A City is where your heart (money) is...

Guess what, some nut offered me this really juicy offer from New York a month back and I decided to say no to it. No I’m not mentally ill; I just have a problem with reality. To top the job losses, and meager commissions, the poor investment banking souls I know down there are into their last million and are still taxed to death.

I wanted to quantify my argument, since my wife had already started apartment hunting in NY when she heard about this. I did a bit of research and came across this interesting study done by Mercer Inc (www.mercer.com). It’s called the Worldwide Cost of Living Survey 2010. From what I could read, these are the cities which I knocked out of the list and here’s a few surprise cities I’ve added

- Africa : I know Africa is booming, but just in case you get a $$$ million dollar offer from a blue chip investment bank in Luanda, Angola, remember it’s the most expensive city in the world for expats to live in. Chad and Gabon are also quite expensive and rank number 3 and 7 globally. Errr..and just a bit of friendly advise from someone who’s been quite a bit,.” In case you didn’t know…everything. I repeat everything.. in Africa bites too’

- Europe: Oh Africa is not in your radar and its Europe, I would highly recommend that you ignore all offers from London, Paris and Frankfurt and if you get one from Tirana in Albania, grab it with both hands. It’s apparently the cheapest city to live in all of Europe!!!! Oh! You’ve accumulated a zillion miles on Skywards already, am not sure what you’ll do with that, the only airline which could take you to Albania is Albanian airlines and they fly converted Hercules and Antonov Cargo planes.

- Americas: You’re looking at the Americas, how nice, you and my wife will get along well….the last I heard the economic crisis is so bad out there, they caught a truck load of Americans trying to sneak into Mexico!!! On a more serious note, It turns out Sao Paulo (21), Brazil is more expensive than New York (27). If any of you get tickled into packing your bags for this rapidly developing economy, you’d better read the fine print very carefully. Am sure most of us won’t look very good dancing around in a thong at the Rio Carnival to earn a few extra bucks to make ends meet.

- The United States of India : And if you thought you should take revenge on Indians because they just off-shored some jobs from your office to Slumdog millionaire country, think again. Someone calculated that if you’re a single guy with no kids and were offered a Million dollar job in Mumbai, 458K would get eaten up by the tax bogeyman. So let’s get India out of the list too.

Just for the heck, let me throw in some stats which I found on another blog (Singapore Hedge Fund) “KPMG’s calculations are based on the assumption that the employee is single, has no children and earns a salary of 1 million pounds a year. Tax and social security payments are calculated from Jan. 1 to Dec. 31, 2010 As of April 2010

City -->Income Tax -->Social Security -->Total
London --> £477,519 --> £13,759 --> £491,278
Frankfurt -->£476,469 -->£10,339 -->£486,808
Paris -->£350,786 -->£110,342 --> £461,128
New York -->£414,250 -->£18,520 -->£432,770
Tokyo -->£349,655 -->£12,260 -->£361,915

Good ol Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Jeddah and Muscat rank quite low in this list!!! Add in the Sun, the bling, gasoline costs and friends like you, I’ll happily pay my traffic fines and toll tax and stick around here for some more time.

Stick around guys and God bless!

The day I met Dubai in hospital

It was a cold November morning last year and I was on my way to meet my friend ‘Dubai' at the hospital Intensive care. I had heard of his ill health and it came as a shocker to me (and a lot of us) that such a healthy looking person from the outside could have been so terminally ill on the inside. A debt restructuring consultant friend of mine who was part of the team tending to him at the ICU had said he was in the weakest condition they had ever seen a patient of this category.

As I walked into the hospital on that day, I could see a team of fund managers and bankers all standing outside the hospital and shouting in the top of their voice that they had been predicting this situation for my friend for the past 2 years, but no one had been listening!!!. I said to myself ‘That was not true, you guys may not have necessarily created this mess, but you didn’t help him in any way and only goaded him along into this path to the ICU’, but I kept quiet and didn’t want to add to the cacophony.

Today, a year had passed since that fatal day and I was on my way to meet my dear friend. It was a near miracle, Dubai had survived a very close shave with death and had lived to tell the tale. As I walked into Dubai’s residence, I could see the change. A couple of years back the same place was filled with blue/ black suited men with cheques waiting for signatures, now they were no more there. The suits had been asked to stay off for a while by the expert team of medics.

I spotted my friend resting in the shaded greens and on first glance it was evident, I was looking at a new Dubai in front of me. Gone was the naughtiness and innocence from those eyes and there seemed to be a sheet of boredom drawn over the eyes. He saw that I noticed the same and said “I know, the doctors (restructuring consultants) worked very hard, but there is no medication for bringing back a state of mind to its old self, medical science has only found cures to bring back the body to its old self, not the mind”. I nodded quietly. I knew what he was going through.

A year on, from the state I had seen him at the hospital when some of his Nakheel cells had turned cancerous and resulted in several more related complications, he was now physically back to his old healthy self. The team of consultants, bankers and Global lobbyists had worked tirelessly on him by bringing in infusion of new capital medication; undertaking continuous chemotherapy to remove the advanced real estate/ mortgage finance cancer cells. Importantly they also made him live a completely changed lifestyle away from the private equity vices.

As I was leaving the house later in the day, I reflected on what this Reborn Dubai had told me and thought; “Miraculously the body was almost back to the old self, but the mind …that may need more time to recover. The confidence had been shattered, and the only medication for treating that was time”

As they say in Spanish "El tiempo da beun consejo"....time will tell

(Disclaimer: These views are purely personal and do not in any way represent the views of my employer)