How much did we spend in the first month of living in Canada?
Cost of living for new immigrants: rent, utilities, groceries, and household items. Mistakes to avoid.
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.
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