I've been planning to move from Spain to London for some months. You're scaring me. Is £40.000 not enough for a decent flat and once a month flight back home?
Assume about 1000 GBP/month if you want somewhere half-decent to live. If you want accommodation to be 30% of your before-tax salary, then you need to make 40K per year.
If you're willing to compromise - live in a room in a shared house, almost like a student, or somewhere dodgy (e.g. tower block with lifts that smell like piss) or with poor transport links, you'll be able to reduce that by 50% or more.
Between myself and my GF, we make about 90K GBP, and we're fairly comfortable. But we live in Bow in the East End, don't have kids, and barely feel middle class.
You say that as if living in a shared house was some sort of social stigma.
Most single young (under say 35) professionals in London share flats, and I'm including lawyers, investment bankers, doctors, etc.
One reason is that price drops disproportionately with the number of rooms, for example for a 1-bed flat you might pay £200/week but for a similar 2-bed you'd pay only £240/week. You could pay 1000/month for a "half-decent" 1-bed flat, or alternatively you could share a great 2-bed flat for the same price. And many people chose to make the second decision. Also it makes much more sense in terms of buying household products and makes "luxuries" such as hiring a cleaner much more affordable.
If you really want to live on your own it makes more sense to live in one of london commuter belt suburbs where you can get a flat for 600/month.
Living in a shared house (assuming no relationship with co-sharers) is a massive PITA, especially if you're as misanthropic as me. Sharing bathrooms, kitchen cleaning protocols, awkwardness / potential conflicts having guests stay over, ugh; it sucks. It's like living at home with your parents; better in some ways, worse in others, but a huge step below having one's own place.
But if you have a significant other, then I agree, sharing is a whole heap better.
We live in a 3-bedroom, two-story house with a back garden that runs down to the canal, and a view directly onto Victoria Park past the canal. It's about 25 minutes from almost anywhere in central London by scooter (to my mind, the best way to get around London). The house runs to only slightly more than 1000/month.
It massively depends on who you're living with. There is a big difference between living with a bunch of people you just met on gumtree and living with your closest friends you've known for years.
Thank you and of course also to the rest of people that answered. It seems I'll be sensibly better than now. Madrid accommodation is shockingly expensive (~900€ a decent flat half an hour from the centre, I live now much farther), considering the much lower salaries... I can't find anything above €30k right now, with 15 years experience!
A funny thing is that yesterday I was thinking of emailing (or should I say spamming) you to ask for advice. I have your address from some conversation we had long time ago over bpd.non-tech, and I don't know anybody in UK.
Email away, but given that I work for Embarcadero from home, and my coworkers are located in California, I don't have much advice specific to the software industry locally; just generalities about London from the perspective of an Irishman, and thus the culture, frankly, is not terribly foreign.
I was living in Stoke Newington 3 years ago with a couple, paying £585/mo for a first-story rowhouse flat with a backyard garden and a piano and an open invite to the older gentleman's main home in Seville, and was 2 blocks off of the A10, right on multiple rail lines to Central London. It's all in where you look.
LOL. 40k ~= 29k / year after taxes? That's 2400 / month (I'm not sure what health care coverage you get for that, it's been 10 years since I lived in the UK, but let's assume it is fully covered). A 1 bedroom is what nowadays, 1600 / month if you're not picky? Add public transport fees (100 euro / month?), above-average cost of food (depending on where you go and what you eat, obviously - 250 euro a month for 1 person if you're a bit careful should be doable); utility bills (gas, water, electricity; let's say you're not home much and it all adds up to 150 / month; that leaves 300 for clothes, cell phone, insurances, furnishing your apartment, social life if you want to have one, various local taxes, ... Luckily Ryanair flies for cheap, but the Stansted Express is already another 25 euros ;)
Obviously there are many people living off much less, but don't expect the same standard of living you could buy elsewhere with that money...
You can get a perfectly decent furnished flat in a normal inner-suburb area of London on little more than half the suggested £1600, and if you plan your flights in advance the cost on a low cost carrier is negligible. £40k per annum isn't going to offer you the same kind of luxury in London you might get in other cities, but it's a perfectly adequate salary to enjoy the city on.
OK I guess it depends on how you define 'live in London', I guess. I used to live in Staines, but I hardly believe that moving to Staines represents the ambition of people saying the want to move to London because that's where the action happens. I admit I don't know that much about actual rental prices right now, but a cursory web search shows to me that my 1600 pounds is closer to the average for a 1-bedroom apartment than 800 pounds. 700 pounds is what an average apartment (nothing fancy) costs in my rural hometown in Belgium.
Sorry, I switched currencies somewhere halfway in my post, I don't quite remember where - but either way, either your net pay will go down or costs go up so the actual situation is worse than what I describe.
40K is around 2450 per month after tax.
If you don't want to share a flat and don't want to spend more than 40 minutes commuting per trip allow around 1000 for a single bedroom flat in zone 2 or 3. Council tax is around 100/150 per month. Water/gas/electricity/internet should be between 150 and 200 per month. Monthly pass for zones 1 to 3 is 120 a month. So fixed costs are around 1500 a month. This leaves you 950 per month for food, clothes, gadgets going out, travelling and for saving some money. Healthcare is free for now.
