I was talking to this person recently who was saying how he just moved from Australia. He chose to come to Vancouver as part of a career change and has been enjoying it. Now the type of work he did didn’t exactly bring in a large income. However, he mentioned something that was interesting where from his experience you can live comfortably making about $600 every two weeks. To put it in perspective, that is about $14,400 a year. Less actually when you factor in the income tax afterwards.
For the record, yes he doesn’t have any mouths to feed other than himself and he rents out a place with another to live in. If you gave that figure to most people who have grown up here they would tell you that is crazy and that you must be living in a box while eating nothing but plain bread all day. I was actually kind of surprised at how relaxed he was with that figure as if that was the norm with anything else being a luxury.
At times like that I think it is not so much about financial management skills but rather how much one was programmed in life to believe that they need to have specific things as a basic necessity.