Japan was seen as expensive when I first moved there; my rent there was certainly higher than it would have been in Canada at the time (Circa 2008). Also, it's hard to directly compare stuff on shelves to what we have here. For example, Japanese peaches are much more expensive than Ontario peaches - but they are also incomparably better. However, if you only look at the price on the label, you would be rightfully sho…
Japan is mostly cheap, but on our trip my wife accidentally bought some grapes at a normal grocery store (she wasn’t converting prices in her head). I think it was $20 for a pound.
Ah, my in-laws are in Yamanashi and I will never forget when they took me to the vineyard and I was randomly shocked to find out how much the grapes cost..
has anyone done a simple merging of the Cost of living and quality of living to get the top 10 countries with the lowest cost of living but relatively highest quality of living?
You can of course use alternative calculations / weights, but without a principled way to do so, you can choose weights to come up with pretty much any outcome that you like.
Living in France, i'm pretty surprised they manage to find a "cost of living index" being _lower_ now than in 2018.
Sure, things have recessed from the highs of 2022 / 2023, but the idea of a "groceries index" that does not reflect how is has changed to, ahem, shop for groceries is weird.
When sorting by Rent Index, the US looks like a massive outlier at 45. Everywhere else over 40 is either a tiny island nation/territory or famously idiosyncratic (Switzerland, Iceland, UAE). The other Anglosphere giants, Canada and Australia, come in very high as well at 36. I would have expected the most desirable Western European nations to lead, but most of those are in the 20's. Those nations tend to have more re…
I think just by country messes up some of the measures for some countries and cities. I paid half of £720 to rent a former family home in Nottingham while a friend paid over £1000 in Nottingham. Not my experience but I think Amsterdam also has extremely high rents but I'm not sure how it compares to the rest of the Netherlands.
The Netherlands has a segmented rental market. The social/rent controlled sector has a price ceiling of €880/month and is only accessible with annual income below €48k/€53k (single/multi-person household). These norms apply nation wide, but as demand / free market prices in the large cities like Amsterdam is much higher than elsewhere in the country, waiting times for social rent there is around 15 years (vs maybe 3 to 5 outside the big cities). Free market rents (anything over €880/month) in Amsterdam is probably around €1500 for a 1br or €2500-€3500 for a 3br. Around 3/4 of the total rental housing stock is social/rent-controlled units. It can be pretty nice if you manage to get one, but it's almost inaccessible to newcomers/outsiders due to the income caps and waiting times. Which is pretty much the expected outcome for price control affordability policies.
Eastern Europe is where it is at. Ukraine is super cheap and a really beautiful place, requires a little work to get there but not to bad. Hotels are cheap and really good food and just awesome. Planning to go again this summer.
I would suggest the Baltics instead considering that they don't have a war going on right now. They are extremely beautiful during the summer.
has anyone done a simple merging of the Cost of living and quality of living to get the top 10 countries with the lowest cost of living but relatively highest quality of living?
Numbeo already includes (among other factors) CoL in their QoL index calculation, see: q https://www.numbeo.com/quality-of-life/indices_explained.jsp You can of course use alternative calculations / weights, but without a principled way to do so, you can choose weights to come up with pretty much any outcome that you like.
Also worth mentioning that the QoL index considers "climate index" which is almost meaningless, and apparently doesn't account for factors like "suffers from tropical cyclones".
Japan has always been a value. I don't understand why folks think it is expensive. Food is cheap, accommodations aren't expensive, transportation is affordable. The most expensive thing is airfare from the USA. I believe that they never fully recovered after Covid and tourism never bounced back. The YEN has also taken a beating so you can get more for your USD.
When I went there, 1983, it was one of the most expensive places on the planet.
When sorting by Rent Index, the US looks like a massive outlier at 45. Everywhere else over 40 is either a tiny island nation/territory or famously idiosyncratic (Switzerland, Iceland, UAE). The other Anglosphere giants, Canada and Australia, come in very high as well at 36. I would have expected the most desirable Western European nations to lead, but most of those are in the 20's. Those nations tend to have more re…
I'm surprised by how much the US has changed. I used to find it one of the cheapest places in the developed world and if you set the date thing on the map to 2014 it shows it like that. I'm not quite sure why it's changed. My guess would be investment flows into the big tech stocks like Apple, MSFT and Nvidia have pushed the currency up. Also oil - the US used to import a lot and is now the world's largest producer.