How Much does Vancouver Cost?

A while Ago I found an article on Flipboard about a couple in Vancouver writing about about living cheaply. It seems that they’re getting a lot of publicity because they were featured in The Province. I was thinking about blogging about our expenses a while ago month but lost a lot of my University data so I had nothing to write about. Since then, we’ve lived and worked day in and day out. It’s somewhat exciting but more importantly, we have enough data to do an analysis and share our findings.

The analysis used 9 months of data since moving into our apartment in September and starting careers. We track each shared purchase that contributes to our collective welfare so we have a very accurate portrayal of our living costs. In fact, we categorize our spending into 13 distinctive categories:

1. Housing (rent, furniture, soaps, etc…)
2. Bills (hydro, internet)
3. Transportation (bus passes)
4. Education (night classes)
5. Groceries (food)
6. Eating Out (more, better tasting food)
7. Laundry (coin-operated)
8. Entertainment (movies, ski passes, etc…)
9. Gifts (Christmas, birthdays, etc…)
10. Medical (mostly my allergy meds)
11. Lent (lending money to friends, it’s happened once)
12. Miscellaneous (everything that doesn’t fit in)
13. Travel (trips)

We use to have alcohol as a category but we drink so infrequently that it got rolled into Entertainment. Of these categories, 7 are budgeted monthly such as Groceries and Eating out at 300 and 200$ respectively. There is also an overall goal to be under 2000$ a month too.

So how are we doing? This graph is our total spending per month for the 9 months since September 2013.

As you can see, there is quite a lot of variance month-to-month with September being an abnormally. But we’ve sort of levelled off towards our goal of 2000 $/month.

We try to stay under budget but it is quite difficult because there is so much variance month-to-month. Expenses like Rent and utilities are pretty constant as are groceries and eating-out but there is infrequent spending almost every other month and they are large purchases too. In that way, September is less of an abnormally and just very expensive. So what happened in September?

September is historically an expensive time of year and as you can see, September was by far the most expensive. September was expensive because of the apartment. We had to sign a one-year lease on the apartment. This included rent for September 2013, a damage deposit, and rent for the last two months, July and August 2014. We also spent $500 or so furnishing the place with a bed, couch, coffee table, shower curtain, etc… once we were tired of camping out on the floor and eating off a cardboard box :P



That explains September, but what about other months? October was okay but then November jumped up again because we bought Whistler Edge Cards to ski the winter. Then in December we withdrew 1,100$ for our road-trip to San Fran trip (cost break down here) and in January we signed up for a Japanese nighttime course at Langara.



Thus, these “rare” events occurred 5 out of the past 9 months, or about half the time.



In 9 months, we’ve gone over budget on groceries and eating out twice each but our average is below our target of 300 and 200 $/month. Usually we treat these two budgets as soft budgets meaning that we’re not overly concerned about exceeding it.



BC Hydro has really cool metrics on their website too for tracking energy usage. Our hydro usage is around 18 $/month. It’s cool to see online that on a daily basis we use an average of 2–4 kWh but on days that we cook our usage spikes up to 8 kWh.



On Average, I’ve spent an additional 429 $/month average in personal finances. This isn’t quite accurate though because my large expenses were in October, and March where I bought a new Macbook Pro, and a bike.


Of course, 2,000 $/month is a target budget and we recognize that among Vancouverites in our demographic, we are probably doing quite well. (For reference, we define our demographic as living independently away from our parents and being self-supporting in the age group 23–29). True, we don’t feel like we’re saving enough of our pay cheques and would like to save more but we’re not overly concerned about our spending because we’re enjoying a very good quality of life.



Let’s take different look at how much it costs us to live in Vancouver.

This is a graph of our average spending per month in each category. We spend an average of 2,615$/mo of which just over half of it goes to rent, and house related items. This does include September and if we exclude September, housing is about 47%.



I suppose it’s unsurprising that our rent makes up 50% of our monthly spending considering Vancouver is one of the most expensive cities in the world. But unlike the couple in the Province Article whom are in co-op housing, we’re in regular market housing. At 1050 $/month, we consider our rent to be on the cheaper side and are very happy with the interior, building, and location. Rent includes heating but doesn’t include hydro or internet.



Looking at Transportation, it’s quite unsettling how much it costs just to get around. Lots of people praise Vancouver’s transit system but Yuki and I both think it’s pretty poor and high cost compared to megacities like Bangkok, Tokyo, and Hong Kong. In Vancouver, a single ticket costs 2.75$ for one zone and 4$ for two-zones. While they last an hour and a half it’s unlikely that anyone that goes out is home in that amount of time so the real cost is more like double. 84 to go downtown!? that’s like 3/4 of a dinner meal or 8 weeks of loonie swimming! But I digress,



A one-zone bus pass costs 91$ and a two zone bus pass costs 124$ for a total of 215$. Yuki needs the two zone to get to and from work and for 23 working days of the month, it effectively costs 5.40$ a day. This is why we don’t want to get a car — because transportation is already ridiculously expensive as it is.



What’s stupid is that since I’ve started biking to work I’ve had to buy fare-saver booklets of single tickets to go hiking on the Weekends and we’ve taken the ferry a bunch so we haven’t seen any savings.



“Other” costs include gifts, medical, lending, miscellaneous, and travel. They are combined into one category because spending in these categories doesn’t happen on a monthly basis and is infrequent.



Including September rent, our average spending is 2,615 $/month. This includes Christmas and our San Francisco Trip. Excluding september is closer to 2,200$/month.



I suppose it’s fair to say that our average spending is about 1,530 $/month (2,200/2 +429) per person including shared and personal expenses. We like to complain about how our friends who live with their parents have so little expenses to stay alive but we think we’re doing pretty well compared to the national and city average for our demographic. I have no idea what it is, but I feel like we’re doing pretty good. Our target of 2,000 $/month on collective expenses is achievable although though difficult because we’re enjoying our current quality of life. To that end, we’ll have to see how things roll because I think it’s unlikely that we’ll meet that target on a monthly basis, we’re just not interested in making sacrifices right now and more interested in growing our incomes.