I joined a couple of years ago thinking the same thing but reality has corrected those thoughts!
My wife and I tried to do the economical thing by renting a modest apartment in Tung Chung but for the first 5 months there was one suicide per month, every month so we had to get out of there. Then we rented a village house elsewhere on Lantau but we soon found that the cost of maintaining a car and the lack of services in a remote area made life more difficult than we had anticipated so we began to have thoughts about getting out of the rental market and into our own place.
We subsequently had a go at buying a small flat in Mui Wo but as we were about to sign on the line we took a reality check... $3.7M for a s#%t hole that needed major renovation + 1$Million in stamp duty would have had us running at a loss for at least 10 years!
An option remains to have a boat which is pretty nice from what I've seen but the running costs are sky high. Excluding maintenance and an astronomical mortgage we are told we can expect to pay $17,000 per month just to park it; fair enough but we were really counting on salary keeping pace with inflation. It was just announced that fees are going up in one marina by 9.5% but KA offered us absolutely nothing this year... ZERO! When it comes to rent, rises of over 20% every 2 years are not unheard of.
If you are stuck flying a chieftain in the bush this may seem like a job that pays well but if you are flying anything decent with the hope of progression at any point, don't leave!
The pollution though better in summer can have you breathing air so thick you can barely see 3km!
Schools are horrendously expensive as they are run 'for profit' and the company will only give you 90% of the ESF rate which covers only about half the cost of sending kids to school in Discovery Bay.
Just getting your kid vaccinated can cost a fortune, a 3 month old set of vaccines us back $3500, its either that or spend one of your few days off to register at a clinic to then go on a waiting list to spend another day at the clinic to only get very basic (not the full spectrum recommended in Australia) jabs.
A trip to the hospital can be a nightmare in itself, public hospitals while cheap are nasty and hopeless except for the most severe cases; your alternative is to go to a private hospital where an overnight stay can cost you upwards of $20,000 that may not be covered by the pitiful KA medical scheme. Which means you are forced to shell out for "top up medical cover" and income protection at the cost of thousands of USD per year.
Doing basic living activities here takes a lot more time than you'd imagine; going on an errand to HK Island takes a minimum of half a day if you do only one thing, a full day if you do three stops. Just try and find an english remote control or real bread in a shop!
Buying any kind of kids equipment in HK is astronomically expensive here; you will pay at least 30-400% more than in Australia only to have it stolen if you leave it outside your door.
Grocery shopping for anything but China grown produce is eye wateringly expensive, cheese can set you back USD $10 for a 200g pack of cheese that has probably been warmed well above 4* during shipping so it will only last a week in your fridge. Don't get me started on the milk...it should be called 'malk'.
Sure if you economise you can make ends meet but why leave your home, family, friends and conveniences to just get by? Nearly everyone I know on this contract is making plans to leave HK.
If you are not a white male you can expect to get pretty rough treatment from the locals here, where the darker you are the lower you are on the social ladder. If you are not married you can't bring your SO here as HK doesn't recognise de facto spouses. If you are married here and he/she doesn't work here, just see what happens when they want a bank account; no matter your profession or how highly educated your spouse is, if you aren't employed in HK at that moment your occupation shall only be 'house wife'.
Take heed of the warnings about cost of living here and do not go expecting generous pay rises of the past as the reality of zero increase despite proven inflation bites harder and harder into your hard earnt cash.
Last edited by TSIO540; 8th May 2017 at 20:11.