If I was able to move to Vancouver how much would I need to earn to live there comfortably? I know there are plenty of variables but any advice would be appreciated.

Define comfortably?

Enough to have a few dollars left at the end of the month, really.

just you? Partner? Kids? Comfortably means eat out once a week, two internaitonal holidays, mercedes in the garage or shopping at walmart & knitting your own soap. In short, just how long a piece of string?

$10 a month more than all of your monthly expenses should do it

Sound and well made advice !!

LOL!

OP, as you can tell from the responses above, you need to be more specific to get any meaningful help.

How many of you in the family, what type of house are you after, how many cars will you be running, in a suburb or central Vancouver, do you want to eat out every day and ski every weekend, etc, etc?

If you can give a bit more info, then you should get some sensible answers.

Go to the Welcome BC website for more specific answers. www.welcomebc.ca
They have a fair bit of information for immigrants on the site, including the average wages and salaries of residents.
Click the link for immigration

Thank you, Mr Micawber!

Charles Dickens, an actual member of British Expats? Who would have thought?!

Especially since he never travelled abroad (like many unrealistic members of our esteemed community).

I thought he made a couple of trips to the US.

Possibly. As a tourist. Pedant.

Some people here will tell you that it is impossible to live in this part of BC on anything less than 100K a year.
We live very happily on half that.

The only person who can really judge is you.
Look at craigslist and the property website mls.ca for rentals and houses for sale in the areas you might be interested in. That will give you basic housing costs for a variety of properties. Look them up on Google Streetview and see what the areas are like, as the insides can look nice but outside.

I would say we live just as well here as we did in the UK on less money, but then we don't live in the big city, we have no kids, we don't have flash cars and we don't eat out all the time.

If that is your preference, then maybe $100K is nearer the mark.

It is worth noting that if you rent somewhere and have to pay your own bills (which I think is preferable as that helps you to build up your credit history here) BC Hydro will require a big deposit as you have never been a customer before. So will the gas supplier, if you have it.


The start-up costs are more than the regular monthly expenses. Make sure that you have a nice fat bank balance when you get here to cover all that.

.

Martin Chuzzlewit has some bits set in the US. I assumed that's cos he'd been there.

Edit: yes - he did: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Chuzzlewit