a large purchase. By the way, many adults have a habit of pouring small change into a pod at the end of the day. This does not affect the wallet in any way, and in a year it runs up to a thousand euros.

Germans and Japanese people often have a special ledger for calculating family expenses. Shop receipts are saved, pasted into a notebook and analyzed.

When you look at these invoices at the end of the month, you understand how many unnecessary purchases were made, - says Victoria. - Then you take all this into account, making plans and lists of what is necessary for the next month. It is very disciplining, especially for impulsive people like me.

As we have already found out, you can save a lot on public services - and at the same time it is not at all necessary to go to extremes. It is enough just not to forget to turn off the light, and also make a rule to pull out all the plugs from the sockets every evening. The Swedes have found that in this way you can save an impressive amount of kilowatts. They also made it a habit to while away evenings by candlelight from time to time: both romantic and profitable, and the demographic situation is improving.

Another way to minimize costs is not to neglect discounts. The champions in this sense, of course, are the Americans, who manage to go to the supermarket with so many coupons that the store still owes them. There are also a lot of "discount alcoholics" in Europe; among them there are those who can easily compose the actual look from the items found in the basket "all for 2 euros". Many, moreover, are regular visitors to all kinds of flea markets: some are gamblingly looking for antiques, others are looking at utilitarian things from the category of "useful on the farm."

But most of all Europeans save on "show-offs", - concludes Victoria Schlatt. “It would never occur to anyone here to shell out a few thousand euros for a Chinese mink coat, or to hang oneself in gold from head to toe, or to spend money on silicone implants — this is considered extremely stupid.

Throwing money down the drain is a manifestation of vulgarity, and Europeans are ready to endure everything except bad taste. Therefore, even monarchs do not allow themselves extravagance. The other day, British Prince William sent his son to the most ordinary kindergarten with a fee of 5 pounds per hour. The thrifty subjects of the Queen of England welcomed such a wise decision in every possible way. Should they not remember the words of Queen Elizabeth, which have become the motto of modern Europe: "Wealth is not a reason to throw away yesterday's porridge."