While we’d been bracing ourselves for an expensive life in Yellowknife, our previous life in Wellington of self indulgence and meagre saving combined with a new lifestyle of seldom going out and cooking dinner every night except for a few rare exceptions, has meant we aren’t finding it too expensive here at all.
Sure, the rent is more than Vancouver. We paid $900/month in Wellington (unfurnished and relatively cheap for where we lived), $1,200/month in Vancouver (furnished and we were thinking of moving to a cheaper area before we left), and now $1,600 a month in Yellowknife (housing is in short supply in the Knife). Petrol is expensive here, one of the most expensive places to buy gas in Canada, but not a big issue for us as we don’t have a car and walk everywhere.
As we’ve somewhat curbed our socializing (aka going out and spending all our money on booze) we have cut back quite a lot there and so our biggest expense is food, and by food I mean the supermarket. And interestingly the food at the supermarket isn’t much different to our local supermarket in Kits, Vancouver (I’m sure there would’ve been cheaper places to shop).
Yellowknife Co-Op Supermarket verses Vancouver’s Safeway Supermarket
Yellowknife Vancouver
Milk (2 litres) $2.59 Milk (2 litres) $2.75
12 grain bread $3.59 Organic multi grain bread $3.99
500g Bacon $4 500g Bacon $4
Another somewhat interesting factor is housing. As Nicole read the online news this morning about New Zealand being the second most expensive place to buy a house (only closely 2nd behind Aussie) at 5.7 times the average income, Canada was a more affordable 3 to 4. Three times the average household income being “ideal”. And we could “technically” buy an apartment here in the Knife for just over one “times” (about 1.2) our household income!
Do the math people, and we’ll see you at ours for dinner next week. Oh, but it ain’t cheap to get out of the Knife, but who needs to leave Paradise on Ice.
Jimmy K planning the Knife
