[Akula]

(12-16-2013 04:11 PM)Menace Wrote:  

This just confirms my impression of Moscow fr when I was there. Fun to visit and lots of attractive girls but QOL is not great if your income is coming from there and you are not making decent money. $80k in Moscow is peanuts if you want a good life.

Too true. Even with a 13% flat tax rate I don't think 80k goes very far here. I pay $3000 a month in rent alone, and everything is expensive if you live in the city - sort of London-style prices for the most part.

@jimukr104 I'm in finance, and made some pretty good money here, but the word now is that the good times have really slowed down especially with only 1.4% growth for 2013. Many people are sort of wondering what will happen next - that sort of growth sure isn't typical of an 'emerging market.'

Also, it sure seems like Russia is at that tipping point where they no longer value expats. Seems like the CEOs and senior managers here think that there are enough Russians who've worked abroad for many years who can just do the job - for way less money. That's a false reality, but they believe it anyway, and thus perception becomes reality.

I was eating with a bunch of expats over the weekend and we all discussed how most of our expatriate friends in the finance/legal and oil industry have left over the past few years and how the trend is continuing and even intensifying. Firms like Renaissance Capital are basically done and dusted (at one point they had 1000+ bankers here), the bigger law firms are struggling to find work and cutting people here too (or sending them back to London or the US). And guess who gets the chop first if they fire employees? It's usually the more expensive expat.

Moreover, the effective 're-nationalization' of many companies (e.g. Rosneft buying TNK-BP, the big banks buying up a lot of the smaller banks,etc.) also creates less opportunities and more cost-cutting/consolidation and job losses at the top too.