Cost of living in the UK and saving

[Aloe]

Totally wrong forum for this sort of topic, but i thought maybe someone will enlighten me   


Hubby and I came up with a plan to buy some real estate to rent out. Our target is to have 3 thousand euro per month worth of rent income in 15-20 years, and move to Thailand. So I was thinking of maybe moving to England to realize this. The way it is looking right now, we might save 2 thousand euro a month here in Belgium if we don't have any children, and it isn't enough to realize that plan.


The question is, how much could we save in Britain? Hubby is a java programmer (software, not web) with 5 yrs experience, and i'm gonna have a bachelor in linguistics without experience, so not sure what i can do with that, probably sit on the phone, maybe do some translation work at best. Salary info websites give a range of like 20k pounds to 70k pounds a year for a java developer, that is a giant difference! I understand it differs with the region, but in which region could we save the most money netto per month? Thinking hubby will get like 40-50k pounds a year, and me up to 20k is that realistic or too optimistic? How much does it cost to live there (in the region you have information about?).
The point is to save as much as possible every month, so if you make 5k a month in london and spend 4.5k living there, you'll save 500, but if you make 3k elsewhere and spend 1.5k living, you'll save 1.5k, which is a lot better than 500 saved from a high salary.
We need to save like 420k-500k pounds to buy enough property in Belgium. Is that realistic?

[Manny]

I would suggest the north, but not too far north. Forget the south if you want value for money and sensible living expenses.

Like anywhere, there some very cheap places to live, but they are not awfully nice places. The eastern outskirts of Greater Manchester and well chosen parts of Yorkshire or Derbyshire offer good value for money and decent quality of life.

As an example of rental income, lets say you buy a small house of flat to rent out something like this: http://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/property-35914960.html

I would expect you would draw £350-£400 a month back for that in rental.

Generally speaking, around the outskirts of Manchester, you will spend perhaps £60k-£100k on a typical rental unit. You would expect to bring in £350-£475 each one gross per month. So to generate a net £2500 per month, you want to be bringing in maybe £3500-£4000 a month to cover some taxes, repairs, capital improvements and rental agent fees. Which means perhaps eight properties. Which means spending £600k.

For a family house that you might actually want to live in, in a decent area, figure £200k plus.

I don't know what standard of living you enjoy in Belgium, so monthly needs vary very much between one person and another. But in the north of England you can live quite well very cheaply if you have some local knowledge. A young couple might expect to get by on £2500 a month. Maybe less. But you could get by for £1000 a month if you needed to.

[Aloe]

Thanks Manny   Wow big chunk for taxes and everything, totally forgot to take that into consideration. Also a mistake in our belgian saving number, only 1.2k from income, the rest from other non-geographically related income.
Our standard of living is pretty undemanding, just food and eat out twice a week and theater like once a month.