Never Retire: What Daily Food and Drink Really Cost in Spain

September field notes on food, drink, and lifestyle

Never Retire is field notes from midlife abroad.

I write from Spain, but this isn’t a travel blog. It’s a lens on how daily costs, routines, and choices add up to a second act that works—financially, emotionally, and practically.

Every post brings the numbers, the stories, and the takeaways you can use to build a life that doesn’t coast and doesn’t quit.

• In September, here’s what we spent on food and drink in Valencia:

  • €178.12 in Russafa Market and the bakery

  • €259.57 in supermarkets (milk, yogurt, granola, chips, some vegetables, and household items)

  • €932.45 eating out in restaurants, bars, and cafés

That’s €1,370.14 total between home and out.

🇪🇸 The real story isn’t just the cost—it’s the lifestyle behind these numbers.

Those numbers don’t just show what I spent—they show how different daily life in Spain feels compared to the U.S.

Markets aren’t a special trip. They’re part of my morning routine. Bread from the bakery or chicken that doesn’t come in supermarket packaging isn’t a splurge—it’s the default. Eating out doesn’t mean an event with a huge bill plus a 20% tip.

The rhythm and accessibility is what makes eating well here affordable. Not “cheap”—affordable. The kind of affordable that lets you live in the center of a city and still eat like a human being every day, without gamified apps, packets of ketchup, or guilt.

And that’s the lesson for you wherever you are: the biggest financial shifts don’t come from cutting or optimizing. They come from structural changes in your daily life. When something is built into the city around you—walkable markets, neighborhood cafés, social eating—you don’t have to fight willpower. Cost and quality line up naturally.

That’s what September’s €1,370 shows me. Not just what we spent, but how rhythm shapes the whole flow of money, health, and time.

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One Small Win

Track one category of spending for a week—not to cut it, but to really notice the lifestyle behind it.

Is it driven by convenience, habit, or structure? The answer will tell you more than the raw number—and whether your environment is setting you up to live the way you actually want to.

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One small story

The place I buy chicken (and eggs) from in Russafa Market makes a wide variety of chicken hamburgers.

Hamburguesas de pollo con… lo que sea.

But it’s not just whatever. They do an incredible job. They have chicken hamburgers with everything from vegetables to apples to morcilla, which is blood sausage. The latter is among my favorites. But they don’t have them every day. When they do, they sell. They’re popular.

So, the other day, they told me they’d have them tomorrow. I walked up to the counter the next day and the lady had two hamburguesas de pollo con morcilla set aside for me.

It’s little things like that that make me feel like my routines and rituals are part of something bigger.

If you enjoyed this, paid subscribers will get more posts like this on food, drink, and other categories—from rent to utilities to daily work rhythms—with the numbers, notes, and stories.