Canadaway

Hi all.

We just got our PPR a week ago and are looking forward to moving over to Vancouver. However we want to try and be prepared as much as possible.
I am sure that there will be many up's & downs but if any one can give me any advice I would appreciate it.

A bit of background info: Me (age 42), Wife (41), 2 kids (14 & 7). No jobs lined up, but hope to be able to find something suitable. Hope to be able to buy a house outright but that’s roughly it.

As I said all advice would be appreciated, however Good, Bad & Ugly.

Beebop

Great naturist beach!

acer rose

GOOD: the great outdoors on your doorstep

BAD: the cost of day-to day living

UGLY: Cambie at rush hour

I hope you have visited to get some idea about the place, the costs, the opportunities etc. There is lots of great information on the forum about whether to buy a car, how to get licenced, what housing costs, how much groceries will cost so have a good old browse and when you've done that, explore the searching options.

There are currently lots of minimum wage jobs available so you should be able to pick something up to help eke out your savings (bring lots of those!) if you arrive with nothing lined up. Depending on your skills, you may also walk into a relevant job - I have heard both sides of the loads of work/no work argument since I arrived.

Most of all, remember why you're making the move and keep remembering those things when times get tough. Enjoy!

Canadaway

Thanks for the posts so far. Is the cost of living really that bad? I'm a secondary teacher here so I recon I will have to re-train. Anyone got a ballpark figure of the amount of salary required to have a relatively comfortable lifestyle?

iaink

In a not so recent thread opinion hovered around the $80k and up level for a family of 4 IIRC. Vancouver is expensive.

Ill see if I can dig out a link.

Could have been this one
http://britishexpats.com/forum/showthread.php?t=387315
or this one
http://britishexpats.com/forum/showthread.php?t=384500

No time to check now, Ive got to get home in time to take Junior skating.

Canadaway

Thanks for the info.
How are property prices doing generally? has there been any reduction/fall? I know that BC has seen huge gains over the years but I wonder if they have stalled as in the states and to some degree over here.

canuckgirl

BC house prices have stalled-sort of. They aren't going up by 20% or whatever but Vancouver is still crazy expensive. A house on the west side can easliy cost 1 million dollars!

I grew up in vancouver but am very happy to be in the more sane (some may say boring!) Victoira.
What I like about Vancouver: Stanley Park, great shopping and restaurants.


What I hate; TRAFFIC! So many great things to do-but such a hassle getting to them.CRIME! Property and car theft is huge due to an awful, out of control drug problem. My whole family live in vancouver- VERY nice areas (Shaugnessay, Kerrisdale, Dunbar and West Van) and every one of them as been broken into at least once.

The rain- it rains twice as much in Vancouver as Victoria due to the rainshadow effect (I don't understand it but I love it).

I guess I just miss the Vancouver of the 70's-if you didn't know it then perhaps it looks great to you now.
Best of luck- make sure to visit Vancouver Island!

(Vancouver on a sunny day at about 10am on a Sunday is paradise!)

MonkeyMagic

Holy sh#t !! those two threads (apart from being very long, and hugely informative), have really got me concerned about our plans to move to Canada

Yes, I realise that there are some posters out there that don't seem to believe that salary expectations are important and that equipping yourself with the correct atttitude is what counts......and I accept that for some that may well hold true, however for myself, and I'm sure many others, income is a deciding factor.

Myself and my wife have a joint income of approximately £65k, however this is offset (dramatically) by a £125k mortgage (2 bed flat), student loan repayments (both of us) and £600/month chidcare costs for our baby daughter. Our standard of living is comfortable, by which I mean that we can afford to eat well (we cook...a lot, and ingredients can (sadly) cost more than 'ready-meals'), and can afford to occassionally eat out (once every few months); additionally we run a 6 year old Golf TDI (which my wife uses to get to work and also drop off our daughter at childcare; also very fuel efficient), and a 4 year old Honda Fireblade which I commute on (cheaper to run than a car and couldn't face the 1 hour plus commute each way in a car - takes 25 minutes on bike )

We believed (possibly naively) that we could exist in much the same manner in Canada, but with the benefit of mountains and snow within reach, but now I'm not so sure - if i earned the Canadian equivalent of my salary could I afford the canadian eqivalent of my current mortgage, i.e. $280k, and would that be sufficient for a 3 bed house in a 'reasonable' neighbourhood?

I really don't want to believe that our situation, and standard of living, would reduce if we moved to Vancouver

cheers
stu

jempee

Stu
Not sure where peeps think they need $80 up a year to live for a family of four. We have nothing like that coming in and we are living veryyyyyy comfortably on VI. Perhaps there is a big differnece between here and Vancouver.

MonkeyMagic

Reading through some other posts and comments, you could have a point We hadn't originally considered VI, but it's looking increasingly attractive.

stu

dingbat

Based on what you have said, I cannot see any financial advantage to moving, unless you both have higher than average paid jobs lined up, that you are definitely walking into. Childcare for a young child can costs anything from $800 up - but that is a larger chunk from a $Can salary than your £600. Vancouver is very expensive to live and no, $280k will not get you anything in a nice area close to town, unless you live in a small two bed apartment. www.mls.ca if you would like to check yourself. Europe has snow and mountains within reach....travel is very cheap there compared to here. Look up any destination in Canada flying from Vancouver.

www.aircanada.com or www.westjet.com to give you an idea.

Vancouver is a nice place just to visit, I enjoyed it when I came as a tourist.

Butch Cassidy

Having spent quite a while looking thru www.mls.ca I would agree with dingbat that $280K isnt going to get you much in the vancouver area, (it will get you less in Calgary oddly enough).
Flights within Canada (and even in to the States) are similarly priced wether Van or Cal, BUT flights to asia are better.

canuckgirl

I think Stu meant he could afford a 280,000 mortage.

Sadly a decent house in any area of the city proper is going to be over $600,000. If you are willing to live outside of the actual city- say Burnaby (very nice) then maybe you could find something.
Victoria is very expensive too. You can though get a very nice house here in the 500,000 range.
I hope your dreams to move here aren't dashed by all this. Look outside the lower mainland and you can do much much better.

bazzz

These are my observations having arrived in January. We were working in London previously (couple with no kids), so you can adjust things as necessary.

Salary-wise, IF you can get a job at the same level, you should expect to be earning around 40-50% less than in London. I say IF because they're pretty parochial over here, so if you don't have "Canadian experience" or the correct paper credentials, then you'll likely have to regress a good few years in career terms.

Property prices certainly seem pretty high here; although renting is a lot more affordable - I'd say like-for-like prices are probably around a third of those in London. If you're not obsessed with owning your own home that would probably be a much cheaper option.

Groceries are probably about the same - so in real terms a fair bit more expensive. The trick with Safeway seems to be to wait until they have things on offer then stock up. We don't have a car so haven't really ventured beyond downtown for shopping. It was pretty when we first arrived - all we could find was the local "gourmet" "organic" outlet which was outrageously expensive. Booze is fairly similarly priced - Australian/American wine seems a fair bit cheaper than European.

Eating out is pretty cheap - especially sushi. A day's skiing is a lot cheaper.

JimandNic

I'm in agreement with pretty much all of the above posts.

One more thing to add to the "more expensive in Vancouver list" - car insurance - our car insurance costs have tripled since moving from the UK - yikes. (they were even higher when we lived in Toronto last year - but that may be a good indication of the state of driving over there )

There's no getting around it, Vancouver is a very expensive place to live. We've lived in Vancouver and Toronto and comparing the two:
- groceries are more expensive in Vancouver,
- house prices are crazy-high in Vancouver- anything with 2 bedrooms (approx 800 sq ft) anywhere close to downtown are going for at around $400k - the market has slowed down (a bit) since the frenzy of last year but prices are not dropping by any means.
- wages are slightly lower in Vancouver. Many people we know have two (or three) jobs just to make ends meet.
- utilities are pretty much the same, very slightly less in Vancouver due to not needing AC all summer and heating for the rest of the year.

You may want to check out Monster jobs.ca and Workopolis.com - choose Vancouver as your search criteria and take a look at the range of salaries offered - it's a pretty good indication of both the number and types of jobs and salaries that are on offer.

On the plus side - Vancouver, in our experience, is a fantastic place to live - we've been here for most of the past three years and we love it. For a city, there is little noticable pollution, we're smack bang between the mountains and the ocean - if you love hiking, biking, skiing, hiking, sailing, shopping, mad fashions, rain and complaining that we're always overlooked by Ottawa - then this is a great place to live.

Good luck with your plans

Nic