Living in Nova Scotia Unaffordable!
Woah. It looks like someone in Vancouver did the math. And they find living in Nova Scotia unaffordable! To quote,
Question from someone in BC, how do you afford to live here?
I’m from BC and enjoy browsing real estate prices across Canada sometimes. I keep getting blasted with advertisements from NS asking me to move there. I looked at a house in Dartmouth and checked again today that same house sold for over 800K. It’s pretty close to it’s neighbors and not a big lot and not that special tbh, it might go for 1.2 mil here in the outskirts of Metro Vancouver.
Well I did some math, on a 90K salary in BC I would pay a provincial tax of $5259. On a 90K salary in NS I would pay a provincial tax of $11, 074.
It got even worse when I checked property tax. On the 800K NS home the tax was 9K. On the 1.2 mil metro Vancouver detached home property taxes were 4K.
I looked at sales taxes next. In BC it is 5% on many items i.e. candy, restaurants, etc. Other items such as electronics, etc are taxed at 12%. I figured over the course of a year if I spend 20K on purchases the sales tax would cost me an extra 1K in NS at least.
I looked at electricity rates and they are double BC. An average home in BC will cost you $100 a month and that is on the higher end. From the research I did it seems an average home in NS will cost you $200 a month in electricity. This of course results in paying an additional $1200 a year in electricity in NS.
If you live in BC you make the following savings:
11074-5259= $5815 saved on income tax 9000-4000= $5000 saved on property tax $1000 saved on sales tax $1200 saved on Electricity
Total: $13, 015 saved annually living in BC. If I moved to NS for the rest of my career (30 year period) it would cost me an extra $390, 450 to live there. If this difference went into buying a detached home in Metro Vancouver than it would essentially cost the exact same to live in either area over 30 years.
So my question is, why is nobody talking about this? If it is just as expensive to live near Halifax as it is to live near Vancouver why am I getting told to “move to NS because it’s cheap”.
Here is the house:
Now you know why they are trying to dupe well-to-do people into migrating to Nova Scotia. Somebody’s gotta pay the cousin-bureaucracy the local Government. As long as people are stupid enough to pay, they will keep paying. In other news, some low income Nova Scotians are being encouraged to move to the North-West Territories! Lets hope they didn’t invest too much in flags and NS bumper stickers as they won’t be of much use there.
