1. Taxes are ridiculous (my friend is in the 65% bucket, sixty five, after 2 years of work experience). They aren't that high if you consider what they include

1. Taxes are ridiculous (my friend is in the 65% bucket, sixty five, after 2 years of work experience). They aren't that high if you consider what they include. My take-home pay proportion stayed about the same when I moved from California to Denmark (I didn't qualify for the special foreigner tax, which would've made it even lower). The effective (rather than marginal) tax rate if you make a middle-class salary in Denmark is ~40%, including what the U.S. splits out as payroll taxes. In California, I paid about 30% total, but that didn't include healthcare. I had to buy health-insurance separately, and it cost me about 8% of my income. Also, Danes don't have to make student-loan payments, which is another quasi-tax on middle-class American incomes. The relative comparison does depend on where in the middle-class (a broad term) you are: Denmark's tax rates are more competitive if you make $70k than $200k, in part because they're progressive, and in part because healthcare, student loans, and payroll taxes bite a bigger proportion of your paycheck in the U.S. if you make $100k or less. It also depends on whether you're self-employed: in the U.S., individually purchased health-insurance plus 15% payroll taxes for the self-employed take a big bite of your income up front. As far as cars, I found my transportation costs have gone down significantly, precisely because I don't have to own a car, since the transit and bikeability is good. I had no choice previously, because the Bay Area's transit sucks (no, Caltrain + VTA Light Rail is not good enough). So that was another 5% or so of my income sunk into owning a car that I'm now free of. Overall, a bigger % of my income here goes into my bank account as discretionary income. And that's not even accounting for the greater peace-of-mind (and implied present value) of having a better safety net.