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ArkanExplorer

Does moving to Australia stack up financially? All units in USD.

Netflix salary: $350,000 (minimum)

Tax as a single man in California with standard deduction: $133,000

Tax in Australia: $140,000

Price for a 3-bedroom house in Byron Bay: about $2m https://www.realestate.com.au/sold/property-house-nsw-byron+...

in SF: about $2m. https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/23-Madrid-St-San-Francisc...

Taxes can be lowered significantly in the USA if you have a stay-at-home spouse and children. Australia does not allow tax combining. Taxes can be lowered in both countries with real estate deductions (although in Australia only for investment properties).

The major advantage for Australia is that there is no demographic underclass or widespread poverty/homelessness, which is a major problem in SF. But costs for Sydney and associated areas are hyper-expensive, about the same as SF.

Sydney latitude: 33.4° South. SF: 37.7° North

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It's true that house prices in Australia, especially Sydney, are so high right now they are on par with the Bay Area. Other financial details are harder to calculate: Your lifetime medical costs, for example. And also a lack of bonuses or pay raises. A number of times my US-citizen colleagues were offered money to stay in jobs when I, as a visa worker, was offered none. Companies believe that visa workers are unable to quit, and abuse it (regardless of who you are). (Disclaimer: not Netflix, they truly treat their visa workers well.)

Sydney has been famously expensive for a while I think... It's a lovely city though.

Personally I'm looking at the other side of Aus, where a family home seems to be achievable around the half million mark.

The Byron Bay house you linked is a 7000sqft 7-bedroom mansion... doesn’t seem like quite a fair comparison, random little bungalows in the Bay Area cost the same.

From a quick dig around, it looks like there's not a lot under $1m in Byron Bay - which makes sense, it's a very pretty town in a beautiful location, it's small, well known and popular.

An hour up the coast at Tweed Heads (the southern end of Gold Coast), things are a lot more reasonable.

Many regional areas in Australia are going through a property boom as people rearrange their lives around remote working. Byron is right at the tip of that mountain. There are many more affordable towns both north and south of Byron.

Yes, moving to Byron for Australia is similar to Hawaii/Maui for California.

It’s closer to 4000sqft if we’re going by American standards. The internal spaces is 385m^2 which is about 4000sqft.

The lot is 7000sqft (not very large, IMO...)

Byron Bay is a pretty specific place. Realistically the range for nice houses is in AUD: city centres - 2M+, suburbs - 1M+, regional 300k+. Tourist places like Byron can be anywhere in between or higher really.

If he's keeping the SV salary then he's probably well ahead of the game.

(edit - I revise my previous statement that 2m is not typical, as I was looking at historical prices. It looks like Byron Bay has seen massive house price inflation in the last 8-10 years!)

> Australia does not allow tax combining.

Australia has family trusts, which can allow significant savings on tax. Or used to, I haven't lived there for most of a decade.

We do but a family trust isn’t relevant to an employee’s salary. E.g his Netflix salary wouldn’t be able to go into the trust until after paying income tax on it.

If he wanted to e.g invest in his wife’s name for tax reasons he could just transfer her the taxed income for her to invest with instead of using a trust.

Trusts provide the flexibility to distribute that future investment income to whichever member in that particular year to optimise tax.

Thanks for the correction.

You also forgot negative gearing. Investment losses can only be adjusted in the us on sale. In Australia real estate losses via negative can even offset income. I know folks who have a field day with this!

The primary barrier to distributing your salary through a trust is the personal services income rule.

https://www.ato.gov.au/Business/Personal-services-income/

Australia has national health so that tax difference is probably more than made up for by health insurance premiums.

I don’t know how Netflix does healthcare but many companies in SV give very good plans with no monthly premiums. I would expect the same of Netflix but maybe they don’t.

Both of us had good-to-great health insurance in the US thanks to our employers. But there's the rub: it's tied to employment, and if you lose your job for any reason, you either do without or pay (very expensive) COBRA. In Australia, everyone has Medicare (public health for all ages), and we currently also have supplemental insurance ("gap coverage") from my employer.

National-ish. You still pay for most visits privately if you want a better service. (As in, you want someone to spend more than 5min with you) But it's definitely much better than the US pricing.

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