cost of living NZ vs. Canada

[JulieD]

I'm not meaning to be depressing, just trying to make you realize what you'd be giving up. Aside from the snow Canada is the best country in the world. We used to live quite far from the relatives but living in the same country you at least know you can go see them.

The Bay of Plenty. The beaches here are superb (long white sand) and unpopulated and the fishing is good from them. Tasty snapper is my favourite. I used to ride my horse on the beach and hardly see anybody. The weather is terrific. Literally the sunniest weather in the country. (some other place holds official title of most hours of sun but they're not recording here, haha!) In winter last year I hardly needed a sweater although the one before that I did wear gloves a couple times. It warms up by mid day. No snow of course, lol but it does get rainy in the winter and that can get a bit depressing. Unless you install some sort of regulated heating (like a heat exchange system) the house can get cold and stoking a fire is a pain!

People in NZ are waking up to the Bay of Plenty though and places like Tauranga are becoming pretty big with lots of suburbs springing up. Most internal migration has been north of Taupo for quite some time.

Summer school uniform for primary aged boys is shorts, polo shirts hats and sandles. Winter uniform for primary school is the same but with a sweater, socks, covered shoes added and less emphasis on the hat. Girls generally wear dresses, but it depends on the school. Older kids in high school generally have jackets instead of sweaters and longer pants.

I'd say Bay of Plenty, around but not in Auckland, Wellington and South Island around Christchurch (but it gets cold down there) would be my top picks for where to live. Cambridge around Hamilton would be nice too but it's inland.

Don't plan on saving enough over here for a house, they're really expensive and kiwis struggle to get a deposit together especially in more desirable locations. You'd be better off to bring enough money over with you for a down payment at least.

If you garden the plants here are amazing. You can grow anything. We have lemons, limes, chestnuts, oranges, clementines, cherry trees, peaches, apples, grapes, macadamia nuts, various ornamentals, a vegie garden, some native trees, fijoas, an apricot tree, plum trees, a couple persimmon, a pepper tree, some yukka and a few other things spread around on our one acre. Most houses have orange trees and various other fruit trees at least in smaller towns. It's a gardener's paradise. Poinsettias, for instance, grow to small tree size and look really cool planted outdoors.

[JulieD]

Wow, I wrote this huge reply about all the cool trees and garden stuff we've got and how great the weather and the best places to live and the upload didn't work on this site.

Oh well. In short, you can grow anything, an amazing variety of trees and plants and the weather is superb but rainy in the winter which can get a bit depressing. (to combat that I think how it could be worse and it could be snow, haha)

I live in the Bay of Plenty which is in my opinion one of the nicest places to live in NZ but in some parts of the Bay it is getting crowded, like Tauranga for instance, since NZ'ers have woken up to how nice it is, lol and most internal migration in NZ is to places north of Lake Taupo.

Hey, there's my reply up there! Must just take a while.

[kdixon]

It's funny... I haven't spent enough time online to closely examine all areas, but the one area I have spent time looking at is the Bay of PLenty. Mind you, you have supplied much more info than any site so far. Mostly I've been checking real estate and jobs. When you say places like Tauranga are getting pretty big - what does "big" mean - population wise? Our plan is to have a minimum $100000cdn to put towards a house purchase. The sale of our house would give us that easy, but we'd might like to keep it - just in case. However, the more - the better.

[JulieD]

Have a look at www dot tauranga dot co dot nz (new comers to this forum can't post links unfortunately) the population, average temp is on the bottom right of that page and there's quite a bit of info on Tauranga on there too.

[kdixon]

Thanks! Great site, and I've managed to find a whole lot more as well. Thanks again for all your help!

[WOE]

A very helpful recent report provides data on the affordability of housing in more than 200 urban areas by calculating the ratio of the median house price to the median household income (e.g., if the average house price is 200K and the average household income is 50K, you'd get a ratio of 4.0).

In general NZ is much more expensive (6.3 average for the 7 cities included) than Canada (3.1 overall). However, there are large city-to-city differences, particularly in Canada. Where I live, in Winnipeg, the ratio is 2.7, but Vancouver is 8.4 and Victoria is 7.3. Tauranga, the most expensive of the 7 cities listed for NZ is 7.5, and Dunedin, the least, is 5.3 (Auckland is 6.7). If you really want to live where housing is expensive, go to Los Angeles (11.5!). In most cases a NZ city would be more expensive than a Canadian city. However, there would be exceptions. If you move from Vancouver to Dunedin, you'd find housing relatively more affordable in Dunedin (assuming you had the same relative income in both places).

If you want to find the full report, just google "Demographia international housing". The tables include the median house prices and median incomes for each of the surveyed cities, so it's interesting to check out different locations.

[CanadianGal]

What a helpful suggestion. Thanks!