ETOPS240

I'm not for one minute suggesting your advice doesn't stand, or that it isn't a terrible idea to bring a family of 5 to HK on an SO salary, but lets not forget that the SO package, while not as good as the B-scale, certainly took a step in the right direction.

Pay, with the raise and new allowance will make the basic pay a shade under US$80k, which after tax and equivalent retirement contributions makes for larger monetary amount.

I'm not for a moment suggesting that your lifestyles will be the same, they won't. I'd go so far as to say it would be nigh-on impossible to balance it. But, lets not make the package sound worse than it is. Like everywhere else, it is simple supply and demand.

Wait out for the likes of FedEx/UPS, sir. That would be my advice if you want to fly heavies around (at night). The SO programme is intended for folk with far lower experience levels - instructors and the like. Despite the naysayers, it does come with a good career bolted on to it. That said, you're in the ballpark for a Direct Entry FO position, which sadly doesn't seem to be on the cards for a little while. Although... Give it time.

Good Luck!

jed_thrust

Coffee Mug...

Put simply: you would be are halving your salary and doubling your costs.

Clear as mud?

PS There are no suburbs in HKG. Perhaps the nearest area with the style of living that you have in mind is south Lantau. I live in Sai kung so I cannot comment on the school situation there, but you can certainly catch a bus to and from work.

tyson744

Etops 240, you have no idea what you are talking about.

ETOPS240

Very substantial post.
Care to fill in the blanks, please?

Care to tell me what the new monthly pay with raise & allowance will be? Care to then tell me what the take home will be? The tax break of having a wife and 3 children? Then maybe we can compare that to the take-home in the US. That's also after retirement contributions, not mentioning the fact that at Cx your retirement pot is significantly greater than at any US regional.

Or was I wrong about telling our friend to stay put and wait it out in the US/wait for DEFO?

You tell me.

lost&found

ETOPS - you are not going to get the answer you are so desperate to see... HK is rated 3rd in the worlds most exspensive cities to live Top 10 Most Expensive Cities to Rent an Apartment in Asia ? PropGoLuxury - Property News

Take the advice of people that already live and work here... you have every resource available to you to research how this place works, you have countless numbers of people on this site warning you off - how stupid must you be to continue asking the same question!

ETOPS240

With all due respect, I think you missed the point of my post.

I'm not desperate to find anything. I've been here a while. I'm on old terms. Supply & demand dictated them. I'm intimately familiar with the heavy financial burden of living in HK. I'd be happy to share my experiences here, some wonderful, some less so.

I thought I was reasonably explicit that the lifestyle change on a given salary would be huge. I went on to explain that 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), despite the naysayers who are a cockpit minority. I also, fairly clearly, said that our friend here (coffee mug) was not in the general experience demographic; rather better suited to the now absent DEFO programme.

What I was asking of Tyson 744, was to prove me wrong with regard to SO pay. With the new deal, SO pay is akin to a US regional captain at an average carrier. Does it buy you the same lifestyle? No, not even close. That wasn't the point I was trying to make. I was just nullifying the notion of coffee mug taking a 50% pay cut. He wouldn't. His net income would be higher. It would also have a higher ceiling.

I'm not trying to be argumentative. I'm just being objective. HK is expensive, we have established that. I can give coffee mug my cost breakdown, too, if he likes (I have no kids, so it won't be too valid).

In short, coffee mug; similar pay, much higher cost of living. US$1000 won't get you more than 550sqft 45 minutes out.

Like I said, hold out for DEFO. SO is a great opportunity for some, but you'd be selling yourself short. If DEFO doesn't happen for a while, FedEx, UPS, etc will. SWA have already opened up the floodgates, too.

I wish you the best. Feel free to PM me for any more info.

Coffee Mug

Gentlemen,

I sincerely want to thank my comrades on the other side of the pond who made this decision so much easier.

To pay it forward, I will duplicate the answers I received in a simple format that is valid in March of 2011:

A brief comparison of a US pilot to a Hong Kong pilot:

If the average US regional airline pilot makes $80,000 US per year, then he makes $6,666/ month.

If he has a family and he lives in an average town then his expenses would be something like:

1. mortgage, $1,000 or 15% of gross income
2. groceries, $500 or 7.5% of gross income
3. school costs for children, $0 or 0% of gross income
4. IRS, state, and local taxes, $2,000 or 30%
5. Percent of monthly income left for other expenses: 55%

If that US regional airline pilot were then to get lucky and get a job with Cathay Pacific as a DEFO (which I understand isn’t really an option for the time being….) then let’s say he made the same amount as he did back in the states. According to the conversion rate in March of 2011 his new salary is HK $623,184 per year, or $51,932/month. I understand this isn't an exact figure on the A scale, B scale, or C scale (whatever those are), I'm just trying to give us Americans from a different culture a reference point....

Assuming the above is still true, here is how those same expenses break down now that he is now living in Hong Kong:

1. rent (owning not feasible) HK $25,000 or 48%
2. groceries HK $10,000 or 19%
3. school costs for children (after help from CX) HK $10,000 or 19%
4. HK and US taxes HK $10,386 or 20%
5. Percent of monthly income left for other expenses: -6%. (Just by meeting the basic necessities you are already in debt.)

I hope this summary helps other Americans out there understand why these blokes are so “down” on the current hiring scheme.


DEFO is the only option for me if I can stand a chance at keeping my financial and family health.

Aviates01

US Regional Average 80k per year? How do you figure that?

Some How I'm Tired

Good work coffee mug. Despite the lack of help from anyone, I'd say you pretty well hit the nail on the head.

There are more hidden expenses than you think. Just having 2 mobile phones in the family can really add up. Plus cable TV equivalent. Plus public transport. Plus a house of any decent standing is more like 40k per month. The list goes on!

One might say that your figures were quite conservative, and it would actually be worse off than your predictions!!

Sqwak7700

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):

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!

Arfur Dent

7700 - Well said - required reading for all new applicants. Excellent!
Sad - but true that modern Corporate Culture (sic) always seems to strive for getting the workforce to do as much as possible for the smallest rewards - that's the stated aim - 'Duty to shareholders' etc etc. When even applicants desperate for a job refuse an offer of one, the Board meets and slightly improves the package (watch this space). Not because of any respect for the future 'team member' - just because they have to fill slots.
And all that 'Thanks for making this a record year' stuff seems slightly hollow................

Flap10

I agree with your comments, and financial numbers aside, most of the other airlines in this part of the world have the same management tactics, Emirates, Qatar, etc. are no different, so hard to factor in pilot treatment when a wannabe is looking for employment with an airline. My advice to a wannabe is don't get into this profession from the start, it's not what it used to be, in fact I don't even consider it a profession anymore.

Flaps10

Sqwak77000

If you haven't already, please blanket the threads in the wannabes forum with your post. I would do it but I can't possibly take credit for something so well written.

If these guys would hold off on saying yes to a job offer they will see much better terms offered in the NEAR future and everyone will benefit.

Humber10

I hope all you newbies all take note of c'mugs research and comments from those like sqwak, they are spot on.

working for a large company in this part of the world, you are just a number and are treated as such. large companies have their PR machines going non-stop with self gratifying dribble, dont be fooled, they may win awards for being such great employers etc but they are far from it.

Frogman1484

I have an apartment for rent. It is 571 sq feet. The current rent is $13000 per month. It is in an old block and out of the way. The rent is probably one of the cheaper ones around.

As you can see the $10000 Cx is offering for you accommodation will not even rent you a 2 bedroom box. If you do pay in the difference and move in you will be living in this box until you are a senior FO which is probably 6-7 years.
After that you housing will move to $14000 which basically means you will still live in the box for a few more years.

Once you get to Captain rank you then can move into a 3 bedroom apartment of about 1100 sq feet ( slightly bigger box).

The one catch is that you will have to wait about 15 years before you can live in a big enough place.

While you wait for the better accommodation to happen, you will be bonded by CX with their cash offer. All this means that while you are going backwards financially you will not be able to leave for 6 years.

What this means is that CX knows that this is a **** offer and the only way they can stop you from going somewhere better is by bonding you. If they did not bond you they know that everyone would come and get the rating and leave to better paying and lifestyle places.

All I can say is that you need to be very careful as once you move, you will not be able to leave...sounds like slave labour to me.

IFB

I tend not to post here too much as IMO I feel that many of the comments are rather polarised and often at the more extreme ends of the majority view. HOWEVER, for those of you thinking this new housing and forgivable loan sounds good enough to accept. BE IN NO DOUBT the previous posts deriding this deal are totally unbiased in their analysis. A rare occurrence on this forum. Accept it at your folly.

tyson744

Totally agree. The offer is very wrong. Particularly if you already have a family.

seventy-seven

Mate what you have stated is generally quite true about CX.A lot of SO's in CX either love it or hate it! Not getting any flying for possibly four or even five years is a real turn off plus living in a virtual dog box takes character especially if you are married. Thats another issue stay single and dont take your girlfriend to HKG. Ninety per cent of white women HATE HKG.There are better options for the likes of someone of your obvious intelligence and CX will be poorer for it.
Good Luck for the future.

crwjerk

Coffee Mug, not far off the "money".
You can also add another couple of thousand for taxis and your octopus card.
One or two thousand for your house cleaner.
Phone , TV, Internet could add up to a couple of thousand also.
There's a quick 6000 to add to your -6%.

crwjerk

Indeed, thanks!