Mrs Jackaroo

Great Thread!

Is there anyone living in the Melbourne area that could list what their actual monthly outgoings are please (I'm sure there must be other women out there like myself and Anya who have these lists!!). Its really difficult trying to work it out from this end without knowing exactly what needs to be paid for - medicare and rates etc.

There are three of us to feed, myself, hubby and a 4 year old daughter and we would be looking at renting initially.

TIA

Rachelle

carryon

No wonder i'm getting cofused, i thought Anya4oz was in Australia, so her calculation is from England converted to dollars, no wonder it was so high.
Mrs Dagboy, how will i be earning double, i'm in England and wanting to go to oz? Boy am i getting confused, or am i just thick? {Dont answer that}.
So think $50k would suffice! Thanks

Mrs Jackaroo

Not just you carryon!! I've been getting confused with this 55k figure too?!

Rachelle

anya4oz

Yes, it would be very useful. However, as our resident fashion icon Mr Dagboy pointed out, there are a *lot* of variables in budgets, even just in the car you drive & how many K's/month etc.

I wonder can we build a standard budget estimate model, which could then be extrapolated up/down by those of us who are not 'average'?

How about building monthly cost estimates for an average Melburnian family of, say, 2 adults & 2 kids, living in a paid-for house worth about $450000, living between say 5 and 15 km from the CBD, with 2 cars & 1 pet.

I think Mortgage/rent are too variable to include in the model.

Any Melburnian takers? Care to look at the figs I posted & pick them apart?

Would be useful to look at costs for Brissie, Adelaide, Sydney & Perth too.

Anya.

carryon

Hi ya Vickyo, yes we do seem to have simular situations dont we,
We thought, put nice chunk of wedge down on a house, if not buy outright, then live on one wage, but getting a little worried now as to if we could survive on this.
If my wife worked full time here{shes the nurse} we could manage quite well, even with a mortgage.
How does your hubby feel about being a househusband?{or is he already}, iv'e always worked and think it would be a culture shock for me, but prepared to give it a go! i do all the housework anyways so no prob with that side of things. What age are the sprogs? carryon!

anya4oz

Yes I am in the UK at the mo, but my calcs were built directly in AU$, not converted from GBP. I built the cost model from various snippets on this forum, a lot of web research, asking friends/contacts in Melbourne, etc.

I couldn't just do a straight conversion from our UK living costs as there are too many different factors.

It does look like Sydney & Melbourne living costs are quite a bit higher (Mel poss about 40% higher than Brissie for instance), so it's probably worth looking at that GoMatilda cost of living calculator for your destination (posted somewhere on this thread)& working from there.

Anya.

vicky o

Hubby works as a manager for Bt at the mo. But his job is much more flexible than mine so he has taken on the role of "mother" for a little while now.
Our kids are 3and a half, and 2 and a half.

We've looked at building our own house as well. We'd definately need a bit of a mortgage for that though. We've been looking at all the real estate sites and you can get a really decent sized house with a pool for about $300,000.

Vicky

carryon

Vickyo, weve been checking the real estate sites for over a year now, certainly get a lot for your money.
I've just checked that Gomatilda calculator thing, and it comes out quite good, we have a combined income of about £30k, for perth and Adelaide it equates to $50k, which my wife could earn on her own, also have you noticed house prices are on the slide in Perth just now. I dont think you could suvive doing part time though could you?
How have you found all the red tape for your nursing papers, is it quite straight forward, we had some time ago contacted Victoria and Queensland who said they would sponsor wiffy, are you going down the state sponsored route?
Good luck....... Carryon....

Mrs Jackaroo

This site gives a good indication of the cost of living in Perth if anyone is interested. Its based on a family of four with two cars and a dog! Its quite good because it breaks all the costs down for you!

http://www.aussiemove.com/aus/costlive.asp

Hope this is of use to someone!

Cheers

Rachelle

Jaykay

Hi Rachelle

We are also a 2 adult, 1 child (5 year old daughter) family. Our monthly outgoings are as follows:

Rent - $185 per week (we rent a friends house so may be a bit lower than normal).
Food - $600-$700 per month.
Petrol - $35-$40 per week, depending on what we do and where we go. We are a one car family at the moment.
Mobile Phone $21 per month. Currently also a one mobile phone family, but we have seen a pre paid for $75, so will probably buy this for other half.
School fees - $1200 per year. This includes uniforms (both summer and winter, and sports).
Gas - $20? We've only had one gas bill so far so not really sure.
Electricity $25? Once again, only had one so not really sure. The bills are quarterly though.
Phone $50 per month.
Internet $60 per month. This is for broadband.
Car Insurance/Rego $800 per year.
Phone Card $20 per month (for international calls)
Outings/Activities - $200 per month. This also includes all of our daughters sports groups i.e. swimming lessons, pee wee tennis, pee wee netball, kids gymnastics.
Clothes - No idea as I haven't needed to buy anything for a while....okay I bought 3 new t-shirts the other day but they were only $15 each.

Can't think of anything else offhand, but I know there's more as our bank balance keeps depleting.

We are also on a one income wage at the moment. I'm doing about 30 hours a week @ $24 per hour, so on average bring in just over $1000 per fortnight.
This doesn't actually cover our outgoings, so we are eating into our savings a little bit.

Hope this helps some.

Regards

Mrs Jackaroo

Thanks ever so much for taking the time to post this Jay Kay! I've printed it off and its now in my 'Australia' file!!

Cheers

Rachelle

Mrs Jackaroo

How long have you been out there JayKay? Where abouts in Melbourne are you? Has your little girl settled in OK? Soooo many questions!! LOL

TIA

Rachelle

Simmo

Hi Guys
Can't be too helpful on this information because my family unit is double income ,no kids.....but what I do know is that all of my adult life in the UK I used to work 2 jobs, pretty much just to survive and lived in a one bedroom ground floor flat which we eventually rented out when we moved out here for around 75 pounds..(the rent...not the move..) and for the equivalent sum of money we were renting a 3 bedroom house with pool,2 kms form the beach in Perth...northern suburbs, I am not saying it is cheap to live here, but I have been back to the UK 3 times in my 8 years here and there is no way on earth that I could afford to live back over there.
On my last trip over when I picked up the hire car and they said it was best to pay for a full tank of fuel up front and then asked me to hand over the equivalent of 120 bucks I almost had a heart attack......
Simmo

Jaykay

Hi Rachelle

I've been back in Melbourne since September last year, and my other half has been here since February.

I'd lived in Melbourne for 20 years before going on a 9 month holiday to the UK in 1993 (I was born there) and I came back 10 years later.

Our daughter, Alana, has settled in really well. She has changed so much (for the better) since we've moved here. She loves being outside now, whereas in the UK she was happy just to sit in front of the TV.
She now goes to lots of different sports clubs, whereas in the UK there wasn't that much around for her to do.

We live in Kilsyth, which is where I grew up too, so it's all very familiar to me.

My other half, Nick, had never been to Australia before he came here, so it's all new and exciting to him. He's also settled in really well, but he did have a bit of trouble understanding what some of the real ocker australians were saying, but he's got used to the accent now.

Regards