Originally Posted by
AIMINGHIGH123
Ok. All Figures are in QAR but you paid in USD.
Base Pay 22575
Housing 13000
Utilities 300
Transport 1500
Flight Pay based on 70hrs 7280
Mobile 33
Total 44688
$12341 a month
Ok if you use there accommodation take 13000 gives 31688 or $8751.
So you would be approx £9400 or £6725 a month. Ok I admit I am using my situation in the figures in the fact I live in UK and wouldn't live in a tax haven and commute to the UK. To earn £9400 a month paying UK tax I would have to be on nearly £200k a year.
People will now say high living costs in Middle East etc etc horrible life but honestly 5 years and you can make a lot of money. I know guys who have done it and guys who are doing it.
There are several issue with the pay at Qatar (and I talk from experience having spent 3.5 years there). Firstly the housing allowance you will never see they will put you in company accommodation and only pay the allowance if the choose to or need to, if you rent privately 13,000 is not enough so you will be loosing even more of your pay. I have long argued that this is dead money and people have rightly pointed out that if you are considering a like for like comparison then you need to consider UK housing costs. My mortgage costs me £1500 a month here or £18000 a year (far less than to rent a small apartment in Qatar), the difference being my house makes far more than that annually in appreciation, so in effect my house is an investment that does not exist in Qatar (remember non nationals are not allowed to buy property in Qatar)
So forget the housing and you are left with 8700 dollars a month which under current exchange rates is a lot of money, but they are at historic lows! A figure closer to 1.5 or 1.6 dollars to the pound are far more representative of the past decade. At those levels it brings your take home closer to £5000 a month, which was about what I was making. Now 5k a month is only slightly more than most BA FOs are making and the difference in living conditions are beyond comparison. To put it nicely Qatar is a boiling hot hell hole full of desperate and greedy individuals, it is an incredibly unpleasant place to live and 6k a month is not even close to a worth while amount.
The head line figures look very appealing but dig a little deeper and remove post Brexit exchange rates and actually things are not so great.