Howefamily

I miss the lorries, I used to borrow a 1975 Bedford TK before I had a trailer that I towed with a Jeep cherokee.
I cannot imagine getting away with towing with a small SUV now, I think the transport police would stop me.
It has to be a truck..... dreams on....

dbd33

Deeper and deeper! My usage of "you" was lax there. I meant that, in the case that one would routinely incur trailering fees, one did not own a trailer. I also failed to localize insasmuch as horses here typically travel by trailer, not lorry as in the UK.

Another clarification is that the buck a click mentioned is both ways so, for example, it was a little over $400 to have a horse delivered from 200 kilometres away.

dbd33

For the avoidance of further confusion, "trailer" does not imply something one might throw behind an MG to take the bins to the dump.

Paul_Shepherd

Wow those are pricey horses.... a friend I used to work with owns two horse...his wife rides, but they have a big enough piece of land to keep them and look after them themselves.... even produce their own hay, I often help out with that. You will have to excuse my ignorance, I dont know a great deal about horses, but from the sound of it....yours are quite the rolling elite horses!

dbd33

Er, no. This is the far other extreme of the horse world, the cash value of these horses is just above their meat price.

Paul_Shepherd

Sound the same as my friends horses then. Maybe its cheaper for them as they have their own barn which they built themselves and carry out a lot of the horse sustenance/maintenance themselves apart from the odd vet bill.

dbd33

It's another thing. I enjoyed having horses at home but, if it's riding you're interested in, as opposed to horsekeeping, then boarding them is the way to go.

Paul_Shepherd

Ok, see where your coming from now. My friends are more horsekeeping really...they don't out that often.

Almost Canadian

Doesn't that depend upon how much you are prepared to put up with?

We have our own indoor stalls at our place, but no indoor arena. We have an outdoor arena which those that are interested in such things use to ride their horses for hours every day during the summer. The same people "ride" their horses most days throughout the winter too. They often have to use the tractor to plough a sufficiently wide track around our pastures to enable them to do so. Spruce Meadows, it isn't but they can do a very good impression of 18th century settlers, albeit with more modern Muck Boots.

When they are done, they can put the horses into the barn to cool down as they allow them to grow their coats.

It isn't my idea of fun, but they appear to love it. I am happy as I always believed that I would have had to pay to cover our arena by now.

dbd33

Yes, and how much time you're able to devote. The couple of hours on Sunday morning I used to spend picking paddocks is now an hour in the saddle. Ideally one would have an indoor at home, look after the horses oneself and have a coach come over a couple of times a week. We lack time and money to support that. Obviously it's easier if one person works at home and can be there for vet, farrier and feed truck.

bats

Lawn ornaments?

Our good friends here have always had horses boarding others in their barn to be able to afford the horses. Now one of them is breeding horses and no longer rides. They cost a lot to manage and rear even with doing all of the turning out and mucking out themselves.

dbd33

I dunno, when we had two horses and a donkey at home the major costs were about $1000/year in hay and the farrier every six weeks at say $150 a time. There was work involved and inconvenience but not very much money.

Siouxie

Perhaps we could get back to actual cost of living in the London area, for the OP's sake?

Cheers!

dbd33

Horse boarding will be slightly cheaper there.

Otherwise it's the same answers as ever, cost of everything except houses is about the same overall. If your move involves a big enough increase in pay to offset the cost of moving, or if your employer is funding the move, then it's all down to the price of houses.

It's still a financial win to move to Canada if you move from a part of the UK with expensive houses to a part of Canada with cheap ones, but those houses are, of course, cheap for a reason. Someone considering moving from London to London Ont. for the financial benefit should also consider moving to Wigan. Similarly, someone considering trading in a house in Wigan (or on a recent thread Belfast) for one in Vancouver or the GTA should consider how well off they'd feel if they moved to Camden Town instead.

I would say that moving to Canada is no longer the automatic win in material standards it once was. It's no longer a simple equation of trading your culture and your soul for another bathroom and a newer minivan.

rivingtonpike

I think your point is a very good one. When we moved it was from Richmond, South West London and our choice of house was very kind to us (in terms of resale). When we moved to Vancouver Island, we were able to afford the sort of place we could only dream of in a similar part of Greater London. As DBD says, maybe we could have got something comparable in Wigan, but, well....

So yes, I think it depends to a large degree what your starting point was and where you end up. BC is considered expensive to many, but for those who came from already expensive areas, it seemed very reasonable. I admit Canada has been kind to us in terms of careers - with a lot of hard work. But for us, I think it's fair to say our standard of living has increased substantially over the last few years.