What are you worth? (salary)

[willsken]

On a £ to $ swap we are worse off here than in the UK. As a head of faculty I was earning a fair whack in the UK. Having said that I budgeted on coming here earning $45,000 as a teacher. After landing a HOD job add another 10k to that and I am waiting for my salary assessment to come back. So I will be earning anything between $55K and $69k. It's not nice not knowing but we are budgeting are for the low end just in case. OH is a builder and has just gone self-employed so we'll have to see with him.

This is easy info for me to share as teacher salaries are in the public domain.

[jailhouse]

Trigirl, did not mean to be impolite, but thank you for your input . Like willsken, my pay was in the public domain (so to speak) having been in the forces everyone knew by rank what each other was on.

I have done quite a bit of research already, and had used the Govt site for the council tax, which while useful, is not as good as "right now" input, as your comment on the utilities show.

The wine seems a good price, but the beer $7 + i was hoping for around $1 LOL.

Willsken, so do you have to pay per mile in NZ on top of the already added fuel tax. Here in the UK they are now "experimenting" with congestion charging, which will penalise drivers for how many miles they drive in town\city centres. Another Stealth Tax.

jh

[Carol]

we are a fair bit better off here despite the lower wages - but thats mainly due to not spending £700 a month between us on travelling into london every day.

Truly???!!!!

Blimey!

[Trigirl]

jailhouse - i'm sure you can get cheaper beer than that don't worry! thats just the ones I know about - OH is a choosy beer drinker

the road miles thing is just the method of taxation. petrol is taxed by adding to the cost of fuel - same as in the uk. diesel is not taxed this way and instead is taxed by making users pay a per km licence fee.

carol - that was me rounding down not up! tickets from our place in bedfordshire to london were just over £280 each a month just for the train, then if you wanted to be able to use the tube too (which we both needed given the distance we worked from kings cross) it was just over £350 a month each.

here we pay about $80 a month between us to use the buses when we need to - but mostly we walk