Glossary · Lifestyle and budget

Lifestyle tier

Mundevo's four-step scale (frugal / balanced / comfortable / premium) for how much you spend relative to the median resident.

Lifestyle tiers are how Mundevo maps a person's spending preferences onto the cost-of-living basket. Each tier has two multipliers: one for essentials (housing, food, transport, utilities, healthcare) and one for leisure. Frugal scales essentials to 0.85× and leisure to 0.4×; premium scales them to 1.35× and 2.5× respectively.

The tiers also map to a housing percentile — frugal targets the 25th percentile of local rent (shared or peripheral), balanced targets the 50th (median), comfortable the 70th, premium the 90th (top-tier neighborhoods). This is why the salary delta between tiers is steep: rent does most of the heavy lifting.

A frugal-tier salary in an expensive city often beats a premium-tier salary in a cheap one. The salary-needed pages show all four tiers so you can pick the trade-off that matches your priorities: same lifestyle in a cheaper city, or different lifestyle in the same city.

Where Mundevo uses this

Calculator — /calculator
Methodology — /methodology

Related terms

Housing percentile

Where in the local rent distribution your housing budget puts you — 25th = budget, 50th = median, 70th = comfortable, 90th = top-tier.

Essentials multiplier

The factor applied to the essentials basket (housing, food, transport, utilities, healthcare) at a given lifestyle tier.

Leisure multiplier

The factor applied to the leisure budget (dining out, travel, entertainment) at a given lifestyle tier.

Savings rate

The fraction of your net income set aside each month — Mundevo defaults to 10% of net when computing required salary.

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