Sunday, August 05, 2007

Monthly expense comparison

This is another post that I am sure many of you would-be R2Iers are debating/mulling/looking forward to...

Feel free to agree/disagree/point out missing expenses for me....

Obviously not included in this comparison are annual expenses such as vacationing etc. But trust me, I just booked a 4 night 5 day vacation to Goa, to-fro flights from Mumbai and all inclusive meals for 25k Rupees, you can't beat that price

To my surprise, overall the monthly expenses came to about 25% of the US monthly expense. Thats a comforting thought considering the 50% pay cut I had to take to move to India :(

8 comments:

Unknown said...

Suhas, this is great information. Seems like you have covered most of the expenses for renting a place. Numbers seem very resonable.

Can you also comment on taxes and take home pay?

Hrishi said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Hrishi said...

This is very good and realistic comparison, Suhas.

We did a similar exercise in the first few months when we moved to Boston (2000) and then again when we moved back (2002)

For us, doing it from either side, it was an equally feel good exercise.
At least I looked at it as a good objective outcome to convince ourselves that our decisions were good - at least financially :)

Unknown said...

Suhas,
You did not mention the Income tax and also did not mention the Health Insurance for you and rest of your family members.
Arnab

Suhas Kelkar said...

For most salaried employees, income tax gets deducted from your pay check by the time you receive it. So I did not include it in this comparison. If you do want to know, I am paying more tax in India than in US. This is due to the fact that in US I was able to take various deductions that would decrease my taxable income. (e.g. exemptions per child) My effective tax in US used to be around 20% of total income. In India it is almost 30%.

Health insurance is a good one to add. Since in recent years your out of pocket expense for health insurance in US shot up significantly. But it would be hard to compare the benefits and it would be apples to orange comparison.

kkdonn said...

Suhas can yo validate these numbers for me , Like you I am planning to move back after 10 years , Here is the pay package for example
(2500000-(30% of 2500000))/12 = 145 833.333 Per Month after Tax deduction and here is list of expenses for Hyderabad
Type Amount
House rent/Hyderabad 20000
Groceries 8000
Domestic help 5000
Driver 5500
Electricity bill 8000
Water 2000
School( 1Kid) 3000
Petrol(1 Car) 5000
Phones & Internet 10000
Cable TV 1000
Entertainment(Hoteling and stuff) 10000
CAR Payments 10000
Healthcare 1000
Monthly parlour( For wife of course) 1500
Travel/yr 2.5 lac 25000
Total monthly expense 115000
Pay Per Month 145833.33
Potential Savigns 30833.33

Suhas Kelkar said...

@kkdonn

Some of your expenses are on the high side. e.g. Electricity bill will not be 8000 unless you plan to use AC 24x7. Our monthly electricity bill is around 1200 and in summer when we do use AC it shoots up to say 2500.

Domestic help will be around 2000. Unless you plan to hire more than two maids!

Driver will probably cost you 7000 or so.

Phone and internet will certainly not cost you 10000. It will be roughly around 4000!

Cable TV (Tata Sky) will all channels costs 500 per month.

Travel (unless you plan to travel internationally every year) will not cost you more than 1 lac per year.

Hope this helps.

I should update our expense table now that we are close to completing three years. I will do that soon.

Suhas Kelkar said...

@kkdonn, one BIG word of caution. Salaries in India can be a bit confusing. If your pay package is 25L, find out what is your take home pay. Usually for 25L CTC, your take home pay will be significantly lower and throw your calculations out of the window.

Reason for this is that CTC usually is composed of lot of elements that are not paid monthly. (LTA etc.)