raauhs

I am British and I work and live in London.I work as a Plant Engineer and salary is £2600 a month After TAX.we are a family of 4 (Wife plus 2 kids) and Have own 3 bed house .

I have been offered a job In Riyadh .The salary offered is £4000 a month Tax free along with free accommodation,health insurance and twice returns flights to Uk.

I am confused whether to take this opportunity or not.Kids are doing A levels so will be moving alone .

Is it worth it to go there or .....

any suggestions will be highly appreciated.

nonthaburi

Basically you're being offered a 50% payrise to work in Riyadh. Seeing how you're going to be on your own that's all you have to think about. Housing covered, no Saudi school fees to pay. Can you put up with being away from the family? That's your only thing to consider.

Most companies will give 30 days plus holidays at the two Eids.

BA has daily flights that start at about 500GBP.

Riyadh is okay though once you find your feet. There is a good social scene, with a lot of parties etc.

DXBtoDOH

You send 2600 GBP home each month to allow your family to maintain their current lifestyle. You spend 1,000 GBP just to live. Is it worth the potential 400 GBP savings?

I don’t think so.

Not good enough.

nonthaburi

1000GBP a month to live on in Riyadh!!!! What is he going to be doing?

Riyadh isn't Dubai. It's very cheap to live. I would put it the other way round. 400 to live on and 1000 saved.

Johnnyboy11

You're only provisionally tax-free until you've passed the Automatic Overseas Test, so April 2019 at the earliest.

DXBtoDOH

I defer to your superior knowledge of the cost of living in Riyadh. But surely between food, transportation, meals out just to be with other expats and all that must add up to more than £400 a month, even in Riyadh?

Even if that's totally feasible, I'd still be factoring in maintaining the NI and compensating for any forgone pension. Then there's the dirty secret many expats don't realise: the cost of returning to the UK at the end of the expat stint. If you can seamlessly transit from a Saudi job to a UK job with no money lost, brilliant, but many people end up taking half a year or longer to find a new job in the UK and often burn through a lot of their savings just to live.

That's why £1000 extra per month won't get me out of bed. It really is not that much extra money especially when the trade off is being away from family. An extra £5,000 a month? Now we're talking.

CJPTFC

What you consider 'worth it' in terms of additional savings is your business and differs from person to person.

What I would advise though, is to consider the possibility of additional trips home over and above your company allowance. With the family not being here it can be hard. I did a year of that before they moved over and there were a few long weekends at my own expense, and it's not just the price of a flight.

Alternatively, with your kids being older, the family may want to meet up with you in Dubai for a long weekend, and that costs a fortune!!

Not trying to put you off mate, just a bit of personal experience that I had recently.

sicklyman

this is a very good point and with children, a wife and a home in the UK, I'm not sure you will qualify even if you make it to April 2019.

Do not underestimate the strain it will put on your family relationships. It will basically amplify any issues you already have and only you know whether your marriage is strong enough to cope with. Or, incidentally, whether your kids are better off without their father while they go through the rite of passage that it is A-Levels and going to uni.

Bear in mind that many (all?) companies have a 90-day probation period during which they won't issue you with an exit visa so no way to visit family.

I agree that £1,000/month to live in Riyadh for a single guy is an overestimate.

Finally, what will this do for your CV? Depending on your age, it might be a better decision to stay in the UK market for your medium-/long-term career plans. Maybe not in engineering though... I can't say.

scot47

The impact on CV is important. For many jobs a spell in KSA is a real black mark. I tolerated that because my strategy ws to work in KSA until I retired. I did and left when I was 64.

bennygoodman

People come over here in order to save a lot of money in a short space of time, on that wage you would not be able to save very much.
Depending on where your company put you your wife will probably hate the place because on that salary you won't be in any kind of decent accommodation so that will leave you on your own over here with twice yearly visits home unless you want to pay £600 to get yourself home now and again.
You won't be spending much money as there is nothing to spend it on but then you might get tempted to fly or drive out to one of the UAE states for the odd weekend which again will eat into your money that you want to send home.

Tahir84

scot47, I am struggling to understand (due to naivety on my part mostly) but can you elaborate more on the above statement.
Is this true for, say engineering jobs in Railways for example as GCC countries are throwing a fair amount of money competing to have the best rail/transit system?
I thought having international experience in scenarios as above would be a good thing on the CV?

scot47

Not in my experience. Maybe Rail is different ?

jam25mack

I wouldn't for that amount of cash....

DXBtoDOH

It's a generalisation but there's also truth to it (I'm in agreement with Scot47 for once )

People greatly overestimate the value of GCC work experience on their CVs. Most employers in the UK don't know what to make of it, and others do have experience in the GCC and know what it actually entails and aren't that impressed. The dynamics of managing a complicated engineering or construction project in the GCC is not the same as in the UK.

For a talented and capable person, your GCC experience won't gain you the position over a comparable candidate with no GCC or international experience, unless the employer is specifically looking for someone with some GCC experience. But all the big engineering/design firms do plenty of oversea work from their UK offices so you can still have overseas exposure while working from the UK.

I take comfort in that I was brought out here by the company and will be sent back by the same company so my bases are sort of covered. But I don't anticipate my years in the GCC to allow me to leapfrog over the competition should I change employers once back in the UK.

scot47

In education, a spell of KSA on your CV is THE END.


OK if you will continue in the region until retiremenet but not if u want to come back to the west.