Hi Daevid, Thursday, June 14, 2007, 9:26:44 PM, you wrote: > We had an employee (a friend of mine) "start a UK office", and due to > corporate legal reasons, and taxes, etc, he got paid in US DOLLARS. > Aside from even more legal/tax issues he personally had to face, his > salary was almost halved, as 1 USD = 1.9696 GBP !! No, that would give him a SUPERB salary conversion ;) It's actually 1 USD = 0.50 GBP. > The UK is VERY expensive. If I were you, I would do some online > research at the cost of fuel/petrol/gas/whatever you call it, rent, Well we call it whatever goes in the car. If you use petrol, we call it petrol. If you use diesel, we call it diesel. Not too far beyond your A, B, C's really. > purchasing homes, taxes (don't they have VAT and GST or something > like that?), an average lunch meal, dinner meal, utilities, car > price, etc... VAT is 17.5%, doesn't apply to all goods (certain items are exempt) and is in practise no different to your state taxes. Think yourself lucky it's only 17.5%, some European countries go way higher. It does however fund our medical services, etc, etc. The average cost of living over here, while higher than lots of other countries, isn't out of line with the average salary, which is all that matters. That doesn't mean consumer spending is in line with their salaries, but hey - welcome to the mass global issue of being in debt. Back to the original question though, I'd not take a job offering less than £35k/pa, *especially* one in central London. You should add on a significant extra for that location alone. Cheers, Rich -- Zend Certified Engineer http://www.corephp.co.uk "Never trust a computer you can't throw out of a window" -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
