With a minimum wage job you wouldn’t be able to afford a flat of your own in London, no (I do, but that’s because I’m a parent and live in social housing). I didn’t realise that’s what you meant by low-to-middle income. In some parts of the country, minimum wage would be enough. In London, people on low incomes generally house-share, as do lots of people on higher incomes. ISTM that that’s common high-density cities worldwide, though.
Oops - missed the edit window so messed up the coding, and I also messed up the currency. 6.49 sterling is 10 US dollars, so it’s actually slightly cheaper in the UK.
I’ve always (in this house) had my gas and electricity bill assessed on a rolling 12 month bill. The consumption varies from month to month, obviously, and a couple of times a year some chaps from the electricity and gas companies come around and point a device at my external meters, and I get an updated tariff through the post. Some years I pay too much, and some years too little. People who need to rely on pay-as-you-go meters on the other hand get to be very cold in the winter.
I am curious about the spectrum- I made about double minimum wage when I moved here, but still would not have been able to afford a place on my own that I would have been willing to live in.
I am just curious as to how at different points during my life it would have been radically different if I had lived in Europe.
As a single parent working at a job I really dislike because it pays the bills and then some, I would love to be able to work at a minimum wage job I loved, like a movie theatre, a bookstore, a coffee shop, arty shop, etc…
All fantasy- never gonna get a work visa for a minimum wage job!
Please note that San Francisco bay area housing is not representative of the US as a whole. You could live a whole lot cheaper if you get out of the bay area or out of California altogether.
I have lived in places in the country where rent was affordable and then some- in one small town I knew someone who was renting a small but decent apartment for $85 - and while that was a good deal, it was only about $50 cheaper than the norm.
However, as I won’t get a job with compensation and benefits like this ever again, even adjusted for standard of living, I am not likely to move unless it is a complete change of life issue.
I am interested for many reasons, and I am very very surprised by the information I am getting- it is entirely off the mark from what I had expected, and I wouldn’t have considered myself entirely uninformed.
I just think that I would probably have to compare here with London, or something similar, to get a real comparison, but again, I am looking for the range from low to middle income.
Well…if you like smoking pot and having sex with prostitutes, you can do that legally in Amsterdam and a few other places.
Better than which parts of the US? Detroit? New York City? Greenwich, CT? Rural Arkansas? Las Vegas.
I’ve been to Germany, the Netherlands, England and Scotland. I wouldn’t say that any of these countries are “better” or worse than the US. Just different. They have cities, towns, suburbs, highways, poor people, rich people, people in between.
One thing they have that we don’t have as much of is history. You aren’t going to find any sort of art or architecture or culture in the US that is 500 to several thousand years old.
I’ve never been in the US, let alone lived there, but I’ve lived in the Netherlands all of my life and visited a bunch of countries in Europe. So I can’t compare directly but I’ll try to give some info on living in the Netherlands.
In the Netherlands 6 weeks of vacation per year is common but the legal lower limit is 4 times the average week. So that would be about a month of vacation. Technicalities can increase that number, and really, a single month off per year is a pretty shoddy deal.
Emergency care; yes. If you can’t afford to get health insurance, the government will provide but it’ll not be fancy and it probably will cut into your daily budget. Emergency food and housing; very likely (you more or less have to be an illegal immigrant not to get that - especially if you have kids) but expect to be pressured to get a job. There are pretty much no slums in the Netherlands, though there are regions especially in the larger cities that may not be all that pleasant to live in.
More or less, yes. Cable and high-speed internet is fairly cheap, as are cell phone plans. (about 10 euros/month for all). Coffee shops obviously depend, but you can get a decent cup of coffee for anywhere between 1 and 5 euros. Ipods are different since they’re a larger single payment. We don’t really have a culture of buying stuff on monthly payments, though you probably can get a lot of stuff (especially more expensive things like cars and furniture) that way. Even on a low income, if you save a few bucks a month you’d be able to either save up for an ipod or get some slightly more expensive phone plan that includes an iphone.
If you keep it to going to the pub once a week for an hour or two, or buying a gram or two of weed once a week, that won’t bankrupt you. Booze and weed are fairly cheap, but for booze, the supermarket is MUCH cheaper than a bar.
A lot of that depends on where you live. None of them are cheap, though if you’re in the situation where you can’t afford housing, you’ll probably get some money to take care of the lot (and expect to have more or less nothing left over).
Depends on what you call luxuries. A/C is not really needed over here except maybe for a few weeks in the summer and even then MOST people don’t bother. Driers are relatively uncommon. Many people prefer to save on space and cost and use clothes lines etc.
Oh yeah: space: unless you live outside of any major town, expect to pay quite a bit per square meter for living space. I payed 200,000 euros for a 64 sq meter (about 690 sq feet) apartment (which does have a small garden) - but that’s near the center of Utrecht, which is the second most expensive city in the Netherlands to buy property. On the other hand, municipal rules for rent (if you can apply under the rules) mean you can often rent a place for about a third of what you’d pay on a 30 year mortgage, even with the current low interest rates.
Okay, serious answers, based on my own ~European lifestyle~. I lived in rural Bulgaria for two years, from 2006-2008. Because the lev is pegged at a 2-1 rate to the euro, divide all of my numbers in half to see how much they are in euro.
No, no, no, no. When I first got to Bulgaria, I lived with a host mom - she received a pension from the government of 50 leva a month. She was supported by her son, who works in Italy. She also owns a cherry orchard, and sells cherries during the spring. She is, essentially, a subsistence farmer. It’s hard because she has arthritis and can’t really garden effectively anymore.
(In 2007, I think it was, she was given the post of mayor of a village (pop. 60) in exchange for having worked on the campaign of the mayor of the municipality. So she now has more income, although I’m not sure how much it is.)
Probably, maybe, yes, no. A cup of coffee - and I’m not talking Starbucks here, I mean a little cafe filled with old men smoking cigarettes - will run you somewhere between 30 and 70 stotinki. This will almost always be Nescafe. Coffee in a fancier cafe in Sofia costs roughly what it would in the US.
I had cable in my house. It cost 12 leva a month. It was kind of shitty, as cable went, though. I knew people in bigger cities who got the Cartoon Network and CNN International, but the best I got was Discovery.
Cell phone…everyone has one, so they’re not too much for anyone, I guess. It seems like most people did pay-as-you-go type things. I did too.
An iPod is going to be WAY out of reach for your average Bulgarian. Smaller, cheaper MP3 players are not uncommon, but most people don’t have computers, so it’s a bit of a moot point. My Bulgarian tutor didn’t even know what an iPod was, when I mentioned one in 2006.
Yeah, sure. Most Bulgarians - at least outside of the cities - make their own alcohol with their own grapes and plums, access to alcohol is the least of your worries. Inside the cities, people have lots of alcohol that their family in the villages gave them. Pubs are going to vary a lot in quality and price. A little village pub, no big. A shiny fancy bar filled with expats in Sofia? Too expensive. (Although still cheap by Western European standards.)
Utilities are fucking EXPENSIVE. My electricity in January 2007 ran me 400 leva - roughly my entire monthly income. Most of this was due to running my space heater. The following winter, I learned to do like the Bulgarians, and I heated my house with my wood-burning stove. Getting a nice fire going is harder than it might sound!
I didn’t have any other utilities to pay for. I have no idea what the heck the garbage dudes did with my garbage, but I strongly suspect it’s terrible for the environment.
The quality of life, as you might be surmising, was significantly lower than that in the US.
One thing to add that is kind of important. Supermarkets are much, much cheaper in Holland. I just spent a month in Canada and the US and was surprised by the high prices in supermarkets. Especially dairy products and beer/ wine are many times more expensive in the places I went to (and in the case of dairy - especially cheese - a lot worse too).
And that lunch break (not siesta) is very visible to foreigners but it only affects a relatively small number of jobs: small-store retail and some office jobs.
In Spain, vacation is not measured in days. We count the other way 'round: your contract establishes how many hours/year will you work. This makes collective negotiations (the norm, and the basis for individual negotiations) easier, because you can establish the same amount of yearly hours for fourth-shift (12h/shift) and normal-shift (8h/shift) and divided-shift (lunch break) people who have the same funcion (for example warehouse worker); the ones with longer shifts will get more days of vacation, but that’s a function of the shift they work, in the end they end up working as much as anybody else.
A very important thing when comparing both income and prices between different countries is, well, comparing both. Using a direct conversion doesn’t quite work; I’ve moved between countries more times than I feel like counting right now and the most extreme case was that move when going from the US to Spain meant 30% less salary on direct-exchange terms but an apartment three times the size for a much-smaller fraction of my salary. My salary had gone down, my purchasing power had gone waaaay up. Of course, comparing purchasing power is a lot more difficult than just going to oanda and plugging in a number.
And there are other considerations - some places you don’t have to spend a dime on healthcare but transportation is more expensive, say. So it’s a complicated calculus.
From what I’ve read, Europe does have employment laws that tend to be more worker friendly. It’s much harder to fire people, they get more vacation and there are more social safety nets. The flip side of that is it is often much harder to find work and their economies are slower to adapt. I’ve also been told that Europe is much less entrepreneurial than the US. There is less value placed on being a “self-made businessman” than there is here.
So if you are career oriented, ambitious and entrepreneurial, USA is probably more for you. If you just sort of don’t care about work and just want something to pay the bills, Europe might be better for you.
That’s my impression too. Capable but non-entrepreneurial Americans used to have their refuge in marketable support skills, like technology, but a lot of that work is vulnerable to outsourcing. This throws the differences between European and American working life into even sharper relief.
Question for Europeans: Recently I was watching an episode of Ghost Hunters Academy (long story, don’t ask me to explain or defend now). What they do is have a class of “cadets” who get eliminated as the season progresses. Early on, a few of the cadets are asked to be team leaders so, in effect, they’re being asked to lead and direct others when they have no real experience in doing the actual work. Failure to lead well is grounds for elimination. Would most Europeans tend to share my opinion that to expect leadership before practical competence is ridiculous?
In this European’s opinion that would be the case at least in Germany - I have sometimes read of ‘management’ as a role unrelated to subject expertise being an import from the US business culture.
Not really. You don’t need to be good at the job to get the team going; the better you understand the job, the better you’ll be able to organize it, but dealing with personality clashes and getting everybody pointed in the same direction are two important leadership skills which require no knowledge of the job. And someone has to be the first one to lead. In a case where people had had the chance to acquire the knowledge beforehand then yes, get a leader who knows the job: but in this case, someone needed to have the cojones to say “what the hell, I’ll do it”.
