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Cost of living: USA vs. Australia

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prawn_86 said:
Providing all goes well with my visa application i will soon be moving to the USA so will be able to give first hand a cost of living breakdown
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Sorry to hear your considering leaving. Hope it all works out for you.
 

I used to purchase Asic's from the USA (with shipping) for ~$60, total, which would retail for close to $120 here.

Then all of a sudden, no more. I sent and e-mail to the company asking why. Reply was along the lines that Asic didn't want people purchasing cheaper shoes from other places and wanted to keep the price here high.

If there is another way of getting Asic's cheaply, please share or PM me. I would greatly appreciate it.
 

Short of flying over, dunno. You can use forwarding companies in the US that buy from a US address and then ship to you. But between their cost and shipping (this has gone up a lot recently), might not be worth it.

I use and collect fountain pens. I got a few online from Malaysia. Well known companies with supposed world wide warranties. They were less than half price to what I would have paid here. However I had a little trouble with one of them and got in touch with their agents here. Essentially got told it would cost me 50% of the purchase price for them just to have a look at it. It is free (including free postage) if I buy from here.

Also got told that Aussie retailers and their local agent have been putting pressure on the Malaysian reseller not to ship to Oz.
 
FlyingFox said:
Sorry to hear your considering leaving. Hope it all works out for you.
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It is for work. We will be back in Aus one day probably, but need to take the chance to live overseas whi;e it presents itself
 
FlyingFox said:
Short of flying over, dunno. You can use forwarding companies in the US that buy from a US address and then ship to you. But between their cost and shipping (this has gone up a lot recently), might not be worth it.
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Got it sorted. Have a friend going back to the US (work wise) next month for a while. I asked him on Facebook, reply came back, no problemo, be glad to help.
 
prawn_86 said:
It is for work. We will be back in Aus one day probably, but need to take the chance to live overseas whi;e it presents itself
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That's a great opportunity, prawn. Good for you. All the best. Hope you'll keep us posted on how it goes.
 
I went to the US on holidays last year. I didn't notice how "cheap" things were so much as I noticed how expensive they are in Australia.

It was only a few weeks, but arriving back in Australia everything suddenly seemed ridiculously expensive. Very noticeable straight away when I got something to eat and felt ripped off.
 

There are other things that you don't notice until you live there like the cost of housing, electricity and petrol. Please note that this is not from first hand experiences but from a couple of colleagues who used to live there a few years back.
 
FlyingFox said:
There are other things that you don't notice until you live there like the cost of housing, electricity and petrol. Please note that this is not from first hand experiences but from a couple of colleagues who used to live there a few years back.
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I lived in NY for a brief period. Aside from rent, everything was cheaper. On the other hand the US has a massive underclass and the poverty is much more "in your face". If you want cheap products and services then you need to have people working on $6-$7/hour (real wages in the US peaked in the mid-70s and have been falling since then). With no realistic expectation of healthcare. I remember being in Chicago in January and seeing a woman begging for money for chemotherapy (she had lost most of her hair). I'll pass on cheap burritos at the expense of someone losing their dignity. Just remember what side of the coin you'll fall on. Sure if you are self sufficient or are earning $100k+ then the US is far better but if you're a middle management type you'll probably find your $75k/year job becomes $50k or lower when you move there.

Having said that, even compared to somewhere like London, Australia has become far too expensive. I remember when I lived there the gf and I used to spend about gbp60 on groceries (we both worked pretty long hours so take away was often also the easiest option) and that was at Waitrose which is a fairly upmarket grocer. NZ lamb was cheaper there than it is here.
 

This feels like dejavu .... so I won't add much. I agree that we should not have a good standard of living at the expense of underclass. However we are starting to have very high base wage with not a lot of headroom by world standards.

Agree on the latter.
 

Spot on.

I lived in London in 2005.

A lot of the time it was cheaper to purchase take away, then buy the ingredients and cook it yourself.
I remember cooking a Thai green chicken curry, it was almost 30pounds You can get take away for a tenner (or less).
 

First place I lived in London was on Queensway. Very centrally located zone one. Curry with naan for 8 quid, pizza was the go to hangover food (and gees in that flat there was a lot of boozing!) that cost 9 quid. Bottle of Absolut vodka 12 quid. Ping Pong was down the road which used to do all you can eat dim sum on Sunday nights for about gbp15, if my memory serves me correctly! Compare that to Sydney.
 
Spent a week n San Fran last October and was shocked at the level of homelessness on the streets. There were certain street corners where the homeless seemed to hang around. If someone asked me for emoney I'd just give them some food - am a stingy traveller and usually have some snacks in my day pack to keep me going in between meals. I do so miss the sour dough bread there

I'm not sure how we overcome the issues of Australian minimum wages being rather high compared to the rest of the world, but unless we have near 0 tax on incomes up to $35-40K I don't see how you drop the pay on the lowest income earners without increasing poverty.

I grew up under the poverty line, and it's not fun. I think it's even worse these days with all the gadgets around and it's far easier to spot the poor kids at school.

I also think people need to look at the medium income levels of a country and how prices compare to that, rather than the average which is usually around the 65-70% mark ie if you earn the average wage you're beating at least 35% of the population.

A good friend in San Fran earns about the same level as me - we both just scrape into the 6 figure mark. His income tax was lower than mine, but there seemed to be a lot of other taxes he had to pay that I didn't, and then he reckoned he would spend 1.5-2K on tips each year which is another hidden tax there. He tried to explain how his health care worked, but from the sounds of it he felt OK to be in an accident, but hoped he never had a major illness as the HMOs there seem to do their best to deny treatment - his sentiment. I assume he would have a bit of an idea of how all that works since he's a physical therapist and gets to see first hand how his patients get treated by the HMOs.

So yeah, eating out or buying clothes might be cheap in the USA, but it does seem to come at a huge cost tot eh individual, and I think to the country as poverty creates a part of the economy along the lines of 3rd world countries where the lack of education and opportunities causes lower productivity and a lot of costs borne by the rest of society.
 



It's very hard to do unless other costs come down.

Curious....what do you think qualifies as a minimum single wage to stay above the poverty line? Is 35-40K the mark?
 
FlyingFox said:
It's very hard to do unless other costs come down.

Curious....what do you think qualifies as a minimum single wage to stay above the poverty line? Is 35-40K the mark?
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Depends where you live.

rent can chew up $150-$200 a week, groceries another $60-70 (I'm single and that's prob my avg weekly spend over a month).

So if you take rent at 150 * 52 = 7800

Groceries = 70 * 52 = 3640

Utilities = 350 * 4 = 1400 (gas electrcity phone internet mobile)

Getting to work = train $1500 a year car ???

I live rent free (home loan free now) and budget to live on $400 a week

A couple might have things a bit easier, hate to think what it would be like with a couple of kids.
 


That is a very tight budget..lol. But if you had to put a number on it?
 
FlyingFox said:
That is a very tight budget..lol. But if you had to put a number on it?
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I really don't know.

As far as I feel, personally I don't live in the real world. I'm single, no mortgage, no debts, high income.

Most months I'm disappointed with myself if I don't have at least another 3K in the bank. That's not how the majority live. Heck some of my friends would be happy to live on 3K a month.

I'd say anything less than 2K a month after tax is going to be pretty hard to get by on these days. Not sure what low income tax rebates etc there are out there or what kind of help you can get. It's quite common for people at work to have hour long commutes so as to get affordable housing further out of the city.

I just don't ant to see the kind of underclass of the USA develop here. Whether high minimum wages is the best way to achieve that, I'm not sure, but I do worry that if you make too many people feel they don't benefit by being a part of society, then they tend to become apart from society and you get all the associated problems and costs.

Possibly the best thing that could happen for us all is for the housing market to fall by a good 30% and remove the burden of high mortgages. Maybe the 2014-15 recession will do some of that for us.

If anyone can give me a rational reason as to why high house prices is good for society I'd love to hear it. Personally I'd feel much better if we were like Germany where real house prices have stagnated for the last 30 years. All that money they can invest in far more productive endeavours.
 

Fair enough ... would it surprise you to know that the median graduate salary in Oz is 50K (and in most occupations lower)?
 
sydboy007 said:
Spent a week n San Fran last October and was shocked at the level of homelessness on the streets. There were certain street corners where the homeless seemed to hang around.
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I was there in September and agreed with your comment. You don't have to go too far from Fisherman's Wharf (a major SF tourist precinct) and the cable car routes to find that wealthy turns to average turns to poor turns to desperate pretty damn quickly.

Something I often do when on holidays is to take a "proper" look at the place. Just go for a walk and see what I find. Suffice to say that finding people on the streets isn't at all hard, indeed at night on some streets it's impossible to not be constantly coming across homeless people. But it's not just that - within walking distance it goes from upmarket and touristy to downmarket and the streets literally crumbling. On a positive note, I did find the workshop where Mythbusters is based (not open to the public but I took a photo from the outside anyway - it's nothing too fancy).

It's much the same in every US city I've been to. It all looks upmarket and fancy if you stay around the tourist areas but you don't have to venture at all far to see a very different side.

As for prices, yes they are cheaper but don't forget that in the US you are constantly paying tips for "services" that in Australia would either be built into the listed price or which don't exist at all. It's a dollar here and a dollar there but it starts to add up pretty quickly.

And then there's tax. That one thing which isn't included in the stated price of practically anything. The price says $5, you hand over $10 and get somewhat less than $5 in change. That's tax and the rate varies between states. The key point being that in most cases (notable exception of fuel), the tax is not included in the stated price.

I did note a few prices of things. Petrol the cheapest I saw was $3.67 per gallon. Alcohol was ridiculously cheap in some places, to the point that it took me a while to realise that this really was the actual price. I don't smoke but I did notice that cigarettes were a lot cheaper than in Australia. Food from restaurants or take away was generally quite a bit cheaper than in Australia.

Personally, I'd rather have less of a class divide than the US has. If that means paying higher prices then so be it.
 
FlyingFox said:
Fair enough ... would it surprise you to know that the median graduate salary in Oz is 50K (and in most occupations lower)?
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Lots of strange things happen so far as wages are concerned.

Looking at my own background in the electrical trade, one really strange phenomenon is that the jobs which involve the least amount of actual work generally pay the highest rates. I've never really thought about why that is, but it is very much the case.
 
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