Happy New Year everyone.

Trying to research quality of living and am trying to work out cost of living.

I have 2 and a half job offers in Auckland, Surrey (just outside Vancouver) and the half in Calgary

At the mo
3 bed victorian terrace, Vectra V6
Monthly
Housing (mortgage, tax, insurance) £560
Utilities (gas, elec, water) £70
Car (insurance, tax, service, fuel) £190
Food £95
Excl luxuries

I just wondered how it would compare with people in the above areas.
I live alone, so i know the bills are low!!

We've been looking into this too. We've been looking at Vancouver Island as far as properties go. Property looks to be around 50-60% of the equivalent house here (though most of the properties on Vancouver Island have Ocean or Mountain or Forest views, which would attract a healthy premium over here in England).

Cars - I've had a quick look tonight - a Chevrolet Impala V6 3.5 which seems to be a bigger Mondeo type thing is about £11750 wheras the cheapest 1.8 Mondeo here is £15995.

Fuel - I found a site for gas (petrol) in Toronto where the highest cost was £0.41 per litre (think unleaded is £0.89 per litre here).

Food looks cheaper - some of it obscenely so. Stuff like Coca Cola, Nescafe and Toilet Rolls are a lot cheaper. (Struggled to find an online site though to compare to Tesco / Asda etc).

Not looked any further than that yet, though we want to find out cost of healthcare, dental care, opticians, education etc etc. I believe there is a basic Health Service, but I've no idea how much health insurance is.

From what I've found (not looked too much into it though) - wages are less over in Canada compared to the UK. However, they'd have to be a lot less to cancel out the benefit of the cheaper cost of living.

We've only been looking into this for a short while so I may be off the mark!

HTH

My first post - Excellent forum by the way

This has been discussed quite a bit in the past and an excellent way to get a quick overview and a lot of info is to use the search function - halfway up the screen on the right.

Welcome!

For information on Alberta - Judy in Calgary - is your best bet. I know for sure that she has just done a great posting about alberta health care and includes alot about what is included in it.

I agree - think it was yonk - with doing a search as most of these topics have been covered before and if i am not mistaken not too long ago.

Have a read through and then ask more specific questions as I think it is easier to get all of your info together that way

The other guys are correct there was a thread a while back particularly about costs of food shopping and it seemed to indicate that it was generally much more expensive in Canada than you might think.
I believe you cannot change the costs into pounds like you have done and you have to base your assumptions on earning dollars and the best way is to assume $1 = £1 in terms of earnings/spending power which means that for example fuel costs are very similar really.
We are going over tomorrow for 2 weeks so will be looking into these kinds of things in much more detail ourselves.
Will post any useful things we find when back.

Even if you don't attempt to adjust for earnings it's not as cheap as it looks on holiday. Less obvious items such as car insurance are very expensive. The cars are less well engineered and the distances greater cancelling out the lower cost of gas, when we were in England in November we giggled at the low cost of operating the rental car there (Fiat Punto) compared with the Honda here.

Absolutely agree. Anyone who moves here and plans their financial life around dividing everything by 2.23 (or whatever the rate is) is in for a tremendous shock. The only exception IMHO is if you are earning piles of cash here (which most of us arent) or are a gentleman(lady) of 'independent means' with an income in GBP.

During my trip back to UK last year I was 'mazed by how cheap a lot of things were. Materially, with the exception of a bigger house, I was probably better off in UK than I am in Canada.

In broad terms I think property is the big win; after that it's a wash.
Emigrating provides a one time cash infusion so long as you don't buy a house (or mansion) here that costs the same as the house (or flat) you sold there. You can upgrade a fair bit in terms of space and features and be better off. However, if want to go back you're in big trouble. If you don't have a house in the UK to start with then emigrating (to Canada) doesn't make much of a difference financially. There might be other reasons to do it, of course.

Now, can anyone help with gas consumption in Canada? We drove very gently for a tank of gas and managed 270 miles on 57 liters, is that better or worse than the 38mpg shown on the Fiat's computer?

270 miles on 57 liters! If your car is telling you that you averaged 38 mpg for this journey then it could well be incorrect.

No, no, the Fiat we rented in England had a computer and showed 38mpg. The Honda we're enduring here has no computer but seems to use a lot of gas. It had just been serviced (35,000 mile service : $2300 btw) so we drove very carefully for a tank and got 270miles, it took 57 liters to fill but I can't do the sums to work out how much that is in English money.

Thanks for the info so far.

I've seen some other £1=$1 posts but was wanting a local breakdown on what my equivalent would be there so I could work out what percentage of my wage would be left every month.

I'm hoping using percentages would be a more accurate way of looking at finances

270 miles or Km's? This is a US spec car right? 57 litres is around 12.8 imperial gallons so that would give 21 miles per gallon. Not impressive for an effeminate SUV crossover at all.

Apart from restating the advice to use the search function to aid your research, percentages is one way to get an idea of cost of living. But, first you need to understand what income you expect/will settle for and what that means after tax, CPP, EI etc. This will all vary depending on where you live.

The 'ouch' factors in moving to Canada are Car Insurance (mine was upwards of $3k pa. for two years running and is still $1850 this year), fuel/heating/electric costs and the stupid purely Canadian things like paying for incoming cellphone calls etc.

Miles. ****ing thing; as soon as we move it'll be gone.

My apologies, I got the wrong end of the stick.The Honda has roughly a 15 gallon tank. This would mean the Honda was averaging about 18 mpg. Their are 3.78 litres to a gallon (American gallon slightly more than European gallon I believe!) This is a rough estimate though as I do not know if the car was completely empty or still had some gas left. Plus there is the reserve tank to consider which I do not know. Plus Canada's gallon may differ slightly from the American gallon. But even so you could not of been averaging more than 18-23 mpg. To answer your question of cost, where I live in England gas is 86.9 pence per liter. Again it varies enormously but based on my local gas prices it would cost you £50.00 to fill that particular vehicle. Or just over $100 given the exchange rate.