Brits who moved to Dubai, how's life?

[Southparkt]

I had several friends who moved to Dubai in the last 3 years and they are really loving it and have no plans to come back. We have been considering a move as we have young family and will be very thankful if we can afford to have nannies and driver etc as our friends have. They feel more relaxed in the sun and can afford big house with swimming pool etc. We are high earners here and used to have nanny for our oldest but if we keep spending at that rate, we can never retire here with the Cost of living increases.
I am looking to hear from Brits who moved to Dubai and how life feels like now?

If OP’s shallow and materialistic herself it might suit her down to the ground though. Couldn’t pay me enough to set foot in such a trashy shithole.

@Southparktthere is a facebook group called British mums dubai which you will find helpful.

if you think you can command good salaries there , it’s a great place for a young family. You need to be able to trun a blind eye to the dark side but let’s not pretend there is no dark side here. Do also commit to saving as much as you can as you would want to move back here when your kids are teens to give them the opportunity to go to private school here and live in reality. With the savings, you will be able to afford the help you need to make your life easier.

I honestly struggled to breathe there and that was May - we met a couple of couples living out there, the ones with the professional job ( well he did) hated it - had been relocated for work -they found it utterly boring and missed everything from
proper pubs, to gigs, to going to cricket and the woman just struggled to find anyone in her tribe at all and just didn’t feel she fitted in - the other couple were a bit more nails/ bling/shopping/ cocktails and they quite enjoyed it but didn’t strike me as the type who would give much thought to anything like rights of immigrant workers etc - they were very pleasant to chat to but clearly had upgraded their life somewhat whereas the other couple felt they had downgraded in terms of life satisfaction - both couples said it was expensive though and high rents and school costs soon add up plus medical and neither were on packages where 100% of this was covered

so so I would say OP look at it from all angles, not just the nanny’s and cleaner and pool etc

This is not true - there is a chance that certain courses at certain universities may not give you home status, but most families I know have all gained home status. Student finance is now a little trickier but still possible.

I live in Abu Dhabi, a much calmer and more family friendly place and have been here for 15 years. My children have grown up here and feel as much home here as back in the UK, where we have a house and base ourselves in the summer. We walk to our work, pay our cleaner of 10 years a good wage and live a very normal, fairly frugal life, apart from some odd treats every now again in the form of staycations or holidays. It’s an incredibly safe place to live and I don’t regret moving here at all. As a woman I have never been mistreated or felt unsafe, quite the opposite.

I have a former friend who has moved there. I say former because she dropped her long term friends like hot stones within months of moving there. I still see her on social media. It is all image, boasting and bragging hashtagged flashy photos of all their new friends. I almost don't recognize the couple anymore, so much cosmetic 'improvement' work has been done. I actually feel very sad for them that they have been sucked into it as a lot of it comes from insecurity (having known them for over a decade) , but trying to describe how much it has changed them just comes over as being a bitch.

but men and women are trafficked there under false pretences

Men and women are trafficked under false pretences here in the UK!

I don't think this thread has gone quite how the OP had hoped ...

Hi OP, I lived in Dubai for quite a long time and I still have friends there now. PPs are correct about the human rights issues and the scale of prostitution - where I worked, a lot of the men in my office would stay to work through the summer while their wives took the kids back to the UK, and it was shocking how common it was for them to sleep with escorts while their wives were away.

One of the big concerns I would have if you have kids is that the values they absorb can be awful - I have friends who moved over with lovely kids but they were surrounded by people who treated service staff appallingly, and inevitably the kids picked up some of those attitudes. One of the reasons I left was because I didn't want to raise kids there, for this specific reason. I also know of families who had issues with their teenagers - there's not a lot for teens to do if they're not sporty, and the trouble they can get into for having sex/experimenting with alcohol or cannabis, for example, is horrific, and I know one family who had to do a midnight run to the airport with the son because his (local) girlfriend's family found out about him. They were worried he'd be sent to prison. Casual racism is rampant and people are open about it because they just don't care - this was something I found especially difficult about it.

One PP said that women are treated very well but in my experience that's only true for Western women - so while it might be true for you, women from poorer countries are routinely exploited.

Something else to research would be the job market - it's tough there at the moment and as it's no longer considered a hardship posting salaries are getting smaller, and companies are recruiting from a wider range of backgrounds now instead of favouring Western workers (who want much higher salaries) the way they did previously. There is little to no employment protection and generally the working culture is intense, with long hours and the expectation of constant availability considered normal.

One surprising thing I noticed when I moved back is the sheer relief of living somewhere with freedom of speech. In the UAE you can be sent to prison for saying the wrong thing on social media or for criticising the government. I didn't realise how much that was always in the back of my mind until I left.

I also really missed living somewhere with arts/culture/architecture/history - not to say that there's nothing there, but it's a marked difference from Europe.

My friends who are still there say that traffic is worse than ever and in general it's not as fun as it used to be but of course that's subjective, and they're still happy to be there.

On the positive side, for me it allowed me to save up a deposit for a house, which I'm not sure I'd have managed back home, and I made some amazing friends. If you are Western and on a good salary then it's a very easy place to live and you can have a good quality of life, easy access to the beach, great restaurants, and it's a great place to travel from because Asia is so close by, so breaks that would be long haul from the UK are much more manageable.

If you do want to go, I'd echo what one PP said and do your numbers thoroughly first - just make sure it adds up. Prices in Dubai are shocking and it's easy to get caught out thinking that the salary is high and untaxed without factoring in cost of living. I'd also consider moving with your existing company if that's possible, and I'd be very wary of working for a local/non-European company over there as the norms and behaviours are so different (I speak from experience on this). Also bear in mind you can't pay into a UK pension from abroad and there's no pension provision over there other than nominal end of service benefits so if that might be an issue for you research it thoroughly beforehand, and also that financial advice (and indeed the financial market) over there isn't well-regulated. Lots of expats get caught out buying products that sound like pensions and then lose huge amounts of money.

Good luck whatever you decide!

What the actual fuck?! I did not know this.

Funnily enough my son rang me from there last night. He’s been working in Oman and it was on his way home. He’s been in Oman for some time, and has a VPN. But kept shushing me as a I was as laughing at the tacky shops he was talking about.

He was worried about consequences, and I’m used to Oman so nothing outrageous was being said. Fancy living like that 😵‍💫

You do you OP, salaries are cheap because the people involved are pretty much slaves.

But hey. Shiny things 🙄

My overriding memory of a week there about 20 years ago (should have read up before making decision to fo) was any hotel bar was full of Eastern European prostitutes.

It is undeniable that workers from India, Pakistan, Philippines etc are treated very badly and work extremely long hours for very little pay.

I don’t think people are jealous and bitter, it’s more that this part is a deal-breaker, not just a minor note on the cons list.

I have lived there, and that poster is understating things if anything. She hasn’t mentioned that it’s a superficially-tolerant dictatorship that increasingly oppresses even those of its own citizens who seek a more democratic say in government. The press is heavily censored, and self-censoring, for obvious reasons. There is no capacity for holding the ruler and his family to account. Sheikh Mohammed has kidnapped two of his daughters and is holding them under house arrest, and terrorised his junior wife, who fled with their children after what the British high court described as a :’campaign of fear, intimidation, and harassment’ which included bugging the phone of her lawyer and security team, and lives in fear of her life in the UK, only travelling by armoured vehicle. And this is the sister of the King of Jordan, so you can imagine his lack of accountability to nobodies inside his own fiefdom. Dubai has one of the most surveyed societies in the world.

Bluntly, the kind of Brit who moves there is a politically illiterate, socially aspirant ‘I’m all right, Jack’ type who has no interest in the regime under which they’re living as long as they have a pool and a maid.

OP, having read of people’s experiences do you still want to move out to Dubai, or perhaps reign in the spending and stay in the UK?

As the OP has demonstrated

This made me laugh on the subject

Slightly different angle on this incase you're still reading OP. My family moved there when I was starting secondary and my siblings were younger. It was only for 3 years, always planned as a temporary situation but I still resent my parents for it a little. This was of course some time ago, but i think a lot of it's still relevant.

It was a truly awful place to be at that age. I rarely felt safe as a young woman, the locals are respectful, but the many impoverished, trafficked men from elsewhere are not.
School was miserable. There's a racial hierarchy, even as children, and it's all just so bizarre. I had minor royals in my class and the expat teachers have to treat them different, so the class dynamic is very odd. Expats come and go, so you never have a secure friendship group.
It was all SO materialistic. I found it incredibly stressful, having come from pocket-money-at-claires-accesories, to situations where there was pressure for preteens to be chauffeured around, buying designer clothes at the mall on a weekly basis. My parents didn't have that kind of financial freedom, so I felt isolated.
Despite being at an apparently excellent private school I was behind when we came home.

My younger siblings loved the pool, and the freedom of being able to run around a gated complex between friends houses. But they came home as brats, and my parents admit this.

And it’s not happening in the uk?!

It happens everywhere. Some countries base their whole lives and economies on it. Like Dubai for example

I’d be a useless employer of ‘help’, as I’m too nice. I’d be helping the cleaner clean and offering to drive to give the driver a break 🤣
Seriously though, it just wouldn’t sit right with me. I’d feel perennially guilty.

I think you’ll find it’s gone exactly as OP intended. The same way all posts about Dubai go on MN.

No suprise that Richard Tice moved there , sounds totally up his street ethically -although quite how he can be an MP here too beggars belief - that’s an awful lot of coming and going - however his family did build one of the first skyscrapers there in the 70s -

My first thoughts too.
Some people really do have more money than sense.
Not to mention ethics.

So my friend’s husband met someone younger out there…she’s now back in the UK raising their young children alone…the Dubai dream is well and truly over. She is adamant Dubai ruined her DH and turned him into a spoilt, entitled child.

I know!! It's abhorrent wherever it is. All trafficking concerns me. But I wouldn't move somewhere especially because I knew I could get cheap labour to fulfill a luxurious lifestyle I coveted.

I would never knowingly employ trafficked human beings in this country. That's why I don't use car washes, get my nails done in them salons etc.

Never mind specifically moving to a country to exploit these people.