IndieOz

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Latest post on 14 February 2016 - 02:11

I'll be very honest about what we felt about living in Dubai and share my thoughts. These are my personal views and perhaps not many would agree with them, which is fine. To each his own. Our ideas of a good lifestyle could be very different. If by lifestyle you mean being able to achieve purely materialistic pleasures - frequenting gazillion malls and buying designer stuff or whatever you want because you can afford paying silly prices, brunches in fancy restaurants, driving 4x4s/Mercs/BMWs, travelling and staying in 5 star hotels on holidays, being a social butterfly etc etc then by all means Dubai is the place for you. This lifestyle is fickle and is to be enjoyed as long as you have that income to support it. But don't live under the delusion that Dubai is your permanent home. There is nothing remotely permanent about Dubai. You're there as long as you have a visa (through employment or the 2 year renewable property visa) and can afford to live there. Lose one of them and you have to move on. Dubai could never ever be home (in the true sense) to us as expatriates whatever you may like to think. So if you're living in Dubai on a high income and solely to live the above lifestyle with no focus on saving money to secure a comfortable future then you're doing wrong imho. Pure and simple. For us Dubai was just a place to save a ton of money and get the **** out thereafter. It took us 15 years to achieve our dreams when we finally left Dubai (for Melbourne). Our income now is a fraction (and I mean a tiny one at that as I stopped working at 42!) of what it used to be in Dubai. But our lifestyle now is unimaginably better in every respect than it ever was in Dubai. We are SAHP (parents), hubby works from home. We would need an income of over a million dirhams just to live in a similar type of house/suburb and pay for my children's education. So if I were you, I would continue living in Dubai/AD (you're both young and earning a high income) and SAVE like crazy, at least 50-60% of your income. Save enough to be able to buy a nice house and live mortgage free with a modest income to supplement your employment income and having done that move to UK/Australia/NZ/Canada or wherever you can get a permanent visa and a passport.

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