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Comment by willvarfar | Hacker News Reader

Partner would have been happy to stay with me in the UK but I was blown away by the beauty of Scandinavia when I visited, and am so glad she relented.

Average quality of life in the nordics is massively better than the uk. It’s not even close!

Wages are lower in absolute terms but not qualitatively and we probably couldn’t afford to move back to the uk and have any semblance of same standard of living. We are now trapped in a utopia and happy about it.

More than half of programmers here are immigrants. Shop staff happily talk good English. There really isn’t any barriers finding good work.

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> Wages are lower in absolute terms but not qualitatively and we probably couldn’t afford to move back to the uk and have any semblance of same standard of living. We are now trapped in a utopia and happy about it.

Can you give some example of improvements that you would need to pay for in the UK?

I'm interested.

House prices in the part of the UK that have decent jobs are crazy. Public services have been slashed, heavily, in the last decade. The health service has been cut so much that to get a comparable service as in Scandinavia you'd need to buy expensive private coverage.

Childcare is really expensive too (because pensioners don't need it).

Education: in the UK is really pays to send your kids to a private school.

Childcare is a joke in UK (London). Super expensive. To send your kid to nursery 5 days a week you are looking at £1500-2000/m.

I second this.

I pay ~£1700pcm for a nanny to look after my 2 pre-school age kids 5 days a week.

This is (obviously) paid out of post tax income. At current UK income tax rates this equates to earning ~£2100 gross.

Most of the time, it's the paid maternal leave and free/cheap child care, and this equation usually never works out in favour for anyone who doesn't have children.

(GP)

Childcare etc is great, but that wasn’t top of my mind when I wrote this. I was thinking about general standard of living.

Normal wage structure here is very flat - there really aren’t orders or magnitude like you see in, say, the UK or the US. The vast majority of people live in much the same income bracket and that affords them very comfortable housing. (Locally there are valid complaints about a housing shortage etc, but this is nothing compared to, again, the UK. Grown up children aren’t financially forced to live with their parents etc)

Where exactly? Continental Nordics are three (or maybe four, depending on the definition) different countries.

Meh. The Scandi-Nordics are functionally similar enough that the local region matters more than which country it sits in. The everyday life experience in the industrial tech centers are more similar across the countries than compared with more traditional cities just a couple of hours away in the same country.

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