@SteveInBsAs: almost always when people talk about wages here (I've never enountered different), the figure presented to the employee is the after-tax amount. People here as a whole have the attitude that the employer pays the taxes (and whatever fees, including sindicato dues, etc), even though we know that the employee really pays and if the taxes and such weren't so high the actually take-home would be higher as well.
You make some good points about the area around Palomar and Ramos Mejia, from what I understand as I've never actually been out that way, but I have an expat friend that actually lives in the outskirts of Ramos Mejia. He legally took over a bunch of land out there by occupying land that hadn't been used for decades and had back taxes owed. He improved the land, did whatever legal things needed to get the title over in his name (which included paying the back taxes) and ended up with what he describes as good land at a very cheap cost.
He also tells me about how very rural is his life out there. It suits him.
Steve, you're right about the train - my buddy says it's rickety and dirty and feels unsafe. He took the train for about a year, to our expat dinners on Fridays, when his truck was out of commission. Yuck, is the sense I got from him.
I can't remember now where the $4000 USD a month number came from, the official rate on $18000 pesos a month (doesn't quite reach 4K)? Of course, we all know that the real value of that is more like $2900 USD a month at the blue exchange rate (for the moment! slipping every month), which is extremely important because it gives one a sense of how much the salary is actually worth in more real terms here.
Living out there may provide the ability to live on 18,000 pesos a month, though. Depends on what kind of life, and possibly what kind of commute.
You other guys who are saying you can't live on $4000 USD a month here for a family of 4 - I'm with you as well, at least from my point of view. I think there are varying degrees of this - someone with 4 and 2 year olds can live cheaper than I do, and particularly out in the sticks of Gran Buenos Aires.
I know there are people (expats I mean) who live with families for that or less here in the city as well. It is possible - obviously, the Argentines do it all the time. With MUCH less. (Side note: I took my sister-in-law and a friend of hers out to dinner and a movie on Saturday. We went to TGI Friday to eat - not because I like the place, but because it was in Recoleta shopping by the cine, and because her friend had never eaten there before. She lives on Libertador at Libertad, not a bad place at all, but they are doing everything they can to survive and don't go spend $420 pesos for a meal for 3 people...ever).
One thing that many people who say "you can live so much cheaper than X salary in Buenos Aires" (I'm going to include Gran Buenos Aires in that) don't seem to bother with is the standard of living, unless I'm missing something.
I didn't move to Argentina with the expressed purpose of lowering my standard of living. I didn't immigrate to Argentina at all - I moved here to live, not to become Argentine. That doesn't meant that I don't want to learn the culture and that I want to isolate myself in an expat bubble (I live in both worlds).
What it means is - if I can't live what I consider to be a relatively high standard of living, I don't want to live here. I'm not committed to Argentina or Buenos Aires in particular to the point where I will continue to watch my standard of living shrink month by month and do nothing about it. I don't want to find myself moving into smaller and smaller apartments or houses, or moving into areas I don't care for in order to find something affordable, because I don't have to.
In point of fact, at the beginning of this year I had decided to do exactly that - leave Argentina. I'd had enough of the inflation and the other things that come with life here weren't enough to make me want to tolerate lowering my standard of living.
Hell, two years ago when I enrolled my sister-in-law into a private school in the city, we payed 680 pesos a month for school. We are now paying 1500. Professors to help her study when I couldn't help with a particular subject or was busy - from roughly 35 pesos an hour to 75+. Clothes prices rising, food prices rising, rent rising, etc, etc, etc, ad infinitum.
Then the split between the blue and official dollar rate finally began to seriously move and made things much more realistic price-wise. As an example, two and a half years ago, the dollar rate was probably something like 4 pesos back then if I remember well, less earlier in the year (working from memory). I was paying, then, for school at 680 pesos, between $180 - $170 USD roughly. Now, at the blue rate, I'm paying $241 USD. At the official rate, I'd be paying around $322 USD. While I'd rather pay $170 than $241, that's at least manageable but $322 is getting ridiculous, particularly for what we're getting.
This applies to everything here. Still more expensive than it was, but it set us back to prices comparable to a couple of years ago.
Now the political situation has me worried. It's not just prices that concern me, but stability and the ability to get things that one needs. But that's a whole other set of issues now...
Going back to someone moving here and earning $18000 pesos a month. Even if you could afford that now, don't think that it will retain its same value by the end of the year, for sure. And I'm not talking about converting to foreign currency like the dollar - $18000 pesos WILL buy much less here by the end of the year unless some sort of miracle occurs.
I cannot currently live on $4000 USD a month without lowering my lifestyle significantly. My apartment, parking space, building expenses, etc, cost half of that now (I like my apartment and I can get a king-sized bed in both of our two big bedrooms, my office could be a third bedroom and I could fit a king in here as well. I have a dependencia with a single bed too - when I was looking for apartments, cheaper ones had such small bedrooms a queen occupied most of the space - forget about a king it wouldn't have fit within the walls at all!). Add school, health and car insurance, electricity (!!!!!), land line telephone (!!!!) and all the other things listed previously by Early - without the blue rate I would have been gone around the time school opened this year.
The OP hasn't posted in a bit - maybe he's decided we're a bunch of complainers and we've got things all wrong, I don't know. I know I'm being as honest as possible from a viewpoint of maintaining a reasonably high standard of living.
You make some good points about the area around Palomar and Ramos Mejia, from what I understand as I've never actually been out that way, but I have an expat friend that actually lives in the outskirts of Ramos Mejia. He legally took over a bunch of land out there by occupying land that hadn't been used for decades and had back taxes owed. He improved the land, did whatever legal things needed to get the title over in his name (which included paying the back taxes) and ended up with what he describes as good land at a very cheap cost.
He also tells me about how very rural is his life out there. It suits him.
Steve, you're right about the train - my buddy says it's rickety and dirty and feels unsafe. He took the train for about a year, to our expat dinners on Fridays, when his truck was out of commission. Yuck, is the sense I got from him.
I can't remember now where the $4000 USD a month number came from, the official rate on $18000 pesos a month (doesn't quite reach 4K)? Of course, we all know that the real value of that is more like $2900 USD a month at the blue exchange rate (for the moment! slipping every month), which is extremely important because it gives one a sense of how much the salary is actually worth in more real terms here.
Living out there may provide the ability to live on 18,000 pesos a month, though. Depends on what kind of life, and possibly what kind of commute.
You other guys who are saying you can't live on $4000 USD a month here for a family of 4 - I'm with you as well, at least from my point of view. I think there are varying degrees of this - someone with 4 and 2 year olds can live cheaper than I do, and particularly out in the sticks of Gran Buenos Aires.
I know there are people (expats I mean) who live with families for that or less here in the city as well. It is possible - obviously, the Argentines do it all the time. With MUCH less. (Side note: I took my sister-in-law and a friend of hers out to dinner and a movie on Saturday. We went to TGI Friday to eat - not because I like the place, but because it was in Recoleta shopping by the cine, and because her friend had never eaten there before. She lives on Libertador at Libertad, not a bad place at all, but they are doing everything they can to survive and don't go spend $420 pesos for a meal for 3 people...ever).
One thing that many people who say "you can live so much cheaper than X salary in Buenos Aires" (I'm going to include Gran Buenos Aires in that) don't seem to bother with is the standard of living, unless I'm missing something.
I didn't move to Argentina with the expressed purpose of lowering my standard of living. I didn't immigrate to Argentina at all - I moved here to live, not to become Argentine. That doesn't meant that I don't want to learn the culture and that I want to isolate myself in an expat bubble (I live in both worlds).
What it means is - if I can't live what I consider to be a relatively high standard of living, I don't want to live here. I'm not committed to Argentina or Buenos Aires in particular to the point where I will continue to watch my standard of living shrink month by month and do nothing about it. I don't want to find myself moving into smaller and smaller apartments or houses, or moving into areas I don't care for in order to find something affordable, because I don't have to.
In point of fact, at the beginning of this year I had decided to do exactly that - leave Argentina. I'd had enough of the inflation and the other things that come with life here weren't enough to make me want to tolerate lowering my standard of living.
Hell, two years ago when I enrolled my sister-in-law into a private school in the city, we payed 680 pesos a month for school. We are now paying 1500. Professors to help her study when I couldn't help with a particular subject or was busy - from roughly 35 pesos an hour to 75+. Clothes prices rising, food prices rising, rent rising, etc, etc, etc, ad infinitum.
Then the split between the blue and official dollar rate finally began to seriously move and made things much more realistic price-wise. As an example, two and a half years ago, the dollar rate was probably something like 4 pesos back then if I remember well, less earlier in the year (working from memory). I was paying, then, for school at 680 pesos, between $180 - $170 USD roughly. Now, at the blue rate, I'm paying $241 USD. At the official rate, I'd be paying around $322 USD. While I'd rather pay $170 than $241, that's at least manageable but $322 is getting ridiculous, particularly for what we're getting.
This applies to everything here. Still more expensive than it was, but it set us back to prices comparable to a couple of years ago.
Now the political situation has me worried. It's not just prices that concern me, but stability and the ability to get things that one needs. But that's a whole other set of issues now...
Going back to someone moving here and earning $18000 pesos a month. Even if you could afford that now, don't think that it will retain its same value by the end of the year, for sure. And I'm not talking about converting to foreign currency like the dollar - $18000 pesos WILL buy much less here by the end of the year unless some sort of miracle occurs.
I cannot currently live on $4000 USD a month without lowering my lifestyle significantly. My apartment, parking space, building expenses, etc, cost half of that now (I like my apartment and I can get a king-sized bed in both of our two big bedrooms, my office could be a third bedroom and I could fit a king in here as well. I have a dependencia with a single bed too - when I was looking for apartments, cheaper ones had such small bedrooms a queen occupied most of the space - forget about a king it wouldn't have fit within the walls at all!). Add school, health and car insurance, electricity (!!!!!), land line telephone (!!!!) and all the other things listed previously by Early - without the blue rate I would have been gone around the time school opened this year.
The OP hasn't posted in a bit - maybe he's decided we're a bunch of complainers and we've got things all wrong, I don't know. I know I'm being as honest as possible from a viewpoint of maintaining a reasonably high standard of living.
