I and my wife both are planning to move from Bay Area to Toronto under ICT with our existing employers.
I’m a little confused to discuss my Canada salary with my employer, so need expert advice here… Our current gross income in Bay Area is ($300K+) and wanted to know if a similar joint income (CAD 300K) will be reasonable in GTA area as well…?
Here in Bay Area, I’m living in a 4BD townhome which I’m planning to hold for the next couple of years as rental income is very good in my community.
I don’t have any immediate plan to buy a home in the Toronto area but need some input about overall general expenses with the 5-year-old kid.
I dont think anyone can answer that question for you. It will depend on your lifestyle and needs.
Overall, $300k CAD is a good amount, but eventually it will come down to roughly $150k post taxes, CPP, EI etc. Also factor in where would you live in the GTA and how big of a house, or condo you would rent out. If you are planning to buy a car, gas and insurance are high as compared to bay area. Internet, phone, eating out are all either on the higher side, or at par with bay area as well.
Overall, it is a good salary to get you started and be comfortable for some time , but eventually if you plan to have a similar bay area lifestyle, you would need a higher family income.
We are a couple with a 2 year old baby. We live in Toronto. To give you an idea of the expenses you can expect (based on our expenses in CAD)
Regular expenses: 5000$ per month (with rent being 2800$ per month for 2 bed 2 bath)
Then you have to add all the discretionary expenses, the biggest may be the car expense (might cost 500$ for parking + insurance alone). For us, day care expense and international travel expenses are pretty big expenses as our kid goes to full time day care, and we try to go to India once a year, which can cost 7K or so. Say it costs you 2000$ monthly set-aside for these discretionary expenses (adjust it based on your spending).
If you assume 7000$ monthly expense, a 120K salary should fetch you this much. I use this calculator which is quite accurate.
Obviously, 120K is the minimum salary you need. You need higher income to put aside money for retirement, kids college education, etc.
One thing I want to note is that 300K CAD is going to fetch you much higher than 150K post taxes. At 300K, it is true that the “marginal” tax rate is close to 50%, but that 50% doesn’t apply on the whole income. Use this calculator.
At 300K, I think you will get somewhere close to 175K-180K after tax, so about 40% net tax, assuming you don’t have any contribution to tax free contributions like RRSP.
I had also moved with my US employer in Bay Area to Canada since they have a pretty big presence in Canada. The compensation really depends on your performance and what they usually pay people in Canada. In my case, my CAD salary was 1.1x of my USD salary (so hypothetically if you assume 100K USD income in US, it became 110K CAD). This is a salary cut of course, which is almost always the case. I feel expecting 1x or so conversion is reasonable.
Given that the 300K USD income is between the two of you, and assuming equal distribution, expecting 150K CAD in Toronto per person for tech job with decent amount of experience seems reasonable. Again, lot of variation can be expected based on which sector/company in tech, etc
Thank a lot for your valuable inputs. Can we personally touch base over the call, as I have a few more questions related to transferring things from the Bay Area to Canada and ICT processing stuff.
Let me know if you have some availability, so will discuss it accordingly. Please share your contact details over my email id (anubhavpachauri@gmail.com) or you can share your email id, so I’ll reach out to you accordingly.