The high salaries of Muscovites do not delight the residents of the regions. However, one must understand that these high salaries are accompanied by the corresponding price level in the capital.
Salaries and spending
Official data claim that the average salary in the capital is a little more than forty thousand rubles, the minimum is about ten. Of course, forty thousand is not the smallest money, in the periphery you can live on it for more than a month, especially if you have your own economy. However, even if you do not take into account the option of renting housing, which in the capital costs a lot of money, the cost of living in Moscow is also quite high.
An undemanding resident of Moscow, without dependence on cigarettes or alcohol, can eat for twelve thousand rubles a month. At the same time, red caviar and other delicacies will not be the basis of his diet. The diet of an undemanding Muscovite will include chicken (about 90 rubles per kilogram), fresh and frozen vegetables (the latter will cost 80 rubles per kilogram, fresh ones are more expensive, but it depends on the season), various dairy products (about 40 rubles per liter of kefir or milk), eggs (50 rubles per ten), bread (20 rubles per loaf), fruits (the cheapest option is apples - about 50 rubles per kilogram), cereals, flour, sugar (from 30 rubles per kilogram) and other basic products that allow tasty but quite easy to eat.
To these expenses you need to add the economic part. On average, about 1,500 rubles per month are spent on washing powders, toilet paper, shampoo, soap and other little things.
A working person usually eats something at lunchtime. It takes from two to four thousand rubles a month. Of course, you can bring food from home, especially if the office has a microwave, but this is not always convenient.
Obligatory expenses
Transportation costs are a serious blow to the budget. Travel cards for all types of transport cost Muscovites about three thousand rubles.
Apartment owners have to pay rent, which is about four thousand rubles, and housing and communal services, this is still about one and a half thousand (depending on the ability to economically use water and electricity), that is, living even in your own apartment will cost five thousand a month. If there is a need to rent an apartment or even a room, this amount can be increased significantly. A one-room apartment on the outskirts of the capital will cost about twenty thousand per month (plus utility bills).
After all the calculations, we can say that a Muscovite has to spend about twenty thousand rubles a month to maintain "basic" needs, if not renting an apartment. But this amount does not include entertainment, shopping for clothes, trips outside the capital and much more. So even in this case, the official “average wage” no longer seems so high, and if you subtract money for renting an apartment from it, nothing remains of it.
But polls of the capital's population showed that the official average salary correlates poorly with reality. More than half of the three thousand respondents earn up to eighteen thousand rubles a month, and only twelve percent earn more than thirty-five thousand. So the myths about well-fed Muscovites remain myths.
