That's not marginal, that's damn near 40%, ballpark of 80k USD per year difference. That's close to $100K CAD per year.
And while the current state of play in the US is rather odious, the idea that you'd be less secure or safe in somewhere like NYC or SF is laughable. The only places I've even been accosted on the street were in Melbourne, Australia and Brampton, Ontario. The rhetoric and laws you dread are mostly, or entirely, perception; make no mistake they're a thing, but heavily magnified by a media machine based on getting eyeballs and reactions. Like, the Prairie Provinces are solidly conservative -- AB even took a crack at banning gay marriage a little while back -- and ON managed to vote in yet another Ford.
I'm happy to sit out the Trump years north of the border, but if an offer with another $100K on top of what I'm making now floated my way but required me to be in California, or NYC, or DC, I'd be hard pressed to ignore it.
Where do you get those numbers? Did you forget a period? Or are you comparing gross numbers and forgot to normalize? You're off by an order of magnitude!
The US is, generally, very safe. And I'll gladly take a 2x or 3x increase of a very rare event to not have to live in Canada again. I grew up there and... yuck (To the Canadians here, please understand. I grew up in the GTA)
That being said, mama raised no fool. I don't and wouldn't live in a defund-the-police city.
It's pretty funny. You get the same tax load in most of canada compared to california, yet the tax laws have far less gotchas like these and you get universal health care.
The canada gotcha's are:
1. Everything is more expensive.
2. Housing is overpriced in employement metros except alberta.
3. You get paid a lot less than the USA anyway.
4. Canada's stock market is pretty much flat compared to the USA in the past decade.
Sometimes just raw amounts of money overcomes a lot of these kinds of issues.
I mentioned in another post that I am a big proponent of moving to Canada, but I have my eyes wide open. Canadian salaries do not even come close. Also, I have filed taxes in CA for 12 straight years. The tax burden gets diluted by a lot of different factors like deductions, mortgage deductions, tax credits etc. In 2018, I took my total $$$ paid to Fed + CA and divided over total income and effective rate was only 28%. The top rate in CA is 9% which is a progressive rate. Effective rate is actually close to a flat 5%
As someone who keeps tabs on the poutine and labour markets back home, I can vouch for everything you said.
I don't even live in CA/NY (so my gross pay multiple isn't quite as high, but income net tax/cost of living is pretty great) and there's just no comparison. I probably make 60-80% more total comp in the USA than I would expect in a major Canadian city, and that's not even accounting for higher taxes (depending on state/province), frothy Canadian real estate valuations, and higher consumer prices almost across the board.
But Canada sure is a great place to live and I miss it dearly. I still hope to move back one day.
N/a for me since health insurance was a given for every job I had in California
> license fees (eg vehicles)
Cars are much cheaper to buy and operate in California than Canada
> cost of housing
FWIW the Canadian housing market is currently in a massive bubble, comparable IMO to where the US was in 2007 (i.e., peaked and on the verge of bursting)
> utilities
Negligible on a software engineer's salary
> cell phone plan
More expensive in Canada
> reasonable retirement provision
Social Security or Canada Pension Plan: Good luck!
> child care and education provisions
Given that my wife couldn't work in the US it was n/a for me, but we could comfortably afford for her to stay at home when our first son was born.
At ~170k USD (220k CAD) in Ontario, you'll be hitting the combined top marginal rate of 54%.
It's true that California+Federal will be within a couple points of that at their top marginal rate, but that's 1m+ in California and 400k+ federally. So you won't even be within spitting distance until 400k+.
In California at ~170k USD you'll only be paying a combined marginal rate of ~37%, which is a huge difference. The brackets are lower all the way up, so you pay way less overall even if you do hit 1m+. And although payroll taxes are a bit more in the US AFAIK, Canada has higher sales taxes and lots of other hidden costs (e.g. much higher gas tax, more expensive consumer goods due to import duties, etc.).
If u have a ton money, it's cheaper to just live in US. Canada is very expensive for the plebs. The cost of living keeps rising and the politicians are very anti small businesses and pro oligarchy. They have a strangle hold on the country simliar to the Murdoch in Australia. Ironically, US is fairer in helping the small timers.
Canada has all the issues and none of the advantages of the US market 10 times its size.
Real-estate securitization has DoS’d key class 5 to 7 zones. This means empty industrial buildings stay empty, as the tax-deductions on inflated-valuations are also used to underwrite more debt... worth more than any lease sucker deal. Try to convince a competent CEO a small $32k/month triple-net lease isn’t going to bleed an inexperienced company into receivership eventually.
Pick just about any US state, hire 30 locals, and making a profit gets so much easier. The US financial ecosystem is generally far more harmonious even to type C corporations.
As an outsider in unregulated markets, one could see Corporate sponsored prostitution, targeted bribery, and blackmail. You just aren't important enough if you don't know these facts yet.
Canada has some of the silliest smart people in the world =)
At my level CAD $120k/yr is average salary I've been offered locally, with no options, though after taxes that's $87k/yr and my rent is $24k/yr for a one bed condo so I would have $63k to spend per year. Instead I make remotely USD $160k, which is $210k CAD, and it goes to a consulting corporation that I write off everything I can including rent so pay much less taxes to my incredibly corrupt provincial government. I also have standard options everybody else in SV gets.
Edit: I work for a startup that advertised here in the monthly who's hiring threads.
5% of 270k CAD/200k USD is 10k USD. That's not an insignificant amount of money.
Sales tax is higher here, 13% in Ontario vs ~7% in CA (varies by county or something weird).
Things really are more expensive. Grab any book off your shelf and look at the Canadian and American MSRP, notice how it's still more expensive in Canada after accounting for currency conversion. Gas is more expensive. Alcohol and cigarettes are more expensive. The list goes on and on.
Off the top of my head the only things I can think of that I know to be cheaper in Canada are maple syrup, propane and lumber.
>Most employers provide this. And vision/dental is far cheaper than paying for everything.
Most employers provide it in the states as well, but it's still money they spend on you instead of paying to you. Insurance needs to cover less here, but it is needed for much more than vision and dental. The biggest one I can think of would be prescription medications, there are more but I don't feel like grabbing a policy book off my shelf.
>Buying isn't cheaper. Renting is still significantly cheaper (at least by 1/3).
I haven't gone into any great detail verifying this but I doubt it is true. What cities and neighbourhoods were you comparing?
Again I love my country but moving to a major Canadian city from a major American as a way to save money is a foolish idea.
Is the view of IT being seen as a cost an East Coast Mentality though? Stemming from the days of Arthur Rock not being able to get any investment money in New York.
The West Coast has always been more of a 'dream land', where even far fetched ideas could see the light of day vs. here in the East Coast.
On another note, I heard rumours that the Liberal Government may tax small corporations (up to $300k a year) as much as personal income?
Sorry, but I'm not sure this is entirely accurate, as a Canadian.
> Translation: Canada is wealthy including most Canadians I know. That’s why things are expensive.
Most Canadians are not wealthy; the median salary, adjusted for taxes and transfers (so including healthcare spending and social welfare) is lower than almost any US state. There are very many Canadians, who live in places like Trois-Rivieres, Kelowna, or Kingston, that are very poor and are almost destitute. There are also very many people who can barely afford rent—average rent in Toronto is about ~2K CAD per month. That is almost the median salary for Canada as a whole.
> Canada has better healthcare than the US (#5 in the world according to US News and World Report, ahead of Switzerland).
I agree, but its getting worse. Doctors (thanks Ford, Legault, and Smith) are underfunded and leaving, a good portion of Canadian cannot find a primary care physician, and haven't been to the doctor in months.
> I straight up don’t believe you that there aren’t decent jobs in those cities. They’re like the NYC and LA of Canada.
There are decent jobs, but open to those who have university degrees due to the rampant credential inflation in Canada. If 60% of Canadians have tertiary education, what good jobs are available to the 40% who don't, due to family circumstance, money, or time? What jobs are available to the 500,000 immigrants per year?
> People want big McMansions to store their consumerist junk because of our HGTV culture but you can live a good life in much less. Your kids can share a bedroom, they’ll even likely be happy with it.
People also want to spend less than $2K a month for a 1 bedroom apartment in a suburb. Canada's problem isn't that there aren't enough McMansions going around, but that there aren't enough *houses* going around. Again, the average Canadian pays something like 40% of our income in rent and/or mortgage, with little option to downsize to pay less.
dangus 1 hour ago | parent | context | flag | on: Families earning $100k in Toronto eligible for Hab...
“It’s so expensive, nobody wants to be there”
Kind of like “nobody drives, there’s too much traffic.”
> Most Canadians I know have multi generational wealth so they are going to be fine
Translation: Canada is wealthy including most Canadians I know. That’s why things are expensive.
Canadian cities rank highly for livability, including expensive ones Toronto and Vancouver. No US cities were on the list that I found.
Canada ranks higher than the US on the human development index.
Canada has better healthcare than the US (#5 in the world according to US News and World Report, ahead of Switzerland).
I straight up don’t believe you that there aren’t decent jobs in those cities. They’re like the NYC and LA of Canada.
My hot take is that living in a small rented apartment isn’t some kind of catastrophe. For one thing, North American housing is already considered large by the standards of many countries.
More importantly, the size of your dwelling is only one aspect of quality of life, and it’s a factor that’s less important than most people give it credit for. Are Dutch people unhappy because their apartments are small?
People want big McMansions to store their consumerist junk because of our HGTV culture but you can live a good life in much less. Your kids can share a bedroom, they’ll even likely be happy with it.
Just as a cherry picked example, I’d rather live in a tiny apartment in Vancouver than live in a big house in places like New Orleans, where I have to worry about higher crime and gun deaths, worse education, worse and more expensive healthcare, worse city services and infrastructure, weather and climate flooding my house away, and worse job opportunities.
> Obviously, Canada needs better housing and immigration policy, but I’d call those pretty minor and resolvable problems for a country that is doing so well.
I'm sorry, but this is really out of touch. Canada needs better housing policy, but its not a minor and resolvable problem. It's something we've known about since ~2000, but haven't fixed yet due to entrenched interests. Many Canadians—especially those with high-paying, senior dev roles as you would find on HN—are doing well, but there is a significant underclass of people—including those who came here for a better life—who are struggling. Please do not diminish their struggles.
If I wanna visit Canada, I can spend a few weeks/months in the places I wanna see (Quebec, BC, Alberta), work remotely for a US company and make 2-3x the money w/o spending half my income on taxes/insane rents.
Canada has lower corporate tax, liberal startup grants, greater income mobility, higher qol, health care, safer, more tolerance - but it's an itsy bitsy tad cold, no one goes.
I don't think the COL argument works any more. Toronto is at Brooklyn levels (if not higher). Montreal was better, but got worst when Toronto passed new legislation for rentals and rental properties.
The "free" health insurance - which your taxes pay for - is great for some things but non-existent for others (e.g. routine oral care, routine optical care, physiotherapy required by something other than work, etc). Realistically, you need extended health insurance if you're not elderly, disabled, or on some sort of social care.
Now the nice thing about taxes in Canada is that you won't be taxed at anywhere near the highest bracket. As a Canadian software developer you're looking at around 50% of the salary as your US counterparts [1] which means you'll be in one of the medium tax brackets.
Taxes in canada are very high. The ontario income tax rate of 53.53% applies at 220K CAD. the equivalent rate for Cali in USD is 34.75%. you then have PST/GST (14%), way fewer deductions and european gas taxes. The one thing that is a good deal in canada is cheap high quality education. The "free" healthcare that you get is not very good and even the for pay services are of surprisingly low quality.
And while the current state of play in the US is rather odious, the idea that you'd be less secure or safe in somewhere like NYC or SF is laughable. The only places I've even been accosted on the street were in Melbourne, Australia and Brampton, Ontario. The rhetoric and laws you dread are mostly, or entirely, perception; make no mistake they're a thing, but heavily magnified by a media machine based on getting eyeballs and reactions. Like, the Prairie Provinces are solidly conservative -- AB even took a crack at banning gay marriage a little while back -- and ON managed to vote in yet another Ford.
I'm happy to sit out the Trump years north of the border, but if an offer with another $100K on top of what I'm making now floated my way but required me to be in California, or NYC, or DC, I'd be hard pressed to ignore it.
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