by Lynn Kan

BARELY two months home from her five years in London, Ms Emiley Yeow, 37, continues to grapple with grocery shopping in Singapore.

She grabbed a familiar British brand of garden peas that cost 99 pence (S$2.30) there. At the cashier, she discovered to her dismay that it would cost her nearly $10.

'Foreign produce here is much more expensive,' she says with a wince.

In London, where she bought more food, the bills for her family of four used to add up to a maximum of £70 (S$159) a week. Here, with a less full cart, it is $150 a week.

'My cart is not chock-a-block with things, I don't go for brands, but my bill is always surprisingly high. I know there is a premium on foreign produce. But I didn't think it would be that high,' says the corporate relations director at Stamford Law Corporation.

She and her civil servant husband, Mr Colin Goh, have two-year-old twins - a girl and a boy.

While in London, Ms Yeow, then a legal headhunter for recruitment consultancy Michael Page, and her husband, who was a business consultant, entertained at home mostly in order to keep an eye on their children.

But dining in saved the couple all kinds of extra costs.

For one thing, if they dined out, they would need to hire a babysitter at £10 to £12 an hour for their twins, excluding the babysitter's transport home and 'the pressure to hurry home'.

Then, there is the issue of parking.

Car owners in London do not face forbidding prices for cars - the brand-new Volkswagen Touran that Ms Yeow and her husband drove cost about £20,000, much cheaper than their current $80,000 Honda Stream.

But 'perversely, using the car is more expensive', she says. Once, her parking fee for a three-hour dim sum lunch in London was £30.

'Fuel cost and maintenance cost are higher, parking is extremely expensive, a nightmare in London. So, it's a good driving deterrence.'

Resorting to the relatively faster and congestion-free public transport in London was not cheap either.

She spent about £5 every day travelling from her home in the outskirts of London to her workplace in Central London - which is just six train stops away - and then back. In contrast, after being dropped off by her husband at Little India in Singapore, the three train stops to her work venue at Raffles Place cost less than $1.

As for accommodation, expenditure remains much the same. Currently, Ms Yeow's family rents a three-bedroom condominium in Shelford Road. About 30 per cent of her income goes to rent - about the same proportion that went to paying her mortgage for her three-bedroom terrace home in London.

Ms Yeow concedes that income in London is higher. However, after taxes, which are about 40 per cent, she has less for savings and non-essential expenses.

Although Singapore has grown more costly now compared to before she left in 2001 to work in San Francisco, and later in Oxford and London in Britain, she still believes Singapore is a more affordable city.

This article first appeared in The Straits Times.