Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

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Note that the author lives in Europe (Italy), where there is a robust social safety net and typical programmer salaries are about $45-60K/year. It doesn't take nearly as much to be "wealthy" relative to those conditions.

Author is basically engaging in a form of geographic arbitrage by working remote from Europe. They get to enjoy wages comparable to U.S. programmers, but get the European social safety net, and since they're not living in a big city, rural cost of living. It's not unlike U.S. tech workers who choose to live in a remote rural village, or Californians who retire to Boise at age 30, or Canadians who come to Silicon Valley to work for a FANG and found a startup and then retire to Canada after doing that for 7-10 years. (The latter is my favorite, because Canada allows citizens a step up in capital gains basis upon moving back to Canada, so you can make literally millions in Silicon Valley stock over a few years and pay zero tax on it, then enjoy the Canadian social safety net for retirement.)

Good luck retiring in most major Canadian cities if you don't already own real estate there.

Article said "don't live in a major city". Besides, my understanding is that prices are still reasonable in smaller cities like Quebec City, Kingston, Halifax, Edmonton, Calgary, Winnipeg, etc.

As someone who just sold a house in Halifax last year, and with friends who weren't as lucky to have bought a home in the 2000s, I think you can safely remove that city from your list.

We moved to a town a couple hours away from Toronto, and the prices were shockingly comparable to Halifax, while Halifax household incomes are lower.

Prices in all of these cities have gone up. Halifax average sale went from $330k to $370k from 2019 to 2020.

People see if they don't buy in now, they may never be able to buy in, and are buying in, driving prices up further, causing more people to panic buy, etc.

It also leads speculators to buy houses because they see property giving incredible returns. Pay in many of these cities, or employment opportunities that pay well, are limited.

If they're relatively reasonable now at this pace they won't be for much longer.

Alberta is perhaps a little different because they seem to build new housing much faster than many other provinces.

Halifax is still livable/affordable as a remote dev-- far more affordable than places like NYC or SF. On remote engineer salary the increases in cost of living aren't so much the killer as the insane income tax is.

halifax is still livable if you get money from someplace that isn't halifax, but what does that say to the future of halifax? Who will provide all the services when they can't afford to live there on halifax incomes? What's the healthcare availability in NS compared to other provinces - Halifax healthcare was in crisis even before COVID.

Just in October they announced that the child healthcare system was at capacity and they might have to start diverting patients to other provinces. How does that work for people who aren't on remote engineer salary, and how does that bode for the future of halifax?

Welcome to the Bay Area, where the only people who can buy houses are those that can funnel the retirement funds of the world into their pockets.

The answer for us is that all the local service providers live far outside the core urban areas and have terrible commutes. Or they double or triple-up, multiple families per unit. As the area becomes increasingly unlivable for people that do the local gruntwork, a number of them leave the metro area. Those that stay have less competition, and so they start charging higher wages. Eventually the local economy equalizes at a much higher price point; local service workers find they make a livable wage again; globalized tech workers find that most of their income is eaten up by daycare, housecleaning, gardening, and restaurant meals out (to say nothing of housing); and the whole region settles into an uneasy truce, yet enjoys great geographic arbitrage opportunities over other regions. We can go make Halifax unaffordable and live like a king there, for example.

You wi t have healthcare or city services and you'll create crazy crime waves as I equality grows but hey I guess that is the bag area - with lack of self awareness included.

That's rule 4:

> Don’t live in big cities (go for smaller, more liveable towns).

Author is writing a lot of crap because every sane employer asks for where you're living and verifies it (either by bank accounts / asking for domicile paperwork / etc) to pay you a good-enough amount for that country.

FAANG companies hiring people in Italy do the same. If you can find a stupid employer who'll pay you a San Francisco salary to live in Souther Italy, then good for you, but that's _rare_.

The 'robust safety net' that you think is in place in Italy is a poor-people subsidy which is currently being discussed because totally abused by a lot of users (and it's becoming unsustainable for Italy's devastated economic situation). So the only good thing the author did is fleeing this ticking bomb.

Canada allows citizens a step up in capital gains basis upon moving back to Canada

Could you elaborate on this or provide a source? Curious because I'm in the US in tech with a canadian citizenship.

https://kpu.pressbooks.pub/cdntax/chapter/__unknown__-10/

Oh, I see. this wouldn't apply to a US/Canada citizen, since the US taxes worldwide income.

45-60 is even high for Italy, it's substantially below Europe on average

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