Grean wrote:It is good to know that it is not as expensive as we were told.
We are in The Netherlands now, we pay less for food and have a massive house in a rural place.
I really want to make it work, we would really love to experience Singapore. So many people told us just how insanely expensive everything is, it made us think that 150k could be less than enough for a family.
Almost all of us go through some cost-of-living-shock adjustment here. Land is scarce which feeds > rents (shops rents too), which feeds prices in general. Together with that just about everything is imported, and the cost premium that involves. Example: My breakfast this morning was a couple of Malaysian bananas, Australian milk and Australian 'Weetabix', with a spoon of honey over. Even something as basic a meal as that is 100% imported. Ha! Just checked the honey, not too$, NTUC own-brand... it's from Hungary. ...and polishing that off with a Nespresso, that's made in Switzerland (and costs maybe 3* what it would in Europe).
If you want to live downtown and shop for the same weekly shopping basket you get back home it
will be expensive. But most people don't move here and try to exactly emulate their life from home. So after a little while you begin to expand your comfort zones and horizons. Eating what the locals eat outside the city-centre need not be expensive, shopping at local supermarkets isn't either (apart from tobacco/alcohol).
In our case we spend our time outside the city-centre. Journeys there tend to be when we're going to a concert, the cinema, fine-dining etc., or when we need our bi-weekly fix of 'expat groceries'. I.e. we do 90% of our grocery shopping in our local supermarket (the island-wide chain NTUC). But there are some things that back home are normal (always in the fridge) that here are a treat. So I go downtown to the $upermarket chain called Cold Storage and buy supplies, like pickled herring, pate, salami, cheese, sausages, crab, smoked salmon. This is stuff I could not or would not buy from NTUC. This is where I could also buy other groceries like back home, sliced meats, high quality fresh meat, non-local fruit and veg, and salad stuff, a better more diverse range of wine, beer etc. all at quite shocking prices.
This hybrid approach of buying most stuff locally, and accepting the cost of some home comforts from downtown works well for us I think.
And furthermore
two other things should be considered.
- tourists here stay on average 2.5 days. They stay in downtown hotels and pay downtown prices for everything. Whereas I would be shocked to go out in my neighbourhood and be charged more than $5 for a plate of the eponymous dish 'chicken-rice', in a downtown hotel seeing it on the menu at $20 even $30 would not surprise me, (because that's what they charge, because they have a captive market, who don't realise the premium they are paying). Same as if I visited Amsterdam, stayed in Centrum ('as all tourists do'
) and paid tourist prices for everything. My impression of cost-of-living will be very different from yours maybe just a few miles away from the centre of town.
- Beware comfort-zones (this has been discussed before). You move here and it's natural to cling to anything familiar/known, since so much is unfamiliar, at least initially. This is why, as with any major city, you get expat ghettoes. Perhaps like AMS/Oud-West? The closest local version is probably District 10, though it has less parks and so on. On this forum we see new members who have decided they must live in D10. It's usually because a colleague lives there. Or a friend lived here and D10 is 'where all the expats live [so you should look there too]'. Then these people look at rents in D10 and they're like
how will our S$1mm salary allow us to have the same size place as home in D10, and the typical nice car we have here is S$250k there
, how will we manage on that salary, should we move to Singapore at all!? There is a required element of 'When in Rome, do as the Romans do'.
Most countries have their favourite topics of conversation. In Europe it's probably the weather, and politics. In general terms the latter is off-limits here, the local topics are weather, shopping, eating out (preferably as cheaply as possible), and how expensive everything is. Europe has a weather-fixation and you hear it discussed at length everyday, maybe the same is true of costs here, especially from a visitor who has just had a downtown 2.5 day tourist experience.
--- Also check out the FAQ-topic 'What to bring'.
http://forum.singaporeexpats.com/viewtopic.php?t=103156
Asia is so vibrant and we just have to be able to get out and about, have fun time to time, not too much fun though 
'two kids!'
