If the latest report about the ridiculously high shelter costs in Oakville has hit you hard, leaving you concerned and anxious, a different study says that you did the right thing by choosing this town as your home.
A recent study by Yore Oyster, a personal finance site in Canada that caters to cost-conscious Canadians, found Oakville to be the No. 1 "best smallest city in Canada" to get rich. This list was centred around small cities "that are attracting more people and businesses."
The top 20 chosen cities for the study were Oakville, Burlington, Saskatoon, Regina, Barrie, St. John's, Saanich, Waterloo, Guelph, Sherbrooke, Kamloops, Greater Sudbury, Lethbridge, Kingston, Thunder Bay, Lévis, Kelowna, Trois-Rivières, Nanaimo, and St. Catharines.
Jordan Bishop, the founder of the website, explains how the team at Yore Oyster choose the cities on the list. They ran their analyses on every Canadian city "that had reliable data." The study purposefully excluded the largest cities in the country "because it's known that, all else being equal, you'll earn more in Toronto or Vancouver than you would in smaller cities (particularly in professional careers), but the differences across smaller cities are less obvious."
For each city, the team gathered data from trusted sources, including public-sector providers such as Statistics Canada, CREA, the Government of Canada and each city's official website. The cities were ranked based on three factors:
- Median Household Income After Taxes
- Monthly Cost of Living
- Gross Domestic Product Per Capita (GDP)
Bishop adds that the team ran this study "to help Canadians (especially young with few roots in a single place) decide where they should live if they want to give themselves the best chance of becoming wealthy over the long term."
According to the study's findings, "Oakville is all about economic opportunity, growth and success, no matter what industry sector you represent. The city's economic indicators show the big picture: from nearly full employment to higher-than-average household incomes."
In our town, the median household income after taxes is $95,035, GDP annual growth rate is 3%, and the cost of living (Monthly) is $2,984. That also means that Oakville's median household income is $38,306 more, and the monthly cost of living is $502 more than that of St. Catherines, the 20th city on the list.