When I moved from Minnesota to Washington in USA , I found things very costly. But Sydney made me realise that “High Cost of Living is just a state of Mind”. Nothing is expensive on this small round shaped place where humans live in, if you can pay for it.

Let me start with housing.

Housing

Sydney has good quality housing. We have recently inspected a few properties and we have no complaints. You would find a great deal if you want a house which is away from Sydney CBD. And by away , I mean at least 40 Kms . So if you are not an office goer in Sydney CBD, you are off the hook. IT jobs are hard to find outside CBD. So we come under the unlucky category.

If you are looking at a decent suburb within 1 hour travel time from Sydney and you dont want to live in a broken house , you are easily looking at a million dollar price tag. Yeah , you read it right , A MILLION DOLLAR and above. Thats expensive in my book.

Rent is Sydney is charged weekly which means you pay a little more than 4 weeks rent each month. A 2 bedroom apartment in a decent area within 1 hour travel time from CBD would cost somewhere between $400 to $600 a week .

Medical

If you wish you can get a decent medical care if you are a permanent resident or citizen in Australia. So thats a plus , I must say. However visits to specialists do incur an out of pocket cost. Government takes a medicare levy and on average its approximately $200 on a $100000 salary package.

Food

We are a family of 3 and my son is 7 months old. Excluding his baby food, grocery shopping each week costs us around $50 to $70. We have started to understand benefits of a good healthy diet after coming to Sydney.

Internet

We pay $90 for a 80 GB broadband plan from Optus. We had to take a 2 year contract with them. We got fetch TV with this plan. However we could not use it even for a day as internet speed is too low and after fighting for whole one month , we could do NOTHING about it.

Transportation

Only husband works at the moment and his trasportation cost is $280 a month.

Mobile

Prepaid mobile connection costs minimum $30 a month and post paid costs minimum $60. Now this one is cheaper than USA as we had to pay $200 downpayment for iphone5 contract and each month we paid around $65. Here we paid no downpayment for an iphon6+ and $70 per month for the plan. Data plan is almost same. So if you consider the conversion rate , its cheaper here in Australia.

Electricity & Gas

Our electricity bill for a 2 bedroom apartment comes to $120 a month on average and gas comes to around $100.

If you have kids , then you are looking at atleast $200 per month extra without stuff like toys , books , school costs and extra curricular activities.

We have a car but that not an absolute necessity in Australia . So I would not count that.

Cost for a Couple living in a 2 bedroom apartment

  Cost
Rent 1800 (average)
Food 300 ( conservative )
Transportation 300 ( conservative )
Gas 100
Electricity 120
Internet 70 ( average )
Phone 100 ( for 2 people )
Extras 300 (conservative )

So this come around $3000 a month. Taxes are high here. On a salary of $100K , you would take home $5000 approximately. So you can do your calculations of savings.

How Hard it is to buy a house on this budget ?

If you compromise on your daily travel time , you can a buy a house for as low as 500K . However you should do a thorough research about the locality specially if you have kids and you want to put them in public schools.

With a 20% deposit, stamp registration costs and processing fees, you would have to set aside 130K for a 500K property.

Now if you are starting from zero and with a $2000 saving per month, you need 65 months or little more than 5 years to buy a house. But certainly that 500K price tag would become 700K by that time and you would have to move even further out of the city. Not a big deal , I am sure. %^&*^%!@#!

One might get an idea that salaries would be equally high in Sydney specially considering the housing scenario. As a matter of fact , it is a bit high if you are contracting. But I do not see a proportionately high salary when it comes to permanent jobs.

But things that bite me most is the cost of baby stuff. A simple swing which costs $80 in USA , come with a staggering $200 price tag in Australia.

But there is a brighter side , things become really easy if both husband and work in Australia. You can accumulate the deposit in less than 2 years and can even pay off a huge loan before time. Now that’s something isn’t it?