How much did we spend in the first month of living in Canada?

Today I'm going to talk about our family's expenses for the first month of living in Canada. I hope that you will find these amounts helpful and that you will be more prepared for immigration.

The cost of services in Canada and other countries is different, and you may be surprised by the cost of the mobile connection, and Internet, even you may say, will be shocked. There will also be surprises like the one I had when I bought a laptop: I chose a laptop for $1,700 CAD and paid $2,000 CAD at the cash register. But more about that later.

Short-term rentals

The main mistake that cost us a lot of money was that we didn't look for a place to live at all before we flew to Canada. I was counting on renting an apartment for 5-7 days through the service Airbnb, we would draw up some documents, and I would quickly rent a place for the long term.

Back from Poland, where we moved to before Canada, I paid €607 for an apartment, and we lived there for 5 or 6 days. Why Airbnb and not a hotel? If you look at the cost of a hotel, I guess one night in a hotel would have cost the same. We have 3 kids, so that made a total of 5 people. And the apartment through Airbnb was significantly cheaper.

We rented an apartment in downtown Montreal, even though we didn't plan to live there, but we didn't have a car yet, and we had to do a lot of walking and paperwork: social security numbers, health insurance cards, bank cards, and so on.

During this week in Montreal, I also planned to buy a new car and drive it to Gatineau, which is on the very outskirts of Quebec, and literally crossing a bridge gets you to another province, Ontario, or to Ottawa, the capital city of Canada. I rented a cabin through Airbnb for €554, and we stayed there for about a week too. And I was counting on that week to find a cabin for a long-term rental, usually a year.

Car

For some reason, new immigrants in Canada are not very trusted and they didn't sell me a new car on credit, so I bought a 3-year-old Subaru Outback, it cost $22,000 CAD, but I paid about $25,500 CAD because they charged some taxes on top. Of course, if you live downtown, if you don't have kids, you can make do with public transportation. But we wanted to live in Gatineau, and a car is just necessary there.

Of course, you can buy a car for $50,000 CAD or $100,000 CAD, and some people buy one for $500 CAD, so you can adjust this expense item to suit you.

Long-term rentals

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The next big problem we encountered was that we couldn't find a place to rent for a long time. It's just that Canadians tend to move from place to place on July 1, and then on the 1st of some month. And we came to Gatineau in early August, and accordingly, we saw in all the ads that the house was rented on September 1, October 1, and some on November 1.

It's impossible to rent on Airbnb all the time: it's both expensive and unclear how the kids will go to one school and then have to be transferred to another. It was really hard. We hired a real estate agent to help us find a place to live. In the end, we looked at four houses in Gatineau, one of which we more or less liked.

And don't forget that when you rent a place for a short period on Airbnb, there is usually everything: beds, some shelves, cabinets, and plates. And when you're renting an apartment or house for a long period, there's nothing there, just the kitchen.

For that reason, I looked at the Montreal classifieds, which is a bigger city, and saw that some houses and apartments there were rented right from the middle of the month. So we decided to go back to Montreal. There we hired a second real estate agent and he looked for a place for us, but everything was either small or in bad condition.

When the deadline in Gatineau, we had not yet found anything long-term, so we had to rent an apartment in Montreal for another week, but no longer in the center, but on the outskirts, in the town of Longueuil. This cost us $539 CAD and saved us a lot of time and nerves and allowed us to focus on finding accommodation for the long term.

So I ask you: do not repeat my mistakes, plan your move in advance, find dates to fly in at the end of the month, find an apartment in a few days and rent it from the 1st, or contact some real estate agents, so they would remotely find an apartment or house and send you photos, and you would decide whether to rent this place or not.

We eventually found a house. It was probably not the best choice, but we wanted to stop worrying and worrying and settle down somewhere. The rent was $1,600 CAD per month plus electricity costs, water is free. It should be mentioned, however, that we paid more than $4,000 CAD right away because the landlord required payment for the first month (September), the last month, and another half of August. We never saw the landlord, he lives in the USA, and we signed everything with the help of a real estate agent from our side and from the landlord's side.

Furniture and stuff

As I said, real estate in Canada is rented for a long period without furniture, so we, while still living in an apartment in Longueuil, went to IKEA and bought and couch, beds for kids, some furniture, a huge amount of dishes and other things. I want to add that when we lived in Poland, we already had a lot of household items, but we sent them in a container, which was supposed to arrive in a month, and in Canada, we came with only three suitcases.

Other expenses

Now let's talk about our other expenses in Canada. I know exactly how much money I spent because I collect receipts from stores. It helps a lot to keep home accounting, and since I work as a self-employed person, I then write off the mobile connection, Internet expenses, or some computer parts, since these are not used for my business activities.

As soon as we moved to Canada, my laptop broke down. I had to go to the popular Best Buy store chain and pick out a $1,700 CAD laptop, but when I paid at the cash register, I was told I had to pay $1,955 CAD. It turned out that all price tags in Canada are written before taxes, and then you have to add taxes on top of that. In Quebec, it adds up to 15%, which is a lot, but you can't get away from it. A lot of money was spent at IKEA, we bought furniture there. I paid more than $3,000 CAD with one check.

Total amount

I grouped our expenses for the end of July, but there's only the laptop, and for August, we spent over $11,600 CAD in total.

I spent $183 CAD on gasoline, but I think some checks lost should have gone more. I paid $39 CAD for parking. For the internet, I paid about $70 CAD a month. The mobile connection is $156 CAD, that's a lot of money. We have 2 mobile numbers included, for my wife and me, there's 6GB of traffic and unlimited minutes and text messages across Canada.

For groceries, I counted $2,300 CAD, but that's not because we eat so much. Most likely, this amount included something from stores like Costco or IGA, which sell not only groceries but also some other items for the home. The main expense is $5,500 CAD for furniture. And then you have to add the Airbnb spending — $1,700 CAD.

As you can see, the first month of living in Canada cost us a pretty penny. It all started with Airbnb when we did 3 short-term rentals, then I bought a car, then I paid several months in advance for a long-term rental house, and a lot of money went to buy furniture, plates, towels, and food.

In the second month, we spent less money, in the third month even less. Now we have settled down, but the costs are still higher than in my home country, Ukraine, or in Poland, where we lived for a year and a half. So I support the requirements of Canadian immigration programs when the same federal program for 5 people needs over $28,000 CAD. As you can see from my example, this amount is very easy to spend, and we spent even more.

Alex Pavlenko, founder of Immigrant.Today