Cost of Furniture

Hello All,
I am moving to Sao Paulo next month and need to know the approximate cost of furniture.  Is it twice as expensive?  3x as expensive?  This info is needed for insuring my belongings that are being transported to Brazil.  Thanks for your help!

Hi geogiraffe and welcome to Expat.com!

Hope that you'll soon be enlightened.

Harmonie.;)

Hi Geo,

Unless your furniture is extremely valuable or antiques with a lot of sentimental value you would be better off not shipping them to Brazil, unless your company here is willing to assume all or part of the cost. It is extremely expensive.

Depending on the quality of furniture you want to buy here, it can range from extremely inexpensive (paying cash in places like Casas Bahia, Ponto Frio, Maribras) to very expensive at top-end exclusive furniture shops.

You can probably furnish a 1 bedroom apartment with new refrigerator, stove, microwave, washing machine, sofa, chairs, bed, dresser, closet, kitchen table & chairs, television, stereo, etc., on a budget of about R$10.000 if you try hard. That would be about $5,000 US.

Cheers,
William James Woodward - Brazil Animator, Expat-blog

To get an idea of what things cost here, I went online to walmart.com.br and tokstok.com.br (their version of IKEA).

And I agree with the above post, don't ship anything. It will cost you more in shipping, customs and duties than you can get them for here.

Good luck with the move,
Mariza