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ROME: After Francesca Turtulici graduated two years ago from the Polytechnic University of Turin with an architecture degree specializing in restoration, she sent out dozens of résumés to companies in and around the city, where she had grown up. Then she waited. And waited and waited.
When it became clear to her that she might be waiting for considerably longer, she decided to try her luck in Rome, where her boyfriend, Lorenzo, lived. They are serious about each other.
“I thought to myself, my future is here,” she said.
Her main concern: money.
“I found work right away, but living in Rome isn't simple,” she said. Nor is it cheap. “I've had to make sacrifices. My belt's pulled pretty tight.”
Today in Your Money
Young and on a budget in the big city
Overcoming hurdles to rent in Paris
Surviving in pricey Rome
When she first arrived, she lived with her boyfriend in his parents' house, “which was a little weird.” Then family friends offered her a small studio apartment in an outlying neighborhood. To get to work - in the heart of central Rome - she has to take a bus, then the subway, then transfer two more times onto buses. The commute takes about an hour each way. Though the rent is a bargain by Rome standards, it gobbles up nearly half her monthly salary, which hovers below the four-figure mark.
Once a month she goes to the supermarket where €150, or $193, covers most of her basic needs, which include “a lot” of pasta and eggs.
“I don't buy fish or meat, and my mother taught me to look for bargains - that adds up at the end of the month,” Turtulici said as she munched on a lunch of chicken breast and vegetables. “I only eat meat when I go to my boyfriend's house on the weekend. Or when I'm a guest.”
She also tends to score take-home dishes from Lorenzo's mother, who is, after all, an Italian mamma.
Turtulici counts herself as fortunate, “because I don't need a lot to have fun.” She enjoys dancing, but rather than going to a discotheque where entrance fees and drink costs add up quickly, she goes to discopubs that offer canned rock music. For €5 plus the cost of a beer, “you can hang out for an entire evening.” She usually goes on Fridays, because women get in free before midnight. Going to see a film is a treat. She gets to the theater because Lorenzo occasionally gets free tickets from friends.
Even if she could afford Armani or Versace she wouldn't buy them, she said, “because I'm not into designer brands.” She finds it more of a challenge to scour her mother's discarded clothes from the 1970s and mix and match them with items picked up at Porta Portese, a gigantic Sunday morning open-air market in Rome that can be plumbed for everything from lingerie to army surplus jackets at a small fraction of what they would cost in a store.
“I like poking around markets; you can pick up some amazing deals,” she said, including brand-name items. “So what if they're last year's fashions?”
At 26 Turtulici is a rare specimen among Italian youth because she lives on her own in a country where unmarried people often live with their parents well into their 30s.
Sociologists and researchers blame dismal job prospects and sky-high rents for such cocooning, which is said to affect 59 percent of Italians aged 18 to 34, according to the Eurispes research institute. In comparison, in Spain only 10 percent of people the same age live with their parents; the figure is 16.4 percent in Germany. In Italy, the stay-at-home young adults have become known as bamboccioni, or big babies.
The close-knit Italian family structure also provides a strong social net, supplanting a mostly nonexistent welfare system, explained Antonio De Lillo, a sociologist at Bicocca University.
“If you put these two things together, it means that the family forms the principal safety net” for young people at the start of their careers as they work in precarious or flexible conditions, he said. “They are unable to plan their lives because they have no security about the future.”
Turtulici doesn't depend on her family financially, but she does visit once a month. It's around €100 a round trip, “but most of the time the trains are late or the air-conditioning doesn't work so I get a 30 percent refund. Its like taking one in three trips for free.”
She scrimps on holidays. She wouldn't mind taking a low-cost flight to a European capital on the weekend, but after food and hotel costs are factored in, “I ask myself is it worth it, and it never is.”
Archive for October, 2008
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PARIS: With her gamin good looks, hip-hop baggy jeans and power-lunch-size diamond earrings, Wiam Loukili, 28, is a determined young lady.
Trained as a pharmacist, Loukili was able to land a job in Paris just four days after her arrival from Corsica. And while she recently managed to rent a minuscule furnished studio in a respectable and diverse neighborhood, the road to such a foothold in Paris was frustrating and circuitous.
Before finding the studio, the best she could afford was a furnished bedroom in the apartment of a consultant who traveled a lot. Before that, she stayed on a temporary basis with friends.
Loukili's situation resembles that of many young professionals trying to get established in the French capital, stymied by an undersupply of apartments and compounded by landlords who fear that tenant-friendly laws could result in years of litigation with feckless tenants who won't pay the rent and won't move out.
Trying to avoid such situations, real estate agents and owners demand that prospective tenants prove that their after-tax income is at least three times - and sometimes four times - the amount of rent. That typically requires a dossier of work history, tax filings, personal references and frequently, in addition to satisfying the income requirements, a guaranty from a wealthy relative. Many landlords also demand hefty security deposits.
Today in Your Money
Young and on a budget in the big city
Overcoming hurdles to rent in Paris
Surviving in pricey Rome
As a result, it is not unusual for Parisians to remain home with their families until they are 28 or older, a phenomenon that was the basis for the 2001 film “Tanguy,” in which the well-to-do parents are driven to seek psychiatric treatment because their son won't move out.
Loukili had reckoned that her current monthly net of €1,850, or $2,400, would at best allow her to move into a cramped chambre de bonne, traditionally a separate-entrance room for a servant, many of which are now used as investment properties by wealthy Parisians.
Even small one-bedroom apartments in raffish neighborhoods rent for at least €800 a month and are out of her reach, Loukili said. The rent for her room in the shared 16th Arrondissement apartment was €600 a month.
Loukili left her native Morocco 10 years ago to study pharmacy in France. She was following in the footsteps of her mother, who a generation before had won a scholarship to the pharmacy school at Paul Sabatier University in Toulouse.
After finishing a seven-year course of study and receiving her doctorate in pharmacy, Loukili moved to Nice, where she had close friends. She worked in a pharmacy and rented her own apartment for €450 a month, although she needed a guarantor to co-sign the lease. “But here in Paris, a guarantor is not enough,” she said.
A romance that ended in heartbreak motivated her to spend eight months in Corsica, where she worked as a pharmacist, enjoyed the sea and nature, and met another man. They plan to marry next summer. She headed for Paris because the jobs in Corsica were seasonal. The two indulge in hours of telephone conversation each week, a habit that once cost as much as €200 a month but diminished when her landlord let her use an Internet phone.
Paris, she finds, is expensive. A lunch salad at a snack bar in the smart suburb where she works runs €6 a day. “It is just egg and a tomato and bread,” she complained. She buys some extra bread and sometimes economizes by buying lunch from a supermarket. Dinner, she cooks at home, usually pasta with tomato. She finds meat too expensive.
Her biggest expense besides rent is the €500 to €600 she sends each month to her sister in Toulouse, who is seeking a law degree. In Morocco, Loukili said, people are either rich or poor. Her family, she said, is on the rich side. But there are laws that prevent her father, who owns a construction company, from sending sufficient funds abroad.
Loukili says she does not go out often. She sees a film once a week, but is daunted by the admission price of around €10. She joins friends once a week at a restaurant, usually for Asian or Italian food.
Her biggest extravagance, she said, was spending on clothes and makeup. She hit the July sales with gusto.
She said her employers underpay her because she lacks a European Union certificate. Her work contract describes her as a salesgirl, although she functions on a higher level as a pharmacist. She has applied for the certificate, which could help to raise her net salary to €2,800, but even that would limit her budget to €900 for rent.
For now, she has reached her goal of an apartment in the €600 range, but her future, she said, may lie elsewhere. After marriage, she said, she and her husband may move south to Toulouse, Nice or Bordeaux.
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LONDON: Living in a shed, getting free drinks at gallery openings, dyeing one's own hair and going out just one night a month might not sound like a glamorous urban existence. But it is the only way many young people can afford to reside in London.
Henry Hudson, a 26-year-old artist, can attest to the high cost of rent, even in the borough of Hackney, East London. He feels lucky to pay a monthly rent of £170, or about $280, for a shed with no windows (he spent £1,000 of his own money to install a skylight and a shower).
“They could get £240 a month for this, but the landlord is a friend,” Hudson said. “Still, I have little choice.”
Hudson's shed, which covers 45 square meters, or 500 square feet, also doubles as his studio, where he creates Plasticine paintings that have already earned him several well-reviewed gallery exhibits. “The people who buy and sell art live in London, so I need to be based here no matter how expensive,” he said.
Hudson's brother, Richard, 28, looks wealthy by comparison. He is an independent film production designer and lives in an East London apartment with two other young men, one a cinematographer. “We each pay £500 a month, but that is only because one of the guys bought this flat with his inheritance,” he said of the apartment, in Hoxton. He barters for the studio space where he creates visual concepts for films. “I am helping the fashion designer, who owns the space, renovate it so I don't have to pay rent,” he said.
Today in Your Money
Young and on a budget in the big city
Overcoming hurdles to rent in Paris
Surviving in pricey Rome
Basak Oztamur, 32, arrived in London six years ago from Turkey and is only now supporting herself by living on a budget that has no room for extravagance. Despite working as a bank clerk on Baker Street, her rent in a shared apartment in North London (£420 a month) and one-hour commute to work (£110 a month) easily take up half her net income. “I am lucky my rent includes utilities, or else I would not be able to stay here,” she said, adding that her £60 entertainment budget was the most difficult to follow. “I like to go out to nice places,” she said, “so I either go out once a month, knowing it will cost £60 for the evening and I will have to stay home for the next three weeks, or I go to cheaper places three times a month and spend £20 each time.”
It would never occur to her to go to a beauty salon for a manicure and pedicure: “That costs £40! I do my own nails and dye my own hair.”
James Warner, 21, graduated from Oxford four months ago and only recently moved to London. A drummer in a popular band formed with three friends at university, they are hoping their group, The Glitches, might have the same luck as another university band, Coldplay.
Through GumTree, a classified listings site, they found a four-bedroom apartment behind Victoria Cathedral in Central London for £475 a month that was in need of “modernization,” he said. (Average rents in the area are normally £170 a week) “We pay another £75 each for utilities and council tax,” he said, explaining that they did not have cable television but needed broadband for work. All four of them plan to work as academic tutors through an agency that pays £25 a hour while they wait for the band's big break. (One recent performance netted the group £400.)
Taxis for all of these young city dwellers are off limits, though the fact that the London Underground stops running at midnight can be a problem. “I try to stay with a friend in Central London if it is a late night because a black cab back to my place costs £35 to £40,” Oztamur said.
Food is another issue. Richard Hudson cooks with his two roommates, helped along by a cookbook his mother wrote, “Hard Up and Hungry,” specifically for poor young students and postgraduates.
Henry Hudson is following the centuries-old artists' tradition of finding wealthy benefactors. “I get taken out a lot by wealthy clients and I also go to lots of gallery openings - they are quite generous with the free alcohol,” he said, laughing.
Oztamur, the Turkish woman, said she sometimes cleaned houses on weekends to afford trips back to see her family in Istanbul, usually buying her ticket months ahead to get a discounted fare. “Those trips are important to me,” she said. “Only in Turkey can I afford to get my hair done in a salon and buy clothes. But now even Istanbul is getting expensive!”
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ROME: After Francesca Turtulici graduated two years ago from the Polytechnic University of Turin with an architecture degree specializing in restoration, she sent out dozens of résumés to companies in and around the city, where she had grown up. Then she waited. And waited and waited.
When it became clear to her that she might be waiting for considerably longer, she decided to try her luck in Rome, where her boyfriend, Lorenzo, lived. They are serious about each other.
“I thought to myself, my future is here,” she said.
Her main concern: money.
“I found work right away, but living in Rome isn't simple,” she said. Nor is it cheap. “I've had to make sacrifices. My belt's pulled pretty tight.”
Today in Your Money
Young and on a budget in the big city
Overcoming hurdles to rent in Paris
Surviving in pricey Rome
When she first arrived, she lived with her boyfriend in his parents' house, “which was a little weird.” Then family friends offered her a small studio apartment in an outlying neighborhood. To get to work - in the heart of central Rome - she has to take a bus, then the subway, then transfer two more times onto buses. The commute takes about an hour each way. Though the rent is a bargain by Rome standards, it gobbles up nearly half her monthly salary, which hovers below the four-figure mark.
Once a month she goes to the supermarket where €150, or $193, covers most of her basic needs, which include “a lot” of pasta and eggs.
“I don't buy fish or meat, and my mother taught me to look for bargains - that adds up at the end of the month,” Turtulici said as she munched on a lunch of chicken breast and vegetables. “I only eat meat when I go to my boyfriend's house on the weekend. Or when I'm a guest.”
She also tends to score take-home dishes from Lorenzo's mother, who is, after all, an Italian mamma.
Turtulici counts herself as fortunate, “because I don't need a lot to have fun.” She enjoys dancing, but rather than going to a discotheque where entrance fees and drink costs add up quickly, she goes to discopubs that offer canned rock music. For €5 plus the cost of a beer, “you can hang out for an entire evening.” She usually goes on Fridays, because women get in free before midnight. Going to see a film is a treat. She gets to the theater because Lorenzo occasionally gets free tickets from friends.
Even if she could afford Armani or Versace she wouldn't buy them, she said, “because I'm not into designer brands.” She finds it more of a challenge to scour her mother's discarded clothes from the 1970s and mix and match them with items picked up at Porta Portese, a gigantic Sunday morning open-air market in Rome that can be plumbed for everything from lingerie to army surplus jackets at a small fraction of what they would cost in a store.
“I like poking around markets; you can pick up some amazing deals,” she said, including brand-name items. “So what if they're last year's fashions?”
At 26 Turtulici is a rare specimen among Italian youth because she lives on her own in a country where unmarried people often live with their parents well into their 30s.
Sociologists and researchers blame dismal job prospects and sky-high rents for such cocooning, which is said to affect 59 percent of Italians aged 18 to 34, according to the Eurispes research institute. In comparison, in Spain only 10 percent of people the same age live with their parents; the figure is 16.4 percent in Germany. In Italy, the stay-at-home young adults have become known as bamboccioni, or big babies.
The close-knit Italian family structure also provides a strong social net, supplanting a mostly nonexistent welfare system, explained Antonio De Lillo, a sociologist at Bicocca University.
“If you put these two things together, it means that the family forms the principal safety net” for young people at the start of their careers as they work in precarious or flexible conditions, he said. “They are unable to plan their lives because they have no security about the future.”
Turtulici doesn't depend on her family financially, but she does visit once a month. It's around €100 a round trip, “but most of the time the trains are late or the air-conditioning doesn't work so I get a 30 percent refund. Its like taking one in three trips for free.”
She scrimps on holidays. She wouldn't mind taking a low-cost flight to a European capital on the weekend, but after food and hotel costs are factored in, “I ask myself is it worth it, and it never is.”
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PARIS: With her gamin good looks, hip-hop baggy jeans and power-lunch-size diamond earrings, Wiam Loukili, 28, is a determined young lady.
Trained as a pharmacist, Loukili was able to land a job in Paris just four days after her arrival from Corsica. And while she recently managed to rent a minuscule furnished studio in a respectable and diverse neighborhood, the road to such a foothold in Paris was frustrating and circuitous.
Before finding the studio, the best she could afford was a furnished bedroom in the apartment of a consultant who traveled a lot. Before that, she stayed on a temporary basis with friends.
Loukili's situation resembles that of many young professionals trying to get established in the French capital, stymied by an undersupply of apartments and compounded by landlords who fear that tenant-friendly laws could result in years of litigation with feckless tenants who won't pay the rent and won't move out.
Trying to avoid such situations, real estate agents and owners demand that prospective tenants prove that their after-tax income is at least three times - and sometimes four times - the amount of rent. That typically requires a dossier of work history, tax filings, personal references and frequently, in addition to satisfying the income requirements, a guaranty from a wealthy relative. Many landlords also demand hefty security deposits.
Today in Your Money
Young and on a budget in the big city
Overcoming hurdles to rent in Paris
Surviving in pricey Rome
As a result, it is not unusual for Parisians to remain home with their families until they are 28 or older, a phenomenon that was the basis for the 2001 film “Tanguy,” in which the well-to-do parents are driven to seek psychiatric treatment because their son won't move out.
Loukili had reckoned that her current monthly net of €1,850, or $2,400, would at best allow her to move into a cramped chambre de bonne, traditionally a separate-entrance room for a servant, many of which are now used as investment properties by wealthy Parisians.
Even small one-bedroom apartments in raffish neighborhoods rent for at least €800 a month and are out of her reach, Loukili said. The rent for her room in the shared 16th Arrondissement apartment was €600 a month.
Loukili left her native Morocco 10 years ago to study pharmacy in France. She was following in the footsteps of her mother, who a generation before had won a scholarship to the pharmacy school at Paul Sabatier University in Toulouse.
After finishing a seven-year course of study and receiving her doctorate in pharmacy, Loukili moved to Nice, where she had close friends. She worked in a pharmacy and rented her own apartment for €450 a month, although she needed a guarantor to co-sign the lease. “But here in Paris, a guarantor is not enough,” she said.
A romance that ended in heartbreak motivated her to spend eight months in Corsica, where she worked as a pharmacist, enjoyed the sea and nature, and met another man. They plan to marry next summer. She headed for Paris because the jobs in Corsica were seasonal. The two indulge in hours of telephone conversation each week, a habit that once cost as much as €200 a month but diminished when her landlord let her use an Internet phone.
Paris, she finds, is expensive. A lunch salad at a snack bar in the smart suburb where she works runs €6 a day. “It is just egg and a tomato and bread,” she complained. She buys some extra bread and sometimes economizes by buying lunch from a supermarket. Dinner, she cooks at home, usually pasta with tomato. She finds meat too expensive.
Her biggest expense besides rent is the €500 to €600 she sends each month to her sister in Toulouse, who is seeking a law degree. In Morocco, Loukili said, people are either rich or poor. Her family, she said, is on the rich side. But there are laws that prevent her father, who owns a construction company, from sending sufficient funds abroad.
Loukili says she does not go out often. She sees a film once a week, but is daunted by the admission price of around €10. She joins friends once a week at a restaurant, usually for Asian or Italian food.
Her biggest extravagance, she said, was spending on clothes and makeup. She hit the July sales with gusto.
She said her employers underpay her because she lacks a European Union certificate. Her work contract describes her as a salesgirl, although she functions on a higher level as a pharmacist. She has applied for the certificate, which could help to raise her net salary to €2,800, but even that would limit her budget to €900 for rent.
For now, she has reached her goal of an apartment in the €600 range, but her future, she said, may lie elsewhere. After marriage, she said, she and her husband may move south to Toulouse, Nice or Bordeaux.
–>
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