Cost of living and Software Engineer Salaries in Canada

my first job as a software engineer in Canada paid me three thousand dollars per month after taxes while I was paying 2 700 to rent a place to live within an hour commute time to the office I thought okay it's just the start of my career it will become better pretty quick three years later I have a six figure salary but it all goes to taxes rent and food in this video I will summarize what I've discovered about salaries in Canada while working for three different companies as well as the cost of life with detailed monthly expenses and also my thoughts on the balance between those two things first salaries in Canada Junior software Engineers with zero to three years of experience earn from 45 to 60k intermediate Engineers with one to eight years from 60 to 120k and Senior Engineers with three plus years from 90 to 150k I didn't synchronize the number of years because there is a wide range of how fast people progress in their careers and which company they work for in my understanding the chances that I will be able to earn meaningfully more than a million salary which is 110k for a software engineer in Vancouver are not very high I keep getting invitations to apply to senior roles that require many years of experience and pay just a bit over 100k I have friends who are working as senior devs have 10 years of experience and earn from 100 to 150. 150 sounds like almost an absolute maximum that I can dream of in Canada five years from now Junior entry-level engineers get paid 200k after three or four years software Engineers are doing 300K or so by senior they're doing about 400k the Cylon bonus it was like a 600k income some of you might say 150 what are you even talking about it's huge money well wait for the part about the cost of life and my conclusion in the end the root cause of such a salary cap is so-called wage suppression Canada brings an excessive number of overqualified immigrants so that the companies do not really need to raise salaries they always can hire a new well-qualified immigrants instead who are ready to be paid less because they just arrived they don't understand the true cost of life in Canada yet they have no choice they think it's temporary they think they will earn more in the future that in reality it never comes isn't it funny when I was looking for a way to get into a developed country I thought that Canadian immigration program makes so much more sense than in the US because it favors education and experience while the US one is more random but now I think that the one in the U.S favors more the US citizens in general while a Canadian one favors property and business owners but now when we have the earnings let's look at what this money can buy I will be calculating the expenses for someone like me a family of two adults two kids and a dog in Vancouver but I will also touch the debate about how the cost of Life varies for different cities let's consider a 100K salary that's 8 300 per month 2 500 goes to taxes the biggest expense is housing in 2023 I would budget about three thousand dollars per month for a family for housing in Vancouver greater area there is a shortage of rental properties here if there is a good apartment for rent with a realistic price there will be a competition among five or even 10 people easily to get their Department next expense is utilities roughly a hundred dollars for heating 100 for home internet 154 two mobile phones 54 electricity and maybe 100 more for subscriptions like Amazon Prime iCloud Netflix 500 for everything in this category we spend about 350 per week on food mostly in Costco that's 1 400 per month just a usual basket of vegetables chicken eggs milk bread nothing extraordinary for a five-year-old financed car a monthly payment can be 330 Insurance 150. one full tank of gas costs about hundred dollars we also need to service a card twice a year and buy tires maybe once in three years so let's budget 400 monthly for gas and service and now the main expanse that does not allow Canadians to purchase a home of their dream let's cut that Disney Plus subscription we haven't yet calculated any purchases like clothes Furniture Electronics books eating out gifts travel education entertainment saving investing we cannot afford any of that on a six-figure salary in Vancouver a very tight budget for basically paying the bills if there are two working adults in the family maybe there is a chance to afford some of those things but then potential daycare or after school or God forbid a second car will eat a good chunk of that second salary now a lot of people told me in the comments to my previous videos that Vancouver is not Canada my only problem is that I am in our own City and it is very different in other parts of the country and one of the most popular comments was a suggestion for me to move to Calgary so I've done some research even talked to a real estate agent and the mortgage broker from Calgary and what I've discovered is that yes sure housing is cheaper in Calgary but it's not cheaper to the point of being affordable you still need to pay around two thousand dollars to rent an apartment and about 2 500 to rent a house so maybe you can save up to 10K per year on rent in Calgary but salaries in Calgary are not higher levels FYI shows 80k as a median salary for software engineers in Calgary and 110k for Vancouver recruiters from Calgary reached out to me several times and they were proposing roughly a 20K pay cut to what I currently have so those numbers sound about right to me I can save 10K on rent but lose 10 to 20K in salary what about owning a house in Vancouver greater area owning anything is completely out of question there is no option to move further to the suburbs and get cheaper housing as it's a relatively small piece of land bordered by the ocean the mountains the U.S border and farmlands wherever you go here housing is still impossibly expensive in Calgary though a house may cost roughly from 450 to 600 000 which means that with a five percent down payment the monthly mortgage payment will be more than three thousand dollars or at least 50 percent of what's left from a six-figure salary after taxes okay but we can buy a townhouse in Calgary or Edmonton it would cost around 380k 2 300 per month mortgage and also 400 strata fee 2 000 property tax per year and again not less than 50 of a six-figure salary so a software engineer working remotely for a shiny Vancouver based tech company has to pay 50 of the income for a modest townhouse in affordable Calgary however you turn it if you make a try it all income would go to taxes housing and food at best it's not that Vancouver is unaffordable and Calgary is Affordable it's that Vancouver is just impossible and the rest of Canada is highly unaffordable and overpriced if compared to income so the only option to make the ends meet is probably to work remotely for a tech company from a large expensive city while living in a really small least developed almost a village and at this point I started thinking of a Canadian immigration program as a government-run scam that aims at partying educated people from all over the world with their life savings and the most productive years of their lives making them work on low-paying jobs in order to support the housing prices and quality of life for the previous generations of Canadians because there is nothing else in Canadian economy that can do that and after these immigrants cannot be squeezed anymore they had just been thrown away and substituted with new ones and the cycle repeats why are you such a strong word and call it a scam well because potential immigrants are being showed a dream of a prosperous country that best of the best can join work hard and build their Canadian dream in the year 2023 it is light years away from reality I recently realized that when I was taking a decision to move to Canada I was getting information almost only from those who had a business incentive for new immigrants to move like real estate agents and immigration advisors mostly on YouTube and the like their information is too skewed to the positive side and they are very far from being realistic and honest they came here 15 years ago built some kind of a small business bought a couple of properties before the price is skyrocketed they are very unlikely to work as employees of whatever sort and they are promoting Canada to regular folks like it is an attractive country to immigrate now if they were to say the truth it would be something like oh we bought this nice house 10 years ago it costs three times more now while the salaries remain the same so all the recent immigrants are completely screwed we've managed to buy a second investment property and that's how we've already retired oh by the way there is a family of doctors living in our basement very nice hard-working family it's totally fine they like the basement it's a nice one it even has Windows they pay us just a half just a half not even more of their income to rent the basement but these doctors temporarily working at Tim Hortons will be fine you should come to Canada too it's a land of opportunity look at us we've made it so you will make it too look I have nothing against the financial success of these people if they have it it's well deserved I'm just against promoting Canada like nothing has happened in the recent years and it is the same as it was 10 years ago and they are not trash in Canada by the way it is still an interesting country it has its advantages that I described in one of my previous videos I'm personally much better off here now than in so many worst places in the world and I still would move to Canada at least for the passport knowing what I know now and there are still chances that I will end up moving to a city like Calgary but have any more realistic information would have helped me to build a much better strategy from day one and that is what this video is about the realistic picture is that 99 of new immigrants are working just to afford paying taxes rent and food no matter where they live and where they work with almost no perspective to own anything or get ahead in a meaningful way there are opportunities that existed here 20 and even 10 years ago do not exist now they don't exist even for doctors and Engineers I honestly don't understand how the hell do people survive here while having a 50k job which is an average salary in the country by the way standards of life for new immigrants in Canada are falling off a cliff there is no housing no health care for new immigrants even though we are paying taxes in full extreme wait time for any however simple service salary is a low cost of life is high and these words should start any discussion about immigration to Canada and then repeat it again and again and when this is Crystal Clear we can move on to talking about the advantages this video is also maybe about demystifying my own myth about Canada it is just a country among the others with a brutal competition between humans for a very limited number of places Under The Sun It's not that Canadians are first world people with houses health care and democratic government day and night thinking about how to improve everyone's lives it just happened to be a country with no war on its territory a country with clean air and water nice people safe roads and beautiful urban areas which is already a lot by the standards of today's crazy world it's just that opportunities are not currently here I hope that information helps someone if so please consider giving this video a like and subscribing to the channel it would help me a lot thank you for watching

Channel: Angry Canadian Immigrant

Views: 609,547

Keywords: Cost of life in Canada, Software Engineer salaries, Software Engineer salaries in Canada, How much do software engineers make, Salaries in Canada, Software Developer Salary, Software Developer salaries in Canada, Affordability in Canada, How much we spend in Canada, Monthly expenses in Canada

Id: zqyRp6pAwu8

Length: 11min 36sec (696 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 19 2023