Foreigner with job opportunity in Vancouver. Is it good? I have no idea PersonalFinanceCanada

So... a bit of background:

• I'm a 25-year-old Italian citizen with a BS in Computer Science.
• I received a job offer in Vancouver. I'm planning to move there on my own.
• The job offer is of $123k/year total compensation.
• A quick Google search gives me an after-tax salary of $89k/year. Which in turn gives me $7,4k/month in my pocket each month.
• I'm planning on living in Downtown Vancouver because I want to live close to the office. In Craiglist I found furnished apartments for $1,8k ~ $2k per month. This would reduce my pocket money to $5,5k.

So here come the questions..

• I've absolutely no idea how much I will be spending in terms of food / clothes / general entertainment each month. Can you guys give me a rough estimate?
• Is it a good idea to live downtown or is it better to live in the outskirts and commute to the office? How much could I save each month if I did the latter? The reason I want to live downtown is because (a) all my life I've had 1+ hour each way per day of commute and I'm sick of it, and (b) living downtown means I have everything close by.
• Is it better to rent a furnished apartment or an unfurnished one? If I rented an unfurnished one, how much do you think I'd have to spend to buy everything? I'm thinking: refrigerator, microwave oven, washing machine, bed, sofa, tv and such...
• If I rented an unfurnished apartment and bought all the stuff, where should I look into how much it'd cost to move everything back to my home country?

Feel free to add anything else I did not cover!

Submitted February 28, 2017 at 09:21AM by p1m123n http://ift.tt/2myvn5o PersonalFinanceCanada