Can someone tell me about puerto rico other then it is beautiful, how much money does it take to live there?

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nena

Well yes you are right it is beautiful. If you live in San Juan or the metro area, the cost of living is comparable to any US city.

If you live in the smaller towns (especially the central mountain area), the cost of living is cheaper than the US. The rent is cheaper, the car insurance is cheaper & you dont need heat. However cars are a little bit pricier & so is food & items b/c if its not made in PR, it is shipped in. The only problem is jobs. Jobs are hard to come by & dont pay very well. PR also follows the US's minimum wage law, so you will get atleast minimum wage if you can find a job. Many puerto ricans are fully billingual & college educated so you also have alot of competition. If you work in the Pharmacuetical industry you will do fine b/c majority of US medicines are made in PR.
Here is PR's top classified site:

http://www.clasificadosonline.com/

Tammy

Ok, here is my point of view. And while most of the things that IAMACHEF said are probably true he take it to another level, he exagerated it.

I live in PR my whole life. I'm 28 now. I never been assault or robbed there and never feel unsafe. Now I move to nyc and my first week someone robbed me, like six month ago I forgot my keys on the door outside and someone took them and the next morning tried to open the door and sneak inside my house.

I don't think PR is such a bad place to live. I think that the main problem there are the crime between drug dealers and domestic violence. But if you are not close to those areas where they have the drugs problems you are fine!!! I never had a problem and I never been close to a gun shooting or anything and I used to party a lot. Is just like any other country or state don't get too close to the "hood".

Now the salary topic is seriuos: I was a teacher there graduate from the best University and I only made like almost 2,000 monthly. That's way too little. Is not even enough for having a decent house in a decent place by yourself. The cost of life is expensive in PR and you don't get too many money to keep it with that. Even if you graduate from Collage it takes a while to make decent money. Now there is a lot of people with money there that can afford very expensives houses there. And by the way the person that said that houses are more expensives here than they are in US are lieying. That's my biggest complaint from US that houses are just too expensive, nothing less than 350,000 if you are lucky. At least in PR you can find nice houses from 150,000 or 200,000 the problem is that with a 24,0000 per year you can afford them. LOL

So how much money take to live here it's depend in how you are use to live or how you expect to live. I think that with a salary of 3,000 a month you can have a decent life over here. You can have a house, a car and so.

But if you want luxury you would need a lot more. But if you are educated you can make it.

Is not a horrible place to live like IAMACHEF said. It's actually nice. It's have their problem but I think people have the desire of make it a better place. And if NYC did such a big change I don't have any doubt that PR is going to be better soon!!!

Probably I'm moving back to PR not yet bc, now I'm exploring the US. But for sure I'm coming back to my little island

ProArtWork

All I can tell you is, an average police officer, at least beginning their career, earn as much as a person working at McDonalds in New York City or similar cities in the USA.

A person that works in the Postal Service or United Parcel Service working in the U.S. and wants a transfer to Puerto Rico, may be very well off in terms of "cost of living" because salary will not change. I am sure there are other jobs that may pay well, but I am sure those are jobs that are in high demand that require very good skills.

fdo.riveralopez

Is similar to U.S.A. but all depend in wich area you live.

Munbe

I don't know what to tell you exactly but, my sister recently moved back to the US because in PR you work hard, but get little back. Everything is expensive and you get a normal pay. She was a lawyer and was struggling and my father also moved to the US from PR and he is a dentist. I know the bills for say water is about 10 times more expensive than it is here.

Another thing is my old house from when I lived there cost 1.7 million whereas if you found it in the US it would probably cost around 500,000.

shinningstarofthecarribean

try these sites newspapers sites

www.endi.com

www.primerahora.com

IAMACHEF

Anyone who tries to paint a "sunny picture" regarding the standard of living in Puerto Rico, is either a Travel Agent or a complete liar. I left there recently after having worked there for three years, and am glad to be back in civilisation. The cost of living in PR is about 30% higher than on the mainland. It is more comparable to the cost of living in Hawaii. The standard of living in PR isn't the greatest, making it an even worse proposition. I had three different residences there, and regardless of where we lived, we had to deal with the daily water, power, and phone outages. Yes I said daily. I remember once going two days without water service because of an outage.

Everything there is imported from the US, including most of the food. The only factories there are large US owned pharmaceuticals. Most of the meats, canned goods, prepackaged foods and even fresh produce are all made in the US. Of the few things they do produce, they frequently don't produce enough of. This is true of simple things like milk, bread and eggs. They have some companies that make it there, but they don't make enough, which means the rest gets imported in from the US. How much do you think it costs to send a gallon of milk to a foreign country? Now you have an idea of the costs of many things.

One thing that surprised me was that they also import the majority of their seafood from the US and even asian countries. I can understand someone in Illinois going to the supermarket to buy fish and see that it came from another state, or even another country. Think about it for a second. Isn't Puerto Rico an island in the middle of the ocean? Should they have to import sea food? Do you know why they import their sea food? Because they no longer have a commercial fishing fleet of their own. If they have to import seafood, milk, bread and eggs, what does that say about other things you will need to buy?

Even though it has some nice tourist sites, like El Morro, the rain forest, Old San Juan and the historical buildings, it's still a very expensive place to visit and not very safe. Clearly the most expensive tourist destination in all the caribbean. For the amount you will pay to stay at a decent, safe hotel for a weekend in PR, you could stay at a 5 star, all inclusive resort in the Dominican Republic for a week. Generally, you won't pay less than $125-150 a night at any of the hotels in Condado, San Juan or Isla Verde PR. And that's not even the top tier hotels, that's more like the Hampton Inn or Holiday Inn. The El San Juan Hotel generally costs $200+ per person per night, and gets even higher during tourist season.

There's a lot of violent crime in PR, ranked #2 by the FBI for the unbridled blood bath that has gripped the island in recent years. You have a better chance of becoming a victim of violent crime in Puerto Rico than in any other part of the US. The only place mroe dangerous is Wash DC, but they are projected to surpass them this year. The crime is the most telling. The FBI crime statistics grade both major cities and states. Illinois has approximately 20 million inhabitants, Puerto Rico has about 3 and a half million inhabitants. Even though Puerto Rico's population is one sixth of the size of Illinois, it has more violent crime - more crime with far less people.

Drunk driving is also a huge problem there. I actually witnessed a drunk driver and the spectacular destruction he caused. It wasn't bad enough that he drove his car through a security fence, but he continued another 100 feet and crashed the car in the main lobby of the Hampton Inn Hotel. The drunk driving issue is bad because they just don't enforce the law.

Another quirk is the situation with driving at night. It's already bad enough that the roads there are filled with drunks at night, but it's made worse by the fact that between 12:00 midnight to 6 am, you don't have to stop for red lights. The reason the government did this, is because there is a huge problem with car-jacking in PR. Car-jacking got so out of control in PR, that rather than hiring more police officers to deal with the problem, they instead decided that the best way to combat the problem was to suspend traffic laws at night.

Their logic is that you can't get car-jacked at the stop light, if you don't stop at the stop light. Isn't that crazy? Combine not having to stop for a red light, with a drunk behind the wheel and you can easily see why it's dangerous to drive there at night.

As you can imagine, I'm in no rush to go back and visit. Don't be fooled, living there is an all around bad deal.

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