City livin’ – How expensive is it?

We all know that living in the city can be expensive, but how expensive is one city compared to another? Mercer Human Resource Consulting has made up a list of major world cities, and listed them in order from most expensive to least expensive to live in. They take a whole bunch of items that you might pay for, from expensive apartments to normal groceries, and come up with results from there.

A little over halfway down the list is one of the cities we’re interested in – Mexico City. Now, we may or may not live in Mexico City, but it does make a useful reference point, since we know we’ll be in a city area somewhere in Central Mexico. So Mexico City is neither very cheap, or very expensive compared to other major cities.

However, one interesting thing for Canadians is that Mexico City was more expensive than any major Canadian city listed, including Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary and Ottawa (Ottawa was the cheapest, then Calgary). Mexico City was also more expensive than Pittsburgh, Portland, Atlanta and Denver.

Among the most expensive cities were Tokya (#1), London and Moscow. New York was the most expensive North American city. The least expensive cities included Asuncion, Paraguay (#144), Caracas, Venezuela (#134), and Ottawa, Canada (#124).

Anyway, this does confirm what people living in Mexico have been telling us – it may not be the most expensive place on earth, but it’s not cheap (and it’s far more expensive than Calgary!). However, we do know some missionaries who live around Tokyo, and as you can imagine they need waaaay more income than we do! Kinda makes you want to be a missionary in Ottawa, doesn’t it? Except, you should go where the Lord calls you! 😉 And that’s the best place to be!