tutulu said:
I am new here and I can not find any answer to my question here.
What is the average monthly expense for 1 person when you initially arrived but not fully settled?
For some people, their expenses go up after getting a job and fully settled.
I know it varies depending on the region, city etc.
I want to the average monthly expenses from your own experience.
Please include the city, town etc of your experience
I am grappling with similar questions.
I understand why locals have hard time answering and require more specifics before giving relevant response to similar questions.
I also understand why immigrants ask the questions the way you do: you need to know, among other things, the very answers to the questions you ask before you can ask more detailed questions.
Anyway, you will need to either ask several separate questions to get responses (example: Q.1 what is the average cost of living in Toronto? Q.2 what is the average cost of living in Ottawa? and etc.)
or
You will need to conduct an independent research/study on your own (among other things try visiting city forums).
I currently try to do it and it's very difficult (I use Google mostly). The way Google algorithm is written, it pulls to the top several dozens of very similar, clone like images and results, and when you move further (to page X and further) search results become less and less relevant.
Let's say you want to know how life is in Saskatchewan (what are the schools like, what the living conditions are etc.), or, more specifically you want to know how things are in Calgary, Alberta. You run all sort of queries and you end up with top results that either show tourist resorts or some other marketing geared blog/article like "Top 10 Cities to live in *******" and etc (Google is designed to pick those sites out of great many). Since you don't want to vacation there and you don't want to read an article or blog written by some product advertiser, but you want REAL experience of REAL people shared, you keep moving to next pages of search results, and you notice how results become totally irrelevant (ex. a woman named Alberta who lives in Vietnam and is looking for a spaniel is what you may find on page X of the "Housing costs in Calgary, Alberta" query on Google).
And other search engines are not better.
So try to ask more pointed questions (though I know how not easy it is) and do more research on your own.
One other thing you may try to do is search for communities in 100KM radius of your target (let's say, you want to look for job in Toronto, so you look for towns in 100 km radius: you will find some very affordable , clean and safe places you can stay at until you find a job and able to move closer to city, or may even get lucky and find a job closer to where you live).
A lot of people here suggested that Toronto is over saturated by immigrants and other jobseekers from all over Canada, so I referenced Toronto just as an example, you may want to choose some other location where you want to settle (and find cost of living to be even more affordable), and just select for initial stay a place within 100 km radius from your actual target city ( I stick to 100km because it's within approx 1-1.5hr driving/commute).
Thus, you will save costs in the beginning and will be close enough to some larger hub where you can look for a job and etc.
Good luck
