Thursday, June 21, 2012

How Much Would It Cost Day to Day to Live Outside of the US?


A great chart here.

11 comments:

  1. Could you provide the link to the image or a better image?

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  2. And we thought our inflation was bad...

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  3. Who wants to wear jeans in Angola? Too hot! Who's buying a hamburger in Greece? You eat Souvlaki there. This is a "cost of living" only for those hopelessly stuck in a western mindset and who've never left their hometown.

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  4. What I would like to see alongside this chart would be the average monthly rent we have to pay in taxes. IE an average income tax withholding is prob around 800 dollars plus all the sales tax and hidden taxes in the economy. So how much tax rent does the country cost/month.

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  5. Robert

    I live outside US and compared a couple of well known prices to verify the chart.

    For example pretty across Australia a litre of milk is about $1.25 to $1.40 AUD, which pans out to $1.29 to $1.45 CAD. That is the common neighborhood supermarket price. Very common price. But the chart, which factors in Canadian dollars, says $2.68. That is a big error.

    Similarly it says coffee is $5.39 CAD "including service." I assume they mean cafes. In downtown Sydney capuccinos are about $3.50 AUD to $4.00 per cup in a sit down cafe (so $3.63 CAD to $4.15 CAD). I should know that price, I have about four a day.

    The auto club here does a detailed petrol price survey on line. (See http://www.mynrma.com.au/motoring/car-care/fuel-prices.htm.) Average price of Unleaded Petrol (ULP) is $1.33 litre AUD, that's $1.38 CAD. The chart says it should be $1.58 CAD.

    They were about right with movie tickets for first release movies.

    For the four items I actually checked they got one about right, two widely off mark and one near miss (i.e. only 15% off).

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  6. Why the hell is Angola so expensive?

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    Replies
    1. Booming oil industry - though I believe the problem is mostly in the capital

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  7. I have been living in Sao Paulo for the past couple years and will second earth that was's comments on the accuracy.

    Milk is way off if you are talking about similar products. Milk we drink back in the states is a luxury down here, they only drink the boxed non-refrigerated crap. The good stuff costs $2.25-2.50 a LITRE.

    Gas, coffee and soda are about right.

    A Big Mac meal, easily the most compared item on the list, clocks in at R$24, currently $12 but I am guessing this study was done before the real took a huge hit so more like $15.

    Not sure about the rest as I don't have reliable numbers but my wallet tells me rent is much more expensive, movie tickets are more expensive and jeans are definitely more expensive.

    At least they have DELIVERY for McDonalds...talk about lazy people.

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  8. You know,I've always heard that incomes just don't compare because the cost of living is so different in many other countries. By this chart, it seems that the cost of living in the US is extremely cheap among developed nations, and yet it still has one of the higher incomes as well, which suggests that Americans are a lot better off than I thought (though without a lot of the social services available in other countries).

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  9. If someone knows where to find a luxury two bedroom apartment in Singapore for $3,607 by all means please let me know...

    These kinds of studies are always more interesting to me in terms of how inaccurate they are than they are for their actual information. Without even getting into the substitution of goods and other nonsense that we see in the CPI calculations, just measuring "price levels" is a nearly impossible task.

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  10. $4.43 for a coffee in the US!? What?! I pay a buck fifty; and that's for a large -- in CT no less.

    $55 for jeans and a luxury 2-bedroom apartment $4500/mo? Costco has name-brand jeans for $20.

    Where did these people get these numbers? We don't all live in NYC.

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