Viagemcast 🇺🇸

How expensive is Norway? That said, the cost depends on your comparison country and city. For example, compared to New York, the costs of living, dining, and groceries are lower in Oslo. However, if you compare prices with São Paulo, these costs are higher in Oslo. Just so you know, I used Numbeo for these comparisons.

So, is Norway expensive? It depends! Prices in Norway can actually be lower for some items. For instance, we've been looking at baby items and found that some have an average price lower in Norway.

For example, buying onesies and no-scratch mittens in Norway could save us about 6 NOK per item. Baby toothbrushes and shampoos might save an average of 3 NOK per item, and a bottle brush could save about 18 NOK. Larger items, like high chairs, could save us up to 2,800 NOK! Choosing carefully where to buy items could save us a total of almost 4,000 NOK.

If you are an expatriate in Norway, I recommend checking if it’s worth buying items in your home country and bringing them to Norway. Here's how we did it:

1. We prepared a spreadsheet with 8 columns: Quantity, Item, Home Country, Total Home Country, Norway, Total Norway, Buy where?, and Difference.
   
   
   
   

2. We input prices from my home country in column C and from Norway in column E. The "Total Home Country" column was a multiplication of column A (quantity) and column C (price in the home country). If you're not familiar with formulas, this is the formula for line 3: =A3*C3 (just copy and paste).

3. We repeated the same procedure for prices in Norway, calculating the total in Norway with the formula =E3*A3.

4. The "Buy where?" column compares the prices between my home country and Norway, indicating the country with the lowest price. The formula for line 3 is: =IF(OR(ISBLANK(C3),ISBLANK(E3)),"",IF(D3*$K$1>F3,"Norway","Home country")).

5. The difference is calculated in the last column using the formula =IF(G3="","",IF(D3*$K$1-F3>0,D3*$K$1-F3,(D3*$K$1-F3)*-1)).