How much does it cost to live in Dubai?

This is a question I get asked a lot. There is an expectation that expats around the world are living the life of riley with over inflated salaries and benefits.

There are two types of expats, those on a local contract and those being paid from their country of origin. For those on local contracts, especially in Dubai, they pay no tax on their salaries, but they are also not allowed to make investments in their home country and pensions aren't available in the UAE. My hubby is on a local contract and makes his pension payments to the company in the UK, but as he isn't employed in the UK he has to make the company contribution also. For others they have to deal with the fluctuating exchange rates, transfer fees and the delay in their salary reaching them.

Salaries may be higher than the UK, but for my husband his salary is based on 30 years service to his employers, stems from him having a degree and just being damned good at his job. There are also housing benefits and a car allowance plus 1 return flight for him, myself and the teen to the UK, but when you're paying school fees, which is the only option in both Dubai and in South Africa where we lived previously, or in our case boarding school fees, it doesn't actually stretch that far, we also pay a mortgage in the UK and although the house is rented out, it is often empty. Don't forget the exchange rate and the cost of transferring the money. We also make more than one trip a year to the UK and the teen comes out 3-4 times a year. We can only afford to buy and run 1 vehicle as we don't do credit cards and loans, never have and never will. Throw into the mix I haven't worked for the past 5 years, we are more than 1 salary down every year.

Being on a local contract has more benefits, mainly being there is no need to keep converting the currencies to work out how much things are going to cost. Although we do have to do that when we travel to the UK as we have no income over there.

It is an automatic response to want to convert and especially coming from South Africa we were in for an initial shock as for the first month we were spending Rand and not Dirhams.

Basically there is no way we can compare our income in South Africa to our income in Dubai. Everything is just 3 times as expensive here as it is over there. When we visited the UK we found it to be twice as expensive as South Africa especially as we were still spending the Rand.

Waitrose is everywhere over here and like the UK very expensive. I picked up a lettuce for AED25/£4.50. it was just an ordinary lettuce. I've now found that if I shop at Carrefour I can buy lettuce for AED10/£1.77

A Starbucks coffee is AED17/£3 a full tank of fuel for a BMW 5 Series was AED100/£17 fuel has increased by 25% since we arrived.

A taxi fare from Dubai Mall to home, through the city, at any time of the day or night is AED35/£6

The train or bus from the mall is AED10.50/£1.95. A pint of beer or glass of wine is AED55/£9. An average meal out is AED400/£70. A Big Mac will cost you AED12/£2.10. Cigarettes cost AED20/£3.40 a packet.

We pay AED17,500/£3,100 per month to rent our villa, there is little difference between living out in the suburbs or in an apartment in the Marina. Rent is also payable a year in advance and we are responsible for all utilities and municipality fees.

We have to pay road tolls, a fee to register the cat and dog. Oh don't forget the Medical Aid, it's not provided free by my husbands employers although they do contribute towards it. The Doctors charge AED100/£17 for a consolation which is not refundable and most practitioners take payment after each treatment and theres a slow and painful process to go through to claim your money back.

It is very difficult to make comparisons when you're paid on a local contract, you spend money differently when you live as an expat. We have relatively low electricity and water bills in the winter, yet the costs are huge in the summer with the air con running all day, around AED2,800/£500

Of course there are plenty of bargains to be found and many offers and deals available especially in the summer when there are less tourists and with the outside attractions, such as 2 for 1 deals with water parks and meals out.
Knock off designer gear is available throughout Satwa and Kamara, but that is off little interest to us. In the Creek and surrounding areas you can find the souks which are wonderful to visit if you want to buy kitchen items, material and have a dress made, a variety of souvenir shops, do your food and clothes shopping, visit the markets for fresh fruit and vegetables at more than half the price but with it being so hot in the summer, we haven't been down those places since the middle of June.
There are the equivalent Pound Stores such as Daiso found in the local and larger malls the AED7 stores, where you can buy stationery, party goods, make ups, cleaning chemicals and equipment, toys.

It just takes some time to find these places, through exploring or word of mouth, it takes time to get used to the new currency and it's actual value, the spending power of the Dirham.

The main thing to remember in Dubai and South Africa is that prices are pretty much standardised when it comes to global products that are manufactured locally and under licence. A bottle of Coke for example is AED9 regardless of wherever you buy it, unlike the UK where the price varies depending on location. i.e service station, cinema, garage, corner shop or supermarket where prices fluctuate greatly.

i'm not complaining about the cost or standard of living in Dubai, I'm merely answering some questions that are put to me on a regular basis.

How tolerant are you?

I bought a MacBook Air this week and Microsoft Word for Mac.

They offered to install it there and then but I requested an appointment to come back this morning to have it installed to give me the opportunity to play with my new toy and put a list together of things I needed some help with.

So I transferred files from the hard drive, some are corrupted, photos were moved over, the iPhone wasn’t authorised and I couldn’t find the hash tag key #### I also didn’t know how to open a download to have it installed and where to store files and where the search function was. Otherwise I’m more than happy with my new toy.

Now at 42, I know my adult kids think I’m past it when it comes to technology and my 14 year old certainly thinks I shouldn’t be allowed access to the internet, however my Mother thinks I’m a genius in all things technological J.

So when I’m greeted for my 30 minute tutorial by an employee the same age my eldest son, I must admit my hackles were up and I was ready for a fight, but I was so very wrong. He first asked me if I had any experience of Apple OS and I replied ‘other than my iPhone, no’. He then offered to file, move, sort everything for me, authorised my iPhone, discovered he didn’t know where the hash tag #### key on a UK keyboard was located (we found it together) He gave me instructions on how to migrate files so they weren’t corrupted, rather than just copy them across from the hard drive.

He demonstrated the click, 2 finger click (right click) how to close a file, rearrange my icons, open downloads for installing and not once did he demonstrate any kind of frustration with me or make me feel as if I was stupid and shouldn’t be allowed near technology.

Now this is how things should be isn’t it? I have a lot of knowledge about a lot of things and an awful lot of experience, which I use to help others on a daily basis. I’m often approached for advice from child welfare through to international shipping and I give my knowledge and time freely, to strangers off the net and to friends of friends etc.

However I often find I’m on the receiving end having asked for information on how a product, service works and if I can’t get the assistance I need from people who have personal experience I do what we all do, I turn to the professionals, often a free service, they call it customer care on the end of the phone, face to face in a store or via email, letter or telephone and I often find that these people just sometimes don’t care, treat you as if you’ve asked a stupid question or that you are actually stupid.

I tend to find that most visits that involve any kind of request for help for medical aid, cell phone contracts, opening bank accounts, registering a vehicle start like this:

I’m NOT South African, I know how things work in the UK, because that is where I was born, raised, have experience of things. I know in the UK how to phrase questions correctly to get a response, but here I don’t. If I want to ask for a mobile phone contract or ask for a demonstration on a sat nav or god forbid not understand how medical aid works, because where I come from it’s free, then I’m going to ask aren’t I? How else do I learn?

I don’t expect to be laughed at any more than I’d expect you to know how things work in my country either. So that’s why my hackles were up this morning when I entered the Apple Store, but I couldn’t have been more wrong.