How much it costs to live a comfy, low-energy NEET life in Southeast Asia
>Home country: USA
>Countries visited: Philippines (29 days), Thailand (29 days), Malaysia (58 days), Thailand (28 days)
>Total in-country expenses: 4215 USD
>Flight expenses: 1835 USD
>Total expenses: 6050 USD
144 days total, $42/day
Can you afford it?
I saved $15,000 specifically for this trip, so it looks like I won't be returning to work any time soon, heh heh
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If you’re not cooming or partying 1k a month is plenty.
If you’re cooming you need 2.5-3k
I live in Phillipines in a decent apartment in a city with lots of tourists for about 2k a month, that's cooming included and food delivery every day.
High karumba! That is cheap! Cebu? What about for short stay apartment or hotel rentals.. like 1 month?
I have a nice modern 1 bedroom apartment with fiber and a washing machine for $700 a month.
Thats a pretty normal price. You can find deals similar to that on airbnb but it's better to speak to property managers in buildings you want to live in directly.
As for hotels just ask of they have a deal for monthly or multi week stays. You can sometimes get really good price that way, especially of you agree on limited room cleaning (like once / twice a week only).
can you rank according to best value for dollar? how often are you eating out?
Thailand is absolutely the best value, Philippines the worst.
Dining out ran me between $7-9 USD per day. Some days had as many as 15 individual food transactions, others closer to five.
There's no point in carrying your travel funds in cash when visiting SEA.
I have $561 emergency cash with my backup bank card. tbh I'm not sure exactly what sort of emergency the Ulysses and Benjamins are for, but I brought them along just in case.
It's rather spurious to claim that the $2 hotel deal with agoda is something you were able to get for 30 days straight.
>Kneel
I'm calling LARP on this one.
Vietnam is significantly cheaper than other commonly visited SEA countries.
If you do tourist shit like guided tours, motorbike rental, hitting the bars, etc. Your expenses will quickly top $1000.
IDK why people always analyze monthly rental rates when nightly rates are what matters to foreign visitors. No, I don't want to spend an entire month living in one place. The money you save by settling into some outlying neighborhood (where you may or may not be welcomed) will be spent hiring drivers to take you to and from other more desirable places. I'd rather rent nightly and move every 2-4 days, to a new neighborhood or a new city.
Seeing as I averaged $13.88/night to stay in lovely two-star rooms across Thailand last month, I'd expect Vietnam to be somewhat cheaper, in the $12/night range.
You’re carrying that much cash around? Easy lick
I'm a financial wizard who knows how to get killer deals for everything.
I stacked %-off coupons with flash-deals on Agoda and used cashback programs to get a $50 4-star hotel for $2 a night. I do similar things with food delivery and such.
This months expenses (Chiang Mai):
>$60 for hotel
>$300, or $10/day for food (3x a day, 2/3 is Western, always 30%*+ discounted)
>$200 for consooming, services, pampering
Grand total of $560/mo. Could easily slum it up and cut it to <$400. Kneel
>$60 hotel
please enlighten me monsieur wizard
>$60
oops I meant $600
Maybe I'm delusional or about to get scammed, but how do you guys even spend any more than 1k monthly in SEA? Just looking at the airbnb for Vietnam, even with their big extra cuts, you can live in extremely modern looking places for like 300$ a month. Or is the rent cheap and everything else that's expensive?
A lot of the anons here have the means and lack the knowledge. Anybody with sense can put the following together. These are third world countries. They are filled with third world people making third world wages. They need to live somewhere. If you make just slightly more than average you can live in an above average place. As the scale slides up so does the quality of life. But anons think the only places to live are luxury condos and hotels. If you're not going to stay in a country long term you don't have the same options as a resident on the rental market I guess. But I see people here talking about spending much more than 1k to live in countries full time here all the time and they just have a condo. Here in the Philippines you could be living in a full sized house for less than that. But they have no clue about this. They settled for the first place they arrived at.
You wouldn't be 45 minutes from the city center like you think. You really don't have much of a clue about anything but it's not my job to educate you. If more expats weren't good little paypigs staying in your containment zones the market wouldn't be what it is. I could live way better than you live with far less money spent because I know what things actually cost here. You don't and you think you're getting such a great deal. You have all these supposed reasons that would be null and void if you actually did a real assessment of the situation here. But you're so green you probably have never even done something as simple as riding a jeepney.
It makes sense to me that you're a dumb coomer. Of course you think you need to pay more than 7x the going rate. You barely know where you are. You could find it on a map or say the name of the place maybe but you don't have a clue about anything else.
I am in the Philippines right now. I've lived here for more than 9 years. I first came here in 2011. I always lived on a budget out of necessity. It's doable, if it wasn't how would pinoys survive? You've never had anyone teach you anything about living here. You've never had a real reason to learn. Therefore you convince yourself frivolous things like the security guard in the lobby of your condo building does anything except keep the food delivery driver from going directly to your door. You have no idea how much money you're wasting because you have no idea what it's actual purchasing power is. Perhaps you never will.
>uhm actually you shouldn't live in a luxury condo in a city
>you just shouldn't ok?
>you should live a hour away and ride the jeepney like me
>the fumes aren't that bad just wear a face mask
>I know better because I lived here 10 year and got married to a provincial girl and live on a rice farm pay pigging for her family
>follow my advice and you can live that dream too
You can live in a regular apartment near everything far cheaper. But go ahead, be a moron. I won't stop you. I'll be spending less money for my entire overall living expenses than just what you give to property developers. I did when I lived in the city and if I wanted to go live in a city tomorrow I could budget it. Being a pampered little pussy and whining about things like fumes on a jeepney tells me you don't belong. You'll always be an outsider here in every conceivable way. You will get taken advantage of because of it.
>well yeah I might be poor and $800 sounds like a lot of money to me
>sure I had to live cheap out of necessity
>I'm such a dumbass I can't even make a living wage online in the year 2024
>but
>I absolutely know about finances in the Philippines and know how to get the best value for your money!
>trading $ for luxury is a concept utterly foreign to me
>watch me rationalize my poverty lifestyle and try to suck you into it
>It's so great not having any white people around
>I'm sure it has nothing to do with me being literally filipino poor and living in the middle of nowhere
>I still know best about city life though
>I did it for a few months back in 2011, I'm sure I'm still up to date on everything
>now follow my advice or you're an idiot
I showed in another FUD filled thread like this that I could get an apartment in Angeles City right now for around $125. You're getting fleeced. If that's the price there I know other similar places in larger cities aren't going to be $800. But I know you're scared you'll be living near too many brown people. You know nothing about where you are.
Yeah, Angeles City is a huge rat's nest of a city. Go "downtown" and you won't see a single foreigner...but downtown is a shithole snarl of dirty street commerce and horrible traffic. Trying to walk across that big roundabout by the bridge around 6 PM, holy fricking shit. No way in hell would I want to live in that dump, even if I had a comfy cheap apartment.
>the food I eat is fresh and delicious
You must've trained your pinay slave to cook chef-tier meals with what she buys from the market. LOL
The shitty food in Angeles was truly the breaking point, even for someone who ate five barbecued rat heads on the streets of Manila. Disgusting meal after disgusting meal, everything I ate there bombed, and prices were often suspiciously high. 100 pesos for this plate of garbage, come the frick on. People are buttholes to single white guys there and try to rip you off at every turn, because they assume you're a degenerate coomer with deep pockets. Even if I do return to flipland, I'll pay $12/night for this closet in Manila before I ever return to Angeles.
Pampanga is the culinary capital of the Philippines. If you ate shit food you made shit choices. Like everything else with you it's a skill issue. All the foreigners stay in their little ghetto in Balibago. Some even spill out into Friendship. That's not where I lived though. When I say the Philippines should be gatekept I'm talking about you. All of the things that make this place so based will continue to elude you as you're a subhuman moron who can only think about breeding like a dog roaming the streets.
There is no such thing as a shit choice in a culinary capital, come on now. When 9 out of 10 meals from all across the city get a "bleh" reaction from a hungry forager, that is clearly a problem with the lazy frickers who resent having to do honest work for a living.
Baguio mogs Angeles for food on offer. Laoag mogs Angeles with its delicious night markets and food festivals (picrel). Manila mogs Angeles with its variety of restaurants and stiff competition for diners. Hell, even Pasay mogs Angeles with its friendly little stalls serving cheap and tasty meals 24 hours a day.
It's as glaring as the nose on a israelite's face. The Angeles food scene is an epic failure in culinary achievement at street level. Just look at the Saver's Food Complex behind the Best Western, which was planned to be the new hip foodie destination for Balibago. When I visited there was one stall out of 20 open, and it served stale crap that looked like it was pulled out of the Best Western's rubbish bin. The huge seating area was perpetually empty. What a fricking waste.
Only one single meal during my weeklong stay in Angeles was good, at a canteen run by an old lady near Balibago. Coincidentally, the place was packed with locals whenever it was open, even at odd hours like 3:30 PM. The place closed when the food ran out. This does not happen in a place with plenty of decent restaurants.
You really need to get out more and see how good life can be elsewhere in Southeast Asia, instead of all this protective posturing over the junkyard heap that is Angeles.
You didn't know what you were doing and got a predictable result. Frick the rest of Southeast Asia. It's full of people like you. I've had plenty of good times in Angeles and the rest of Pampanga too. Good meals in people's houses. There's a lot more to be said that I will just leave unsaid because it's wasted on you. It's not as if I'm protective of Angeles, it is the sexpat capital of the Philippines after all. I just find it funny that you went there and found barely anything. You know Google exists right?
I've got the aircon blasting, I have 700mbit fiber internet, and I do absolutely nothing all day every day except the one day every month I go to work to collect a check. The food I eat is fresh and delicious. Better yet I don't need to share air with anyone like you even most of the time when I'm traveling around which I do frequently. On most trips I will probably cover more mileage than you have in the entire time you've been in the Philippines.
I also want to add while I'm spoonfeeding instead of gatekeeping like I should, did you know nearly every blog or website that publishes information for flip travelers is in English? Oh wow the rest of southeast asia is so wonderful because there's a herd of fat white fricks like you to get behind and follow. Meanwhile everything you need to know about this place is hardly kept a secret, it's just off limits to you morons because of your own ignorance and incompetence. You want your hands held. You are afraid of making your own decisions. You will go to Thailand. You will be around all the other whites.
I can recognize you from the Philippines general and you told me you weren't in the "sekrit" club of Angeles.
And yet here you are. Same syntax, talking about Angeles.
Angeles is just one place. Nothing secret about it. Type best restaurants in Pampanga into Google. Ask a local where to get street foods and they will tell you to go to totobits. Getting a clue is free, why don't you have one?
>If i keep posting in bad faith that means I "win" the argument
you just keep exposing yourself as a degenerate butthole
I already told you more than enough. It's not hard at all to figure out the Philippines. People just come here with assumptions and learned helplessness. I am glad they do. It's going to suck when the government stops thinking dumb things like all it needs to fix it's tourism industry is a new slogan.
>around the other whites
You don't know jack about Thailand. I spent 57 days in the country this past winter. It is superior to PH in every way, and I don't need to go to anyone's house or get clues from Google Maps or locals to get a decent meal, because there are great restaurants everywhere. Rooms are fricking amazing and cost less than the Philippines. I averaged $13/month for spacious and immaculate two-star hotel rooms with fridge, balcony, desk, silent A/C etc. God I hated those loud-ass flip A/Cs so fricking much. And when's the last time you rode a Philippine passenger train? Oh wait, PH is a shithole, they don't have trains... only overpriced buses in trashy terminals like Dau full of no-good hustlers. I paid $6 to take five train rides across Thailand, stopping in fascinating and rarely visited places like Lop Buri and Uttaradit. Thailand mogs. Period.
>get clues from Google Maps
I also want to address this because I forgot to. Don't use Google Maps. Flips are going to rate Jollibee and Mang Inasal 5 stars. Do use regular Google search and look at travel blogs and websites. Search the places they are talking about on Google Maps or even Facebook to read reviews and see more pictures. Again like I already said they are writing all their travel and tourism info directed at fellow Flips in English. It doesn't get this easy anywhere else in Asia. See the people in the Japan thread lamenting the quality of tourism into written in English coming from places like reddit and seeking out sources written in Japanese. Here you don't need to follow the normie hordes if you don't want to. Or you can repeat babby's first SEA trip over and over again in Thailand. It's no big deal to me.
>I desperately need to pull others down to make me feel good
it's called mental illness
Why visit a country if you are going to be a degenerate sexpat?
The stereotypical LBH with his self esteem in the gutter wants to go where the bar is set as low as possible. He doesn't care about what attractions are in the place where he lands. He's happy to sit in his room and get fast food delivered.
literally me
>also "LBH"?
Loser back home
>I need to make people feel bad about themselves to be happy
pot calling the kettle black
To be a degenerate sexpat.
Anyway you can't go to Thailand and leave your old life behind. They don't want your goofy farang ass to stay there for more than 6 months. Perhaps that's not long enough to integrate yourself into the country to the point where you will meet someone who will invite you to dine with their family. You can jump on a train and go someplace just to say you went but what does that really get you? There's a lot more that you'll never be able to do without speaking the language but even that only gets you so far with the Thais. Meanwhile I'm over here carrying on full English conversations with anyone I feel like. I can go damn near anywhere without it being an alienating experience. I am struggling to find something to finish this off with so what I really want to say is inauthentic experiences are gay as hell. I hope the Thailand tourism industry continues to thrive and the Philippines tourism industry continues to suffer. I want this for myself, for the Filipino people, and for anybody who isn't a prissy pampered homosexual and can figure things out for themselves.
Thailand is peak comfy for my non-social ass precisely because Thais keep a respectful distance and DON'T force their company or their social expectations on me, as a general rule. Thais don't feel miffed by my personality like so many other peoples of the world do. To Thais, a stern and quiet demeanor indicates gravity and maturity, not disapproval or hostility.
The Thai culture very much welcomes foreign sojourners and wanderers. Other places, my rootless solitary lifestyle makes me feel like an unwanted outcast, but in Thailand, I am accepted for who I am.
Not saying that every interaction in the country was perfect. Yes, I did piss off a few taxi and tuk-tuk drivers, and had an unpleasant encounter with one in Nam Tok (Ratchaburi) who tried to block my path between parked cars and coerce me to use his services. I refused, and he stepped aside somewhat while continuing his spiel...but then one of his pals hollered at him, and while he was momentarily distracted, I walked off abruptly (and received snarky abuse in Thai). Word got around fast in a small touristy village about his loss of face, and it shortly became evident that I was persona non grata.
Hostels start from $4
Hotels start from $12
$20 is always enough to find a decent room with ac.
Food is very cheap, locals eat a day with a dollar. $10-20 to only eat outside with some beers.
>Can you afford it?
I have been in all of those countries with a similar budget. I didn't sleep in dirty places or eat questionable food, forgetting the high Western startands.
Life is much more enjoyable if you can throw extra $20 now and then, unless you truly are low energy.
Poor maxxing has the upside of meeting more people.
Not him but you're arguing just to argue
it's pathetic actually. Everyone knows you're wrong
How am I wrong? If anything it's a difference of opinion. That anon thinks he should be able to go anywhere and just wing it with nothing resembling a plan and expect great results. The Philippines pleb filtered him. I told him multiple ways he could've had a better time but he won't be coming back. I don't care because it's one less moron.
Snarker is a savage
The only people that ever truly bother me are the aggressive taxi drivers outside of the Cubao bus terminals. They annoy the frick out of me while I'm looking for a spot to get a grab car. Never had any issues in Pasay. I live far away from any of that anyway. Nothing but peaceful rural isolation. If I have some actual reason to want to be in a city I have no problem getting there.
>that pic
>sigh
>like the soft curves of a woman...
this why travel to se asia is so popular...warm inviting charming vistas...
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>$42/day
lol my rent here in Great Shitain is £30 a day so about $38 dollars a day
however I don't spend $10 a day on food because I eat like a 12th century peasant
not a roider and not in thailand but I'm assuming you can find a busy gym in bangkok, make some friends and just find the right pharmacy hook up
like scoring good pharmacies in other countries you can sometimes just go from pharmacy to pharmacy and ask the guy behind the counter if they have what you want, eventually you get lucky, but maybe not with hgh though
malaysia