An overview of money spent during my exchange to Korea

I’ve been keeping track of all my expenses in Korea to get a clear view of how much money was spent on what kind of things. In total, I’ve spent roughly 3.510.000 KRW in Korea,  which is about 2350 euro. Click the link below for a further analysis of my expenses. Tomorrow I will leave Korea (sadly), so the following is complete view of all my costs during my time here. 

Before I came to Korea, I had to take care of several things such as flight tickets, my visum, insurance and vaccinations. I paid 251,75 euro for an additional health insurance combined with a travel insurance. Plane tickets cost me 1182 euro in total, but these include a flight to China and the flight from China to home so the normal price for a return ticket to Korea would be around 1000 euro, I assume. Vaccinations cost me 204,85 but I was able to get an amount  (not all of it) back from my Dutch health insurance. The visum cost me around 40 euro in cash, but I am not certain about this amount since I paid that long ago.

After arriving, I had to register as a foreigner and get a foreigner ID card. This process cost me 22000 KRW including taking new pictures since the ones from home were not sufficient. The rent for my dorm (Koart Ville) cost 1400000 KRW, or roughly 1025 euro. Overall this is not expensive, seeing as how the dorms from SKKU are excellent and especially my dorm is nice considering that every room has its own refrigerator, washing machine, air-conditioning and floor heating.  Getting a phone with some pre-paid amount and a charger cost me 50000 KRW, for which I got a cheap, cheap phone. Books for my courses here cost me 88500 KRW for four books, a lot cheaper than back home. I spent 45000 KRW on a subscription to the university gym, but I must shamefully admit I didn’t  use it a single time.

In total, I’ve spent roughly 230000 KRW on transportation throughout the semester.  I receive 85 euro per month from the government as compensation for traveling so in this department I actually received more than I spent. Food and drinks throughout the semester cost me 945000 KRW, note that this is probably a lot higher for a lot of other people since I’ve been eating bread from the supermarket for lunch most of the time as opposed to going out to have lunch every day. Also, due to my schedule I skipped breakfast most of the time. I also didn’t go out to have dinner very often, mostly making cheap stuff myself or getting take-out food from the many small stands/restaurants you have here in Seoul. I’ve spent about  700000 KRW on gifts, trips, a guitar, et cetera. This could’ve been a lot more if I went outside of Seoul for trips (which I only did once), but I wanted to save some money for my big vacation after the semester (I am going to China) and we also only had three or four days off during the semester anyway.

Considering I get my normal grant from the government plus the compensation for public transportation (totaling 348,57 per month), I managed to have a relatively cheap exchange. However, this is also due to the fact that I’ve been keeping a very close eye on my expenditures since I did not want to waste any money, so for a lot of people here total expenditures have been A LOT higher.