I am staying at Selgars right now - a beautiful coliving in the English countryside. We’re around ten people, from 30 to 80 years old, and we fell into a pretty rhythmical life together. For me, every day looks like this: Wake up, coffe and chat, work, lunch and chat, work, gym, family dinner, board game/movie/other-social-thing, read, sleep. It’s exactly what I need on those rainy British winter days.
Last week, somebody dared to make an expedition to London for the weekend and came back saying: “No matter what you do, a day in London costs you at least 50£ and of the four people I wanted to see, two cancelled and one was so late that we didn’t really have time together.” When I was still living in Amsterdam, that comment wouldn’t have registered with me, but now it made me realize just how much higher the efficiency of communal living is.
I always had an intuition that living in a commune is more efficient but never really tried to put numbers on it. I will try that here and explore how living in a commune affects my finances on my top three community related finance cateogires - housing, social, and services.
Housing
Let’s start with the obvious: Housing is simply more efficient when it’s shared. In Amsterdam, I paid about 1700€ incl for my run-down flat, and that was cheap. When adding to this the cost for furniture, washing machine, electronics etc. it’s probably around 2000€ per month total.
In the two communes/colives I stayed in so far, the accomodation cost is between 1.000€ and 1.800€ per month. And this isn’t comparing apples to apples - it’s comparing an apartment on a noisy street with a shower in the kitchen and a mouse eating into my lentils to a cozy countryside house with lots of communal spaces and to a Disney-style chateau on a hill with a fully equipeed gym, sauna, and hectars of nature.
Social
In Amsterdam I easily spent 800€ per month on social things. Eating out with friends or dates twice per week - 600€. A festival once a month - 100€. Cinema, concerts, etc - 50€. Hosting or joining dinners - 50€. This is a conservative guess.
In the communities now, I spent 150€ max per month on this. At Feÿtopia, we had a communal alcohol fund of 5€ per day and here at Selgars my partner and I developed a habit of going out for lunch once a week for maybe 25€.
That doesn’t mean that less social things are happening. Instead of going out for social dinners every other day, I now have daily ones at home. Instead of going to a festival once a month, we have parties whenever we feel like it. I listened to more live music these two months than the entire year before. And who needs a cinema when you have a large projector, lots of cozy couches, and popcorn in the pantry.
And that’s just the money. In Amsterdam, the city with the shortest and best commutes, I lost more than one hour daily commuting to things - work or social, often through the rain or crammed in a subway. I value an hour of my time at about 50€ (if you would give me 50€ cash for sitting in the subway for an hour right now I would refuse), so that’s at least another 1.500€ per month of funny money. In London or Berlin visiting a friend often means spending an hour commuting one way, so almost double that. On top, if commutes are so long, people become less spontaneous, everything needs to be planned in advance, and often people cancel because what seemed like a great idea three weeks ago often isn’t one in that moment, and you lose more time.
Services
Speaking of the value of time: I spent a lot of money in Amsterdam to pay for services to save time and to make time more enjoyable. I paid for a cleaner twice a month - 60€, spinning and yoga classes - 100€, meal-prep services - 200€. If I could have afforded it, I would have paid for even more: I don’t like cooking but I didn’t want to pay for meal-prep every day. And if it were possible, I would have outsourced the planning of my social life.
At scale in a a commune, all this changes. While it sounds way over the top to hire a personal chef, when you are thirty people it all of a sudden pays off - both Feÿtopia and my next commune The Garden provided full board for most of the week (at 500-1000 EUR) . People are expected to support with taking shifts, but cooking once a week together is still much less time and more social fun than cooking at home. At Selgars, with a group of 12 people, we simply take turns cooking - again everybody cooks once a week and we get similar efficiencies while only paying for groceries.
Apart from cooking, cleaners also get cheaper because their commute time goes down and while we could share paying a personal trainer or yoga teacher, we mostly take turns facilitating training sessions. At the communities I stayed at so far, we didn’t outsource more services but there are many that do. The more commercial coliving places often have somebody planning the social life - a community manager. And I just discovered the first commune for single mothers that includes tutoring, birthday prep, and optional baby sitting services.
More life for less money
The Nomad List quotes the cost of living as an expat per month in Amsterdam at 3.476€. If we add my costs up, we get to something pretty similar - housing 2.000€ + social stuff 800€ + services 350€ (+ groceries 200€ and other stuff like a bike, subway, etc). That is without taking into account the cost of time spent on commute, cooking or planning social things.
My life in the two communities I have stayed in so far was significantly cheaper, between 1.500€ and 3.000€ max, while I felt a higher quality of life - more calm, more nature, more social things, less commute, less time spent on things I don’t enjoy, less time alone.
A disclaimer: Both Selgars and Feÿtopia make most of their money running events in the summer, so it could be that if they would be an all-year commune that prices would go up. So if this sounds too good to be true, that’s because it might be. Once I have a clearer picture of what my ideal commune would look like, I’ll do a post on a business case and see how far we can push the commune efficiencies while staying in budget.
Of course, money is only one aspect of life and just because life is cheaper and somebody cooks your food doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily better. What about not being in a city? What about the famous alone time for introverts? What about keeping up healthy habits? I’ll explore these topics when looking at those categories of the Wheel of Life in the next posts.
Hey Nicole, thanks so much for raising this! I actually struggled to describe what I'm aspiring for with this substack. I am aiming for something like "intentional long-term coliving" but that's a bit of a mouthful unfortunately. I finally chose "commune" because
* Community can refer to anything from a slack community of crypto nerds to a neighborhood community
* Coliving feels like it's becoming a very commercial term used by developers to refer to their flatshares and that's not what I am aiming for here
* Commune is defined by wikipedia as an "alternative term for intentional community" which is close enough to that mouthful, and I like how the hippie-association of the word clashes a bit with the analytical approach here
That being said: Both Selgars and Feÿtopia certainly aren't communes. But coliving also felt wrong, especially for Feÿtopia. Maybe we have to coin some new terms haha. I'll try to be a bit more consistent in the posts going forward.
Fascinating! I would say that although these are communal spaces, neither space counts as a commune per se. A commune is where personal belongings are mostly renounced, and there are more things shared than not -- shared vehicles, shared income, shared ownership, etc.
Does it feel like splitting hairs if I suggest that both spaces you mentioned, Feytopia and Selgars, lean much more towards being a coliving than a commune? This is because both have clear owners (community managers) who control who comes into the space, the stays are seasonal/temporary thus no shared ownership or continued equity, and both are pay-to-stay-and-play, whereas communes often accept anyone who can lend a hand.
Also curious to know how you differentiate commune/community.
Thanks for writing about these spaces! Both are dope are deserve more exposure.