WATCH: What Does It Cost to Live in Rural Russia?

Editor's note: In April, 2018, a group of Orthodox Christians gathered at a church in Cleveland, Ohio, asking various questions about life in Russia. This video clip is an excerpt from that event. A person in the audience recorded this with his iPhone, so the video quality is sometimes sketchy, but hopefully the viewer will find this clip to be helpful and interesting. 

In the example discussed here, the family already owned a small house and car. The cost quoted was for all the recurring monthly living expenses, including food, water, heating, gas, electricity, cell phones, and internet access.

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TRANSCRIPT:

A friend of mine, his wife, and their twelve-year-old son, lived five hours Northwest of Moscow in the Tver region — very rural, out in the middle of the country.

They own a car. They bought a small house for something like $7,000 or $10,000. I forget. It was just a small fixer-upper house.

One time I spent about an hour or two on the phone with him just grilling him because I wanted to know, what is the cost of living in Russia? If I moved to Russia, what was it really going to cost me?

So we went into detail: 

"Okay, here's what I pay every month for internet. Here's what I pay every month for electricity. Here's what I pay every month for heating the house. Here's what I spend on food."

We added all these things up until, finally, he said,

"That's it. That's everything I spend every month."

And we were up to like $500 a month to live. If you can come up with that kind of money, you can live in Russia.

So I said, "I think maybe I can handle that." 

<laughter>

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Transcript courtesy of Dormition Professional Services

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