Petrol tops £1 a litre!

[Chip NoVaMac]

Your statement doesn't make sense. If it's 99p, then it's $1.75. If the job pays 20,000 pounds, that's $35,000. Also, you're ignoring the liter to gallon difference.

Maybe I didn't say it well enough. The point I was making that looking at the same job, I found that the salaries would be the same in the monetary unit used by that country, a $20,000US job earns a British work 20,000GBP. A 99p value fry is 99 cents here in the states.

The problem for people in the UK is higher taxes, so they take home less perhaps. Your example of a 20,000GBP job means $35,000US is if you take into account the exchange rate. By the same logic we could be said to earn less that those in Britain, for a 20,000GBP job when looking at from a British view would only be about $11,000US.

The first post mention 1.02GBP per a liter, with a US gallon being 3.79 liters, so for a US gallon in GBP, the cost is 3.86GBP. At the current exchange rates that means if iGary or I went to the UK we would be paying about $7US for our equivalent US gallon for our holiday visit. But if we worked there there difference would not be as great, just about a pound more for each US gallon we used out of our paychecks.

By the same token, this is why some in the UK may think our current gas prices are cheap. That same US gallon would only cost them 1.68GBP when they came over on holiday.

The danger is when we try to use currency exchange rates to decide on how cheap or expensive a country is to actually work in. At least in my quick look around London, the dollar and pound were closely matched for jobs, daily purchases, and housing.

Most comparisons that I think we sometimes make is based on our seeing the effects of exchange rates for when we go to another country for a visit.

Hope that this helped explain a bit of what I meant.

 

[OnceUGoMac]

Chip talk.

Understood. When were you there? I lived there about 10 years ago and plan to go back in 2007.

 

[Chip NoVaMac]

Understood. When were you there? I lived there about 10 years ago and plan to go back in 2007.

Sad to say that I was only there for 2 1/2 days in late February this year. It was my first overseas trip so I tried to take it all in. I have always been interested in other countries and how they "live". But all too often it gets down to viewing how each others currencies work while on holiday.

Much like how I dislike how the US government uses the consumer price index and inflation calculations to say that compared to X year, you are paying less for gas now than compared to then. Sorry my salary doesn't seem to keep up with much of the "basics" of life.