The High Cost of Living...
Is Dubai really that expensive?
Yes.
And no...
I'll explain.
One constant that features whenever anyone talks about Dubai is the cost of living.
I don't ever do anything without doing my research. I scour reviews, Reddit threads, social media, YouTube, guide books and any personal contacts that I can call upon before making any big decision. Hell, I spent hours looking up reviews of backpacks before buying my last one, can you imagine what lengths I go to when moving countries?
However, even the most diligent research cannot substitute for actual real world experience and I have had research prove to be only partially reliable on more than one occasion, so you can imagine my concerns when moving to Dubai and having spent many hours looking at the affordability of the lifestyle out here. Most of my research seemed to point towards our basic income (assuming I'm the only one working) being comfortable enough to manage on and even have some capacity to save, but there was still that nagging doubt. I'd read lots of post suggesting that anything less than 20000 dirhams/month was just not worth bothering with if you were single! That's a whopping £52000/ year - and that would be tax free! I've never come close to earning that as a classroom teacher, nor indeed as a curriculum leader either.
These are teaching pay scales in the US - these are broadly similar to the UK it turns out (factoring in cost of living etc).
The top of the UK teacher's salary pay scale comes out at £41333 this year and that's only if you've made it through pay progression and achieved that point. You can theoretically go as far as £4652 if you get a school to put you through on the upper pay spine - which is highly unlikely these days (I was lucky enough to get there, although the pay scales were lower, but that was a few years ago now and with a very understanding and very moral head teacher who recognised the worth of his staff - this is not always the case). You would have to be at the top of the pay scale and take on a significant extra responsibility to match the supposed minimum UAE salary, if this were really the case. However, it is not.
I am not being paid that amount. Not even close. Okay not so far off as to make me concerned about my cash flow, but suffice to say that we aren't pulling in the amounts that seem to get bandied around certain corners of the internet.
Actually, that brings me to another point - the opaque nature of international school pay scales. There are a handful of schools that publish their pay scales, but most don't. I was lucky enough to work in a school where there was as standardised scale, but this is far from the norm. This makes is potentially very difficult to work out whether or not you are getting value from your potential employer.
Add to this the vast range of salary claims that I mention do proliferate on the internet and you can imagine that my head was spinning trying to work out whether we could manage.
I turns out I needn't have worried... at least not too much.
Here is an illustration of Dubai and some money - just in case a visual point of reference was needed...
Firstly Dubai is not anywhere near as expensive as most sources would have you believe. In fact we have decided to do a video on the subject as a corrective to the many examples of fairly poor information that is out there (this may take a while though, so don't hold your breath).
Yes, there are some things that are flat out pricey - internet and phone cost more than the UK and waaaay more than Malaysia (I was paying about £7 per month for a data plan for my phone and less than £25 for the broadband), however the speeds! I just checked my signal and it was clocking over 250mbps download and nearly 100mbps upload - I've hit the 500 point a various stages. We pay about £60 per month for the basic package, but basic here is not really basic! Whatever the case I would say that phone and internet packages are about twice the cost of the UK and four or five times higher than in Malaysia.
The other really big expenses are housing and schooling... so, as a teacher this is included in the package. Given that the housing we are allocated is provided by the school, we don't even need to think about that. This is a bonus which is the equivalent of around the 100000 dirhams per year mark - the equivalent of over £20000! In fact it could be higher given the size of the apartment the school provides (it owns and runs a whole building). The school fees are worth at least another 70000 on top. A conservative estimate is that the benefits in kind are worth about £35000 per year! That is quite a figure.
When you factor housing and schooling in, then yes, Dubai is expensive. It's an international capital city (I know it's not the actual capital of the UAE, that's Abu Dhabi, but you take my meaning), so property and schools cost. However, that's not a cost that teachers have to bear - that's part of the deal we make. The cash renumeration is maybe not in the range of other professions, but the other benefits are included. The fact that salaries are untaxed is why there is no public infrastructure for schooling, at least not for non-Emiratis. The tax wealth generated from indirect taxation and public companies does provide health and education for the local population, but they make up less than 15% of the total so everything else needs to be privately funded - it's just the nature of the place. The same is true of Malaysia - Thomas couldn't go to a local school - we would always have had to pay for his education somehow.
There are some significant upfront costs that we were not completely cognisant of and it is worth mentioning these if anyone reading this post is thinking of moving to the Gulf or indeed anywhere in the world. These would be the costs of visas and documentation.
Here in the UAE the process of sponsoring your family is not cheap. Okay, it's cheaper than in the UK, but given that we're all UK citizens I'd never thought of this and in Malaysia the school not only paid for this, but they actually did the visa applications too.
This is not the case in the UAE - in fact I'm not sure that the company can sponsor dependents on your behalf. In any case there is a significant cost involved and you need to be aware of this. To give you a ball park figure the total cost will be somewhere in the region of £600 per person, give or take. Not only that you need to factor in the requirement to convert your driving license, which also costs at least £200 per person too. This is something that must be done as soon as you have residency as you can no longer drive on your home country or international license once you have residency status. Again this is a function of the indirect taxation system - you don't pay the government at the source of income, you pay for it when you use a service.
So it turns out that the setup cost of just being here will amount to the equivalent of over a full month of take-home pay - ouch!
So what is the daily cost of living. Well honestly we're still working that one through. We haven't had a utility bill and we are currently still spending money on set up costs - that is always a factor in any move and especially when moving internationally, but we have gotten an eye in on some of the big factors in our day-to-day lives, namely cars, groceries and eating out. All of which are significantly cheaper than London prices (probably the best direct comparison) and generally below even those we would experience in the North East.
Let's start with cars... We're renting. Two of them. That's not ideal. However, it's costing less per month to rent a reasonably well equipped small family hatchback than it did to rent a Fiat 500 for a week at home! It is still £600 per month for two cars (we need them to begin with, but we'll see how the situation unfolds), but we just have to grin and bear it. Fuel however, is about 1/3rd the cost of the UK, so on balance it's okay(ish). We could easily bring this down if we bought a cars and that's what we've elected to do for at least one vehicle and this has already reduced the monthly outgoing on this by 1/3rd even taking into account insurance and registration. The cost of second hand cars here is lower than the UK and so are finance rates, so the monthly cost of purchase even if financed is lower than that of the rental, which in turn was already lower than the UK.
Eating out is widely considered to be expensive. This is true if you eat in the tourist areas and in big, high end restaurants, but if you do that in the UK it will cost you a lot too. We don't do that. We didn't even do that in Malaysia, but then the food culture was very different and even more upscale restaurants were ridiculously cheap!
We have eaten out at several good food courts and some local Indian and Lebanese restaurants and can easily manage to get a very good meal for all three of us for around £10 per person. Whilst it may be possible to do this in the UK, it certainly isn't the norm. We have even found a banana leaf restaurant where main meals were coming in at prices like those we would have found in Penang!
Banana leaf - I took the picture before the main curries had been added - there were at least 3 more dishes added to the 'plates'.
Groceries are widely touted as being the primary increase in expense here in Dubai, but honestly this is not true. If anything most things are on a par or cheaper than in the UK. Toiletries are the exception - deodorant is about twice to three times the price, which is ironic given the amount you need in a country this hot. This is a similar situation to Malaysia, where cosmetics and personal hygiene products were much more expensive. However even here if you look hard enough you can find bargains - I managed to source Dove for Men deodorant for about £1.80, which is only slightly more than you tend to pay back home. We also found that perfume is much cheaper here and alcohol - OMG! This is widely claimed as the most expensive place to drink, but if you want to get absolutely ruined for a small price you certainly can! I recently encountered a place selling 3 litres of Jim Beam for about £33! That's ridiculous. Personally this doesn't impact us as we're not big drinkers, but again it is illustrative of the perception vs reality dichotomy.
Generally speaking you could easily pay more for your shopping if you exclusively went to Spinneys or Waitrose, but if you did the equivalent at home - M&S and Waitrose then guess what? You'd pay a shed load! What a surprise.
Fortunately there are lots of options, including the equivalent of the Aldi and Lidl brands - Viva. This is a budget European supermarket with very reasonable prices and in general works out to be the best place for staple goods, dairy and everyday household items. Carrefour and Union Cooperative are two other supermarkets that have generally good prices and are where the remainder of the shopping tends to get done.
I'll put a side-by-side comparison together of some key goods based on our recent shopping to give you an idea, but in general we are paying less for food shopping that we even did in Malaysia.
Clothes and consumer goods are as variable as you'd imagine. You can shop in Harvey Nichols in London if you want or you can go to Primark or all points in between when in the UK and it's no different here. Yes, the headline tends to be the designer labels and profligate consumption of high end brands, but have you taken a walk through Chelsea recently? Or even some parts of Jesmond? You can get this anywhere - it is the stereotype of the Dubai life and this is part of what draws some people here. However, secret squirrel fact... You don't have to live like that. Just like most people in London are living fairly normal lives, so are most people in Dubai. They just don't scream about this on social media and don't form part of the active advertising that Dubai uses to attract business and talent.
I mean think about it - 'come to Dubai, it's mostly normal' isn't going to bring in the investors! So it's not too much of a surprise that the image and the reality don't measure up.
Clothing is in most cases actually quite a bit cheaper than in the UK, but sportswear is the same cost or greater. Some consumer electronics are more keenly priced, some are more expensive - coffee machines for some reason I can't quite fathom seem more expensive, but on the other hand TVs are about 30% cheaper. I'm sure the economics of global trade explain this, but I can't work it out.
In terms of entertainment, well it's about as variable as any large city - you can spend over £100 going to a popular and well known tourist attraction or you can go to the less well known spots for a nominal fee or for nothing at all. We recently went to a coffee museum and paid 10 AED each (just about £2) to get in and were given free samples of coffee. We went to Expo city and got free tickets for world teacher day - it was brilliant!
There are also apps aplenty to get reductions with - Groupon operates here as well as several other international discount voucher systems.
The coffee museum
A free fountain and lightshow at Festival City Mall
The fact is that Dubai is a tourist hub - if you spend like a tourist you will bankrupt yourself fairly quickly unless you have an extensive cash reserve. However, this is not how you live day-to-day life.
I think the image of the city as a prime and high end tourist destination has distorted the picture of the UAE in general - for a start Dubai is not as costly as it can seem and secondly it is not the only Emirate. Travel just an hour or so and you enter places that feel distinctly different. We have been to Ajman, Sharjah and Fujairah and they all felt different and the prices varied as widely as you would see if venturing away from London and into the rest of the UK.
All in all we have been surprised by what we have found and hopefully this will make our time here much more 'liveable'.
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