They're getting 50-55k. OTOH their rent is 500 to 800 a month (including electricity and sometimes internet), and they can buy a house in the suburbs if they want for about 300 to 400k. (All prices CAD.) Montreal has a ton of startups and companies that offer good stock options/RSUs/bonus packages as well, you can shop around for those.
This is not a bad tradeoff -- consider 5x the rent and 4x the house price in SF, which is a less safe city with much worse suburb to city transit options, and only what, 2.5x the salary?
Numbers scale exponentially tho. Let me put everything in USD base and then do a napkin comparison:
Montreal:
- av salary: cad$70k -> $55k
- av rent: cad$860 -> $656
- net: $47 128
SF:
- av salary: $135k
- av rent: $3.5k
- net: $93 000
Taxes are very similar so let's keep them out.
Again obviously this is back of the napkin, and there are other factors, such as healthcare etc. but actually, unless you have a very specific situation (lots of kids, lots of health issues, etc) it still seems better to be in SF, COST WISE.
I'm not saying life is terrible in Montreal, I love Montreal :) But having done both, in the technologies sector, the difference is huge. If you work in another domain this is not true, but engineers are paid so much in the US, it's hard to beat.
Yeah I can see the argument. I think this forum in general is too easily weighted towards considering money vs everything else in life though. I wanted to show numbers for a life that (considering the low CoL of the area) was perfectly good and maybe a little less rat-racy.
Also out of pure patriotism we just have way too many Canadians leaving so they can make more money in the US... but there definitely is innovation here also (maybe even more innovation, just less capital) so people who don't need as much money but are anxious about their skills getting outdated can definitely stay in Montreal.
> I think this forum in general is too easily weighted towards considering money vs everything else in life though.
That's to expect when the average participant lives a single young male life in SV or a major urban city with a large tech presence and hasn't reached an age where buying homes, child care, commuting, retirement, etc. become actual issues.
This is not a bad tradeoff -- consider 5x the rent and 4x the house price in SF, which is a less safe city with much worse suburb to city transit options, and only what, 2.5x the salary?