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!
