As far as cost of living, it is not hard for potential new-hires to estimate it themselves. Want to know cost of food? Take your supermarket shopping list for the week and get on the link below to compute. There are several expat markets like 360, Taste, or ParknShop or City Super.
Here is ParknShop, one of the cheaper ones with some expat brands:
PARKnSHOP.com
Housing? Same thing, just click on the link below, I've already entered the parameters, but you can adjust yourself if you plan to pay out of pocket or if you want to buy. Funny thing (well, sad really, not funny at all) - on the rent slider, 10K is the lowest setting, you can't select any lower. Pretty pathetic if you ask me. When you click on the property, it will also bring up a map and you can see where it is located (you can compare to MTR routes for your commute)
Hong Kong Square Foot:
Property Search - Square Foot
Finally, here is a link that ranks cities by cost for the top 50. The only US city is New York, all other cities are compared to it. So, if you are American, you know the cost of living in your city so you can compare it to NY. Then calculate that NYC is 27th on the list and HKG is
8th. This list takes all the variables into account like food and housing, especially for expatriates, so it is very appropriate for our purposes.
Try this site:
Global/Worldwide Cost of Living Survey Rankings 2010/2011, Cities, International, Europe, Asia, America, US, American, Americas, United States, Africa, Australia, USA, Asian, Canada, Expensive, Cheap, : Finfacts Ireland
So you can't complain that you did not know what you were getting yourself into. Here is all the information you need except education, but I think you get the point and will be able to judge education costs on your own. Just look for international schools and then e-mail them for costs if it is not on their websites.
And ETOPS240, your only positive for accepting a career in CPA is built on false premises. You said (emphasis added by me):
... the SO path (cadet or otherwise) is a great opportunity for the low experienced, with a good solid career prospect ahead (at least compared to elsewhere)
Good solid career prospect? Respectfully, under what rock do you live my friend? Here are just some of the career killers we have experienced recently, feel free to rebuttal them or at least post the positives:
- Countless seniority breaches - DEFOs and DECs with perfectly suitable candidates waiting in turn.
- Dismissal by HKG courts of by-pass pay protection - what is supposed to stop (or at least make it financially harder for) the company to violate promotions in seniority.
- Raising retirement age from 55 to 65 - and simultaneously forcing those who do stay past 55 onto lower conditions of service.
- Violation of scope clause - with regards to allowing subsidiaries like AHK to fly wide-body freighters (744BCFs) when it was specifically agreed they would not operate wide-body aircraft.
- Removal of expatriate benefits to new hire SOs, with the ridiculous offer of 10K per month, which is not even a fifth of the current (SO2 and above) rate and has no tie to the economy (housing index fluctuations).
So I really don't understand what career you are talking about. Current SOs waiting for upgrades are going on year 5 (beyond the pay-scale so no yearly increments) and they were told
18 months upgrade to FO when they were hired.
So buyer beware. This part of the world is very different to where you come from. There is no respect to contracts (if you are the employee, not so for the employer), so anything you get in writing is written in invisible ink as far as the courts are concerned. Don't say you were not warned, all the information is out there in the open, it rests solely on your shoulders if you make a decision and later regret it!