What should a person know about living in Brussels?

Edward Viaene

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Big Data & DevOps enthusiast, Co-Founder in4it.ioUpvoted by 

Ivo Popov

, lives in Brussels, Belgium (2010-present) 9y

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What should a person know about living in Brussels?

• Compared to other cities, houses are pretty good quality and landlords keep on refurbishing older apartments to make them prettier and newer (the government gives incentives to do this)
• You can find a 2 bedroom apartment for 800-1200 euro in the center (~100 square meters). You can of course find cheaper or more expensive as well, but this should give you a good estimate
• The following website has lots of properties, you can also find their the agents: http://www.immoweb.be
• There are 2 types of contracts: a 1 year contract (exactly 1 year) or a 3-9 year contract (you can break the contract whenever you want, but the first year you pay 3 years of rent to break the contract, the second year 2 months and the 3rd year 3 months). The latter one is the best one if you spend at least 2 years in a flat
• Cost of living is pretty cheap compared to other cities.
• Almost nobody living in Brussels speaks dutch, so if you don't need it for work, you'll get around just by knowing French. There are lots of workers that come to the city that are dutch speaking though, so you might hear more dutch during the day. They commute from Flanders, so they're all gone by 5pm
• Paperwork (like social security, ID card, etc) for non citizen, even though you are European, will likely take months to complete. Banks will not be very fond of opening you a bank account when your not a full resident yet, so make sure you have an appointment to get the right person dealing with your account. They basically need to print 100 papers and hit 1000 buttons to get you an account created without having a Belgian ID.
• There's a culture that you need an appointment for everything. If you need to get something done at your bank, be prepared to make an appointment and wait a week to see a person.
• Visa/MasterCard is not accepted everywhere. They use something called "Bancontact / Mister Cash" which is their own version of a debit card. Visa/MasterCard is only used for credit card or prepaid debit cards, not usually for debitcards.
• Social life: there's a lot of expats in the city, there's a lot of events, meetups, expat communities, so you can just subscribe to them to meet new people