Brah, you are welcome here! Please keep coming often and post
Its interesting that you mention that stuff is more expensive here. The locals are known to be shopaholics and buy stuff that they dont need. Expats are known to be more conservative? So if expats find stuff expensive, what about the locals then?
I think varies from people to people as to what part of the cost actually bites them the most. In our case, we are not really after top brands for ourselves, besides, stuff like shoes how often do you need to buy them? Most of the stuff that we buy is for our little daughter, we didnt really find stuff like clothes to be so prohibitively expensive. Places like Kiddy Palace are expensive but large stores like BHG and John Little often have deals and we mostly shop in them.
I was looking at children's education. In Australia for foreigners on 457 employer sponsored visa the kindergarten fees is like ~5000 AUD a year. Thats quite expensive! Here we spend like $3000. I think
International Schools (like AIS) here are much more expensive than those in other places and that might have significantly weighted into the cost in the survey. The survey was for a family of 4 so that kind of explains it.
The survey says that it took domestic help into account. Domestic help is much much much much cheaper here. In Australia I heard baby sitters make more money($19-25 per hour) than even IT support personnel
I really would like to see how each of the items were weighted in the survey.
