Hacker News Reader

Comment by MichaelRenor | Hacker News Reader

Ultimately if Toronto wants to be the best they will pay the best (adjusted for cost of living). They're best bet is that the bay cost of living becomes so unbearable that they can be competitive in take-home dollars.

As it is, the money for developers is in the bay by a huge margin.

View on HN

Yeah, the pay here in Toronto is much lower, even when you account for cost of living vs. San Fran.

One consideration that offsets that is medical insurance. If your health care is not fully covered by your employer.

I ran some numbers once and the "rent difference" was roughly $3k (typical 1 - 2 bedroom apartment at $4k vs. The roughly $1k I spend) and the platinum medical looking like roughly $500/mo

Add in a car, ($0 in Toronto, $1000 in The bay w/ parking, insurance, gas & the vehicle)

All said and done, $55k appears to make the cost of living difference "break-even"

If I'm on roughly $100k in Toronto, $155k would be even. Now that doesn't adjust for exchange rate, so you might get ~20% play there. Maybe the $135k median I've read about is roughly on target in terms of total food cost, etc...)

I think there'd be some cachet to having a "big five" employer on your resume, so a year or two in one of the mega-shops would add value to future earnings if you started looking elsewhere, or a handful of other unicorn-class names might have a similar impact.

All in all, I'm not convinced that taking a San Fran gig would necessarily feel like streets paved with gold and scooping up baskets of money (which grows on trees), so much as it'd be a nice, sunny, ultra-nerdy town in the heart of movin' & shakin'

Incidentally, if anyone would like to disabuse me of any errors in my napkin math, I would welcome it. I'd love to get a more realistic idea of the difference.

> "I'm not convinced that taking a San Fran gig would necessarily feel like streets paved with gold and scooping up baskets of money"

It won't necessarily, but it may - one important distinction between the US tech hubs like SV or NYC is that while they offer a higher median salary, they top end of the envelope goes way, way higher than it does anywhere in Canada.

There is a class of jobs/positions that straight up do not exist in Canada where large numbers of engineers can make $400-500k, or even more.

An evaluation of whether or not it's worth moving needs to consider where you are in the market. If you're making $70k in Toronto right now and some company in the Bay Area is offering $100k, that's probably a tough deal. On the other hand, if you qualify for someone of the higher-end positions in the Bay Area, you can go from making $90k in Toronto to making $400k in the Valley. That's a pretty slam dunk deal.

> Add in a car, ($0 in Toronto, $1000 in The bay w/ parking, insurance, gas & the vehicle)

My observation is that's great to not have a car in SF, I prefer not to. But it's impossible not to have a car in Toronto.

Why is it $0 in Toronto?

Great to hear you can go without a car in SF I'm a 20 minute walk to work in Toronto with a large grocery store across the street from home. Basically everything can be done on foot. Add in a bike and a nice transit system and no-car is pretty easy here.

Are you in SF? Does $4k for a 1 bed+den seem to be in the ballpark?

Rents can vary widely but I think $3000 is probably a more reasonable estimate. The transit estimates also seem too high - I spend almost nothing because I can walk to work and take a Lyft Line for $5 or a bus for $2.25 if I need to. Many people bike. Overall it would be fairly easy to only spend a few hundred a month on transit for many people if your apartment isn't too isolated.

You cannot get a 1BR+den for $3000 in SF. It'll be just over $4k since it'll be similar square footage to a 2BR but discounted for not having the proper second bedroom.

I pay less than $3000 actually and see similar listings

Median 1 bed is $3500-3700. Median 2 bed is $4700-4900.

Toronto without a car is very easy so long as you live and work along a subway line, or less ideally, streetcar lines. Uber fills in the gaps.

Impossible? I lived in Toronto for ten years without a car and never had trouble getting around.

$0 is a bit misleading, as you will need $130/mo for a metropass.

I'm shoes & a bike... Which is how I got away with claiming $0 on that, but yeah, I'd go so far as to concede a metro-pass could be required for some.

Personally, it's a 20 minute walk to work at Yonge & bloor ... So car isn't really critical here for me.

Doesn't look too impossible to not have a car in Toronto

(also there are things like Car2Go, no?)

Going carless in Toronto is very possible. After I moved to my current digs at Yonge and Eglinton, I noticed I used my car less than once a month, so I got rid of it.

If you're gonna do this, make sure you're near the subway. Buses and streetcars are a lot less convenient than the subway.

Taxes? Canadians jump very quickly into the highest tax brackets. Goods and Services are taxed in Ontario at... 14% now?

Perhaps surprisingly, that's mostly a wash.

Canadian federal tax is 33% over 200k USA is 33% over 189K

Ontario taxes 11.16% up to 500k California 9.3% up to 250k

... Ok so realistically 2% in taxes :). Maybe that's not a total wash.

But if we're looking at the break-even point it might hit $3k in California's favor

Okay, I tried to graph out taxes between Toronto and SF.

check it out: https://github.com/bsurmanski/TorontoSFTax

It looks like between 60k-200k, taxes in Toronto are actually lower. Between 200k-700k, it is cheaper in SF. At 300k, Toronto tax is about 1.5% more, and at 400k, Toronto tax is about 2% more.

But being realistic, most people in tech would pay less tax in Toronto.

edit: This calculation also does not take into account any other taxes (such as sales tax, or property tax), and is not adjusted for cost of living. SF has an edge in sales tax (8.75% in SF vs 13% in Toronto), but Toronto has a huge edge in cost of living (according to [0], Toronto is 32% cheaper), and property tax (1.14% in SF vs 0.7% in Toronto).

[0] - https://www.expatistan.com/cost-of-living/comparison/san-fra...

don't forget social security. Social security is 5.65%, whereas the equivalent in Canada is the Canadian Pension Plan, which is 4.95%. And you have great medical insurance built right in. [0]

[0] - http://www.investopedia.com/financial-edge/0411/do-canadians...

And social security is owed up to the first ~$110K of income, whereas CPP is only owed on the first ~$50K of income.

That source includes savings due to the exchange rate, even though wages would be in CAD

California's taxes are not straightforward. For example, my effective state tax rate is ~7.3% at $160k. It's a progressive tax, so calculations aren't as easy as slapping a generalized number.

If you're making $500k, it also isn't likely a high point of concern.

If you were moving to the US and were worried about cost of living, Seattle would be a great option. You'd probably spend 2k on an apartment there, making the math much more enticing to move.

wait wait wait -- you're able to find a decent apartment for $1k in Toronto? I was there and lived in a shithole for $1200 and that was 6 years ago.

The problem is that the cost of living is already extremely unaffordable and even more so in Vancouver. What could be a competitive advantage for either of these two cities in Canada is just not there. Sadly, the main major competitive advantage is a more lax immigration process over the US.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com