How to Furnish an Apartment on a Budget

This post may contain affiliate links, allowing us to earn a commission on the products we would recommend to our families and closest friends. You can find more info on our Legal Stuff page.

You may remember from last week that I, as an experienced budgeter mind you, somehow managed to underestimate my furniture budget by over 55%.

Worse still, that’s only the furniture. Thanks to a shipping delay, our crate of personal belongings from the US won’t arrive at our new place in Germany for a few weeks. So we also need to purchase all the non-furniture furnishings required to truly and completely furnish an apartment.

We need pots and pans and flatware and plates and sheets and towels and a vacuum, and a screwdriver…the list seems endless.

If you’re starting out on your own, you understand the pain of furnishing an apartment from scratch.

It seems worth mentioning that previous generations had a totally different experience. They got married at 18, and received all of the above as shower and wedding gifts. Household furnished!

We, on the other hand, are more-than-likely to live alone (or with roommates) for years before consolidating households with our SO. So we have to buy all this ourselves. Side-note take-away: Don’t get people cookware for a wedding gift; they already have it.

Non-Furniture Furnishings Budget

Fresh off last week’s lesson in furniture budgeting, I am not going to make the same mistakes this week with the non-furniture! Right…?

So we’re going back to budgeting basics. To avoid last week’s mistakes, I

1. am writing a complete list of everything we’ll need
2. am finding accurate price estimates for anything I didn’t have experience pricing
3. am converting to the correct currency (duh! I can’t even believe I have to remind myself of that!)

Special notes on my weird budget:

• There are some things we don’t need because we brought them in our luggage (toiletries, scissors for some reason, a tape measure, ziplock bags, etc). I’m just now realizing how weird some of my packing was.
• We didn’t pack any appliances in our crate, because of the different electrical outlets in Europe.  So we would have needed these even if the crate arrived on time.
• With the exception of the appliances, we’re purchasing the bare minimum to get us through a few weeks until our crate arrives with reinforcements. So just two plates, two bowls, two towels, etc.

Here’s what I came up with:

$636 sounds reasonable, right? Well, let’s see how I did…

Actual Non-Furniture Furnishings Cost

Here are the actual costs of my non-furniture. See all that red? That’s where I went over budget…again…

So this time, just a week after learning my lesson about underestimating the cost of furniture, I once again blew my budget. This time by just over 50%. An improvement over last week’s 55% variance, but not something to be proud of.

How was I so Wrong This Time?!

I can defend myself a little bit here. I never expected to buy a washing machine. I planned to use a laundromat. But the apartment came with a washing machine hook up, so I compared the cost of using the laundromat with the cost of buying a washing machine. A full hamper would cost €11 to wash and dry at the laundromat (a hamper of laundry is two loads here because of the small machines). So the washing machine will have paid for itself in just 24 loads, or in about 6 months. It just made financial sense to buy the washing machine.

If it weren’t for that, I still would have gone over budget, but only by about 4%.

Once again, I forgot a couple things in my budget. This time it was a surge protector and a dish drying rack. I also didn’t budget for vacuum cleaner bags. But I’m not accepting any blame for that because I would never have guessed that vacuum bags are still a thing.

The Lesson

If you’re keeping track at home, you know my total budget for furniture and non-furniture to furnish an apartment from scratch came to $2,621.

And my actual total costs came to $4,039.

Here’s the take-away lesson from my last two weeks of budgeting disasters: You can’t plan for everything. And since you can’t plan for everything, you need to plan for that inability to plan.

Meaning what? Meaning we should add a line item to our budgets for the unforeseeable expenses that will inevitably pop up.

So, from now on, all my future budgets will include one last line item: Unforeseeable Expenses. The budget amount for Unforeseeable Expenses will be a percentage of my total budget. I’m thinking 10% because, you know, it’s between 4% and 55% 😐

Please learn from my mistakes and do the same!

Feel Like Sharing?

Has anyone else severely under budgeted for something? Please share it in the comments. It will make me feel better.