Perth - I know this is a stupid question, but ........

[oldnewmummy]

I realise the answer is "how long is a piece of string" but....we're planning to move to Perth in the next few years and are trying to work out much we'd need to earn to live.

We'll be 2 adults and probably one child (4-5).

I'd be very grateful if people could share their rough budgets.

We don't live an especially extravagant lifestyle but lice decent food and a few bottles of wine at the weekend. Don;t suppose we'd go out to eat that much. One car. Obviously ignore housing costs.

Any ideas?

Thanks!

If you don't have any luck on here, try the British Expats forum.

I don't drive so I don't know how much it costs to run a car (sorry), but you'd be looking at say $20-30 for a nice bottle of wine (although some of the cheaper stuff is very drinkable too).

We live in a fairly posh area of Sydney and an excellent meal out locally is about $60-80 for two, excluding wine. You might find you go out more to eat because when the heat is truly punishing it's so much more tempting to go out than have the oven on all day cooking for yourself. Perth is also very social (half my family is from Perth, most still live there) and meeting friends at a restaurant or bar is very much part of life.

A babysitter is about $20-25 an hour, a cleaner about the same.

Obviously there's no point in giving you the figures in anything other than AUD because the exchange rate could be drastically different in a few years.

Thanks.

We're currently in Singapore where things that are cheap (labour) are expensive in Oz, and things that are expensive (cars, wine, red meat) are cheap in Oz, so hard to get a fix on it.

We're expecting to earn substantially less than we do here, but reckon if we cut back on eating out our costs will reduce too.

Perhaps BE is the way to

we havent found most things here cheap. we are in bris.. but certainly not morethan the UK! we have three cars.. one for myself and dh and one of au pair transport.. none are small cars so our rego is about 600 to 700 a year and that includes third party insurance. all cars then iunsured on top either fully comp or TPFT. and this is between 150 and 400 aud. none of our cars are new as we bought them all out right. I know there is a big labour shortage in perth and the house prices ahve fallen by about 25% in 18 months. I buy cheaper wine than ninedragons! i try to get the quantity and qualioty balance so will buy the three bottles for x normall 20 to thirty for three bottles of hardys or similar plonk. beer is 40$ a carton.(36)
meat can be chape but sometimes cheap isnt great with meat so we our butchers. Prawns are $25 ish a kilo for big kings.. sausages i pay $8 a kilo and steak is very variable depends on what sort!
coles online has prices now i think and there is a shopping comparison site launched last year between wollies, coles and aldis...

Thanks for that, useful.

We are the few who DON'T want house prices to fall! We started the building process in 2006 and the house was completed Dec 2008. Luckily it went up a bit before it fell, and we have some leeway if it falls further, and we've managed to rent it out.

We camped out in the house for 2 weeks just before Xmas to clean, hang lights etc. Found a nice bottle of red for $4.49, and a good butcher. We could have a decent steak and a bottle of wine for $20; would have been about $70 in Singapore (roughly 1:1 at the moment). We pay about $400-$500/month on electricity and water for 150sq m apartment, so I think we'll be seeing some savings there.

Oh, and we have a Honda Jazz which cost $70k new (gulp) so we're looking forward to cheaper cars!

id agree with your prices... we can ahve steak salad and wine for 20 bucks. we paid 10,000 for a 2000 ford explorer and 12000 for 1997 pajero then 3000 for a 1997 commodore. all old abut do teh jobs wih a bit of abuse included..
cars generally seem to be cheaper new here than say the uk. but hold value longer.