Are we talking once you've reached your top wage or starting salary?

Getting a job that pays around 40k to start is considered pretty average these days, but depending on what they job is, you could receive yearly raises or need to wait several years then receive substantial wage increases. It all depends if you have a collective bargaining agreement, personal contract or run your own business.

Are we also assuming that we have a pension plan and average benefit package? More money and less perks is also a huge contributing factor.

Personally, I could live comfortably if I started at 40k with full-time employment, pension and benefits. If I was on contract with the potential to become full-time, I'd say the number would be more around 55k to 60k to cover any and all medical expenses. Hopefully my maximum wage would be about 90k to 110k.

As for what I want, that would be as much as I can get.

It's always easier to adjust your quality of life when you are given more, than when you have stuff taken away. This is a huge influence on the comfort factor.

EDIT: and all the values I provided are before tax dollars

Humza, please watch your posts. The other users are trying to help and contribute to the discussion.

To take things back on topic here.. there's a great answer to this in Yahoo Answers I think is well worded and breaks things down nicely. See the post here:

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/in...20 354AAOUxP9

Let's just say you get a $36,000 a year job. That's $3000 a month. Let's take off 25% of that for taxes, EI, CPP, union dues or whatever.. This leaves you $2250 cash in hand per month.

So now lets see what you can get for $2250 cash in hand:

I know someone that got a $200,000 mortgage making $36,000.But they saved up $20,000 in cash for a downpayment.

Anyway, assuming that you have no debt, and you can somehow manage to get a $180,000 mortgage (usually the rule of thumb is a bank will give you a mortgage of 3x your yearly salary, so in your case $100,000 which will get you nothing, but there are brokers out there that will help you out.)

So let's use this as an example. You want a $200,000 mortgage at a 4.5% interest rate ammoritized over 25 years.

You're looking at a monthly payment of about $1100. Let's say you want to upgrade to a $250,000 house, well you'd probably want to ammoritize for more years by negotiating with your broker, but not sacrifice your interest rate. So on average for $200K - $250K house, let's just say you'll pay anywhere between $1100 and $1300 per month JUST for the mortgage.

So if you're BUYING, this is what your life would look like:

Mortgage: $1200 per month
Hydro: $130 per month
Water: $80 per month
Gas: $80 per month
Food: $250 per month
Bus Pass: $60 per month
Dog Food: $60 per month
Cable / Internet / Phone: $130 per month
House maintenance in case anything breaks: who knows how much


So this is BASIC life and you're looking at $1990 cash-out per month out of your $2250 for a total of $260 per month for savings or entertainment or anything else.

This is pretty slim. All your money is going to living and soon enough you'll be depressed because you can't entertain yourself or save money or anything. You should try to find a job that is $45,000 per year or more for a more comfortable life.

Your other option is renting for a while. Or even renting an apartment. You can rent an all-inclusive apartment for $800 and you don't have to pay water, hydro or gas... and that would save you upwards of $500 per month.

You can save that $500 per month for 2 years livinig in an apartment, get $20,000 for a downpayment on a house, then cut your mortgage down from $200,000 to $180,000

anyway, you can see where im' going here. There are many options, but $36,000 will only go so far. I think $45,000 + you can live a very comfortable life.

Originally Posted by Chad

Humza, please watch your posts.

I am watching my posts. I want nothing to do with Silver. That is a choice I decided to make, and I'll follow through on that.

As for Fight0, I offered that user to PM me if they wanted to continue talking about me eventually making a $120K salary after taxes.

EDIT:
I was initially also contributing to the discussion as well if you read my post, but then it was steering towards how would I exactly go about getting that much money.

I added Silver to my ignore list, so that problem is taken care of.

If all you need is money to live comfortably, your an airhead. and hear come the comments saying its 'your're' and 'here'. we live in canada, and if you were born here you probably don't realize how good we got it. i'd be comfortable making minimum wage if i immigrated from a third world country. being born here, north american culture has ruined what you believe to be a good life. all the money in the world isn't gonna change the fact that we live in canada, a country with a really high cancer rate. so while you were studying all these years, and spent the first half of your life worrying about getting a nice salary, people with nice salaries were putting steroids in our food and growing GMOs. 9.11 was an inside job. all these horrible things, and your worried about money? talk about wasting your life

To put things in different perspective. Aka not what we want but what normal people live with:
-Average number of payed full time work hours per year => 52(weeks)*5(days)*7(h ours) = 2080 payed work hours including all holidays + payed leave. This is a rough average: many work 35 hours as do sever work 60+.

-Poverty line ontario 2008: $18,582 (single adult) , $26,279 (single adult + 1 dependent)

-Minimum wage Ontario 10.25=> $21,320.00 yearly income (-$2000 tax) = $19k

-Average wage Ontario 24.54 => $51,043.20 yearly income (-$9500 tax) = $42k
(note 26.55 per hour is perhaps a more reasonable number)

There is a big difference between the average and different employer groups though. For example I know several engineering coops that would consider $20 per hour quite low for a coop job. An there is usually at least a 20k difference between coop and full time engineer. ("no-one gets paid less than a coop")

[edit ]

http://www.statcan.gc.ca/tables-tabl...abr69g-eng.htm

My needs are my wants.. anything I have in excess I'll just put in the bank for the kids or donate to charity. I don't see myself owning a car until I can afford a hybrid/electric one, so my mulah will just build up for years... (my hope)

I don't really buy into the lie of wealth, so I don't accumulate silly things; if you're buying some fancy car, watch, or what have you, you're being swindled into buying something with artificially inflated worth. Video games are my folly though...

Originally Posted by herBs

I added Silver to my ignore list, so that problem is taken care of.

Silver is a nice guy, anybody who feels the need to ignore him must be a pretty big jackass.

Originally Posted by RyanC

Silver is a nice guy, anybody who feels the need to ignore him must be a pretty big jackass.

Thanks
/12chars

up till my late 20s i'd be more than happy with 60k. not really big on the whole house thing. would like a nice car though.

but i think after that i would look for more. not really big on the whole marriage thing either. but i want to adopt, which would bump up what i would need/want
and then i would also want to support my parents so... i think later on in life i would want say 90k+

so taking care of me, my kid(s) and my parents. then whatever is left, some into savings and some for things like travel, and nice things

It's a tough job market currently, even though Canada is in relatively good shape. If you're graduating soon, you may come to realize that some of your more ambitious goals might need to be put on hold.

I'm not really answering the OP here, but there's some recent articles that show more and more young adults are living at home with their parents. This statscan article sums it up pretty well (http://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-re...1003_3-eng.cfm)

Anyways, if possible, my advice would be to live off your parents as long as possible, and you will save a whole chunk of money very quickly to be able to make those large purchases later on in life (cars, houses, weddings, divorces, etc.)

I plan on getting married and having kids so I think 100k combined income after taxes would allow us to live very comfortably and travel from time to time. If I were to stay single with no kids then I'd be happy with 40k. I grew up in a lower middle class family of four and always felt very comfortable with just the essentials so in any case I think I will be fine.

Nicer would be a single house with at least 2500 square feet fully furnished etc and enough savings.

I'd be quite happy with about $55000 combined income between my husband and I when we're finished school. We've lived on more and we've (like now) lived on much less, both before and after having our son. Making lots of money so you can buy fancy toys and cars, great big houses, expensive vacations, etc. is nice for some people. But I would rather work fewer hours doing something I enjoy and have even more time to spend with friends and family than work 60+ hours a week and/or bring my job home with me all the time.