HDBs are still expensive. 2k SG for a small 2 bedroom HDB and very expensive electricity are not a good mix and there are very few studio or 1 bedroom HDBs. In most non coastal cities in the US you can get a studio for $600 USD.
In U.S. South near big cities, you can easily get a whole house with 3 bedrooms, two bathrooms, living room, kitchen, back/front yard, electricity, and high-speed Internet all for about $1,300 a month. Cheaper if you are about 10 minutes out into rural areas.
Either people make serious money in Singapore or their poor are pretty crunched in terms of living space. I don't have data to answer that.
Feel free to correct me, I've only been to America a couple of times, so I don't know the most appropriate place to search for comparison.
Rent would be considered a lot for most Singaporeans, however being ang moh I automatically pay more anyway. I know people living in my building who pay half what I pay in rent simply because they are Singaporean.
Also young Singaporeans live at home with their parents well into their 20s, and often get engaged and order an HDB which they start paying before they get married. They are not allowed to move in (by law) until they are married, and can only buy as a single if they are over the age of (35) i believe.
This is to encourage marriage. Likewise the lack of single bedroom HDBs is to encourage starting a family by having the rooms available. etc.
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I pay $2600/m (divided by 2 because I live with someone else) for a 2 bedroom hdb, that's bigger than the $2800 2bedroom apartment I had living in Sydney.
My power bill in Sydney was about $210/m while in Singapore its about $110/m.
Internet in Sydney was about $120/m for ADSL2+ (that connected at 2.5mbit) while in Singapore I pay $59 for uncapped, unthrottled, 1gb down / 500mbit up.
Taxi in Sydney cost me $27 to get to work in the morning. In Singapore, it takes 3x as long to get to work in a taxi and costs $10.
Train in Sydney cost me about $7/day and because it was only a few stops it would cost more to get a monthly or yearly pass than to just pay each day. Singapore costs me $1.18 to get to work and $0.90 to get home.
Basically my cost of living has significantly dropped living in Singapore. I'm not saying its like that for everyone. People I work with live in Condo's and pay a lot more than I do.
"New York - Downtown, as I figure in terms of status and location that seems comparable to Singapore."
"Feel free to correct me, I've only been to America a couple of times, so I don't know the most appropriate place to search for comparison."
You narrowed the scope of our conversation to one of the most expensive and famous parts of the entire United States to compare to the average of Singapore? At least you offered that you don't know where to do the comparison. ;) In my area (Memphis Metropolitan), there's tons of businesses, restaurants, activities, service sector, events... you name it. It's not even one of best areas: actually a bad one. Yet, just around $1000 a month. Lots of areas in the South are like that where I hear some suburbs in Northeast near tech capitals are as well. West is expensive everywhere. Good parts of big name cities like NYC, LA, Chicago, etc are as well.
So, it's best to avoid comparisons with those as mostly rich people live there. The rest of us dare not try. :)
"I know people living in my building who pay half what I pay in rent simply because they are Singaporean."
Never heard of this before. How does that work?
"They are not allowed to move in (by law) until they are married, and can only buy as a single if they are over the age of (35) i believe."
That's really messed up. Thanks for telling me, though.
"I pay..."
Your house is double or more what many Americans will pay in rent. The power bill is reasonable if that comes with water. Or does water come with rent or free? The internet leaves me jealouse: I heard you had uncapped Gigabit but didn't know how many or how much. $59/mo. Wow. Corruption is preventing that here with a handful of cities having gigabit ranging from a little above that to $350/mo. Corruption puts me at 50Mbps down with a cap for $70/mo.
"Taxi in Sydney cost me $27 to get to work in the morning. In Singapore, it takes 3x as long to get to work in a taxi and costs $10."
Hmm. I've always wondered about this tradeoff but have no hard data on it. It happens here. In cities, people taxi or walk to work. Rates I paid were similar. Out here in suburbs, we mostly own cars to do that 20-30min drive I mentioned. Gas is maybe $5 a day. Car and insurance can be had for as little as $600 a month for 4 years. Interesting enough, that puts it at about the same rate per day although we pay with or without a trip to work. Ego reasons mean many people pay a lot more for their car, though. ;)
"Basically my cost of living has significantly dropped living in Singapore."
That I believe. Australians tell me the country is expensive to live in if we're talking the cities. You might have dropped your cost of living moving to... anywhere. Just kidding but cities cost $$$ in First World countries with Singapore obviously cheaper.
So, what kind of work do you do? With good hours, wages, and breaks? Is that average for your area?
It's just assumed that because I'm white I earn more money so I can afford to stay here.
"The power bill is reasonable if that comes with water. Or does water come with rent or free?"
Includes water in the power/gas bill.
"So, what kind of work do you do? With good hours, wages, and breaks? Is that average for your area?"
Just a lowly .NET dev. 10am till 6pm, good salary, hour lunch. There's a huge need for developers in Singapore. Singaporeans seem to get pushed towards Doctor/Lawyer/Accountant by their family, and those who do programming, often end up in big companies like IBM etc where they earn less and become a number, because family thinks that startups are not a good secure future. Atleast that's what i'm told from Singaporean programmers.
Traveling from Singapore is awesome too. Got return flights to Taiwan for a week for $70, been to Cambodia for $80 return, japan for $260 return, thailand for $160 return. Etc. Great for weekend trips. Fly friday night come home sunday night. :)
I believe it's highly dependent on where you are from.
Glass door has the average salary as < 4000/m, but to get an employment pass (EP) you need to be paid minimum of 4000/m
There's linkedin jobs that go from 5k up to 14k.
As far as I know, Java roles pay rather low because theres lots of developers from India who will fill those positions, but there are very few Node / .NET developers and so those roles get quite a bit more.
I mostly do .NET tho, bit of Node, and currently learning golang (even tho I dont think there are any golang jobs in Singapore, want to learn something new)
Basically I cannot confirm or deny those links because there are lots of factors to consider. The market here is very different to Australia where all roles are around the same range regardless of language.
It is if you're comparing cities. We're comparing countries. America is very diverse in this regard even geographically. Want expensive, dense city? We have them. Want to spend no more than $1300/yr with access to many jobs and activities? My area and dozens of others. Want to live off the land in isolation with a home costing a few grand? Rural areas further south of me have that.
So, comparing Singapore to U.S. means we win on cost of living vs what we get for it because we have tons of lower cost options with similar benefits. Still, I gave them the Internet as I might up my rent $500 to get unmetered Gigabit. I would but can't except in a few areas most of which are quite isolated.
Singapore is a city state. The entire country is a single city, with a population density comparable to New York City (18,645/sq mi vs 26,403/sq mi; and unlike NYC, large slabs of Singapore are used for heavy industry or military purposes).
I knew it was small but didn't remember that it was that small. Hmm. My counter still stands as choosing a country based on options it gives you still leads to better value for real estate in U.S.. The extra information I'm getting just makes it more clear why this is true. It's still a drawback, though, that doesn't exist everywhere. It must be factored into cost-benefit analysis.
It's hard for me to compare the cost of living in Singapore vs (insert American city) because I've never lived there. I can only compare to Australia because I lived there for 5 years after leaving New Zealand.
There's a lot of things that are far cheaper in America, for example I can buy an SSD cheaper on Amazon shipped to Singapore, than buying it in Singapore. But then (having visited only a couple of times) I'm unaware of anywhere to get lunch for $4(sgd) in America.
Singapore can definitely be an expensive place to live. If you choose that sort of life-style. However your federal tax alone is more than my whole income tax. And if Sanders gets his way, that will go up even more. Coupled with State tax, I can only guess my disposable income is more in Singapore than it would be in America.
For example, lets say that USD/SGD was 1:1, with a yearly salary of $75,000. In America the federal tax alone is 17,666. (not including state tax)
In Singapore the income tax on that would be $2000, however every couple of years Singapore does 50% tax rebate up to the first $1000. So the effective tax for last year would have been $1000. Meaning your net income was $74,000 vs $57,334.
This doesn't include singapore's common "13th month" salary which is often an extra month of salary as bonus, usually to cover the cost of taxes as tax is not withheld here like it is in Australia / NZ.
That means you would get an extra $6200 (approx) on top of the 75k, making your net income more around $80,000
If you paid $500/m rent in the US that's $6k/yr, in singapore you pay say $1,300 or $13,000/yr
I don't fully understand how you do taxes in America, but based on my limited research from when I wanted to live in America, and just now, this is what I worked out. This isn't meant to be factual and proof of the cost of living between the two countries.
Edit: Also not a good idea if you're American to move to Singapore to work, since you get double taxed. Even all forms here in Singapore ask if you're American Tax Citizen.
Let's just run through this see what we can quickly glean.
The meals may be cheaper. What's that constitute a meal, though? Here, I can get a footlong sub and side items for $8-10. A restaurant meal, with tip, is going to be $10-15 per seat if it's an inexpensive one with one plate and a drink. What's the $2-3 USD you claimed get you?
For taxes, I try to stay in states with no state tax. So, it's just federal. We get various types of deducations that should be considered. I'm ignoring that to simplify to worst case. So, $75,000 is $5,156.25 + 25% of amount over $37,450. That's $14543.75 of tax. That leaves $60,456.25 of disposable income in an area with cost of living of $15,600 which leaves me with $44,856.25.
Note: Wait, are you paying $1,300 for your part of rent or is that the whole rent? If we're halving it for a roommate, I can drop a few hundred off mine to add a few thousand a year. That's still around $50,000/yr so not huge difference.
"This doesn't include singapore's common "13th month" salary which is often an extra month of salary as bonus, usually to cover the cost of taxes as tax is not withheld here like it is in Australia / NZ."
We do withholding here, too. Many withhold extra to cover for overtime as the IRS will come after our ass if we don't have the difference. People like the check they get during tax season, though. So, similar in practice to the bonus but with some differences.
"Also not a good idea if you're American to move to Singapore to work, since you get double taxed. Even all forms here in Singapore ask if you're American Tax Citizen."
That last part is due to all the tax avoidance and U.S. cracking down on it. We can't even open a bank account in some places like Switzerland. Plus, if we renounce citizenship over taxes, they claim taxes on 10 years of our income in the new country as punishment. Taxes are not among America's strong suit unless you're rich enough to avoid them with loopholes designed for the rich. :)
