I wrote an article or two, both here and on my friend Bob’s Living in the Philippines web magazine, that concerned the question “can you live in the Philippines on $770 USD per month”? By the way I notice Bob has been kind enough to still have all my old living in the Philippines articles up there for general reading on his site … you might want to read them, once or twice I have managed to string a few sentences together to the made sense .. the rest of the time? Well, I didn’t charge anything…)
Anyway, back to the magic $770 USD. Is it possible? Absolutely. Not only do about 70-something millions Filipinos live on a heck of a lot less than $770 USD per month, but I even know more than a few foreigners who approach that as a monthly budget figure … and a few who live on substantially less. You can see my most up to date monthly expenditures living in the Philippines here … hasn’t been updated in the past few months because frankly, not much has changed.)
One of Bob’s writers, John Miele, however, just wrote a nice article that points out something that I am not sure how to convey to many of my readers. See John’s article about shopping at Trinomial, or Triangle North of Manila, , if you have the time, it’s well worth it. This is the operative paragraph I wanted to touch on, though:
… There is a hell of a lot of money in this country. Income distribution is widely unequal, and the “have-nots” certainly struggle just to survive from day to day. But what about the “haves”? Well, say that 5% of the population are well off. That equates to roughly 5 million people who are very much high-end consumers, most of whom live and work in Metro Manila. These consumers demand all of the goods that one could find in Europe or the United States, both in terms of quality and availability. In other words, everything that you could expect to find in the West is available here… For a price. That is what expats need to keep in mind when deciding whether or not to move here. Yes, the modern, top-line, feature-laden, LG refrigerator is for sale here, but do you want to spend the additional money to purchase this type of refrigerator, or would a simpler model suffice? These are the types of questions you will need to answer when moving here. What is important to you and a “necessity” or what will be sufficient for your standard of living. Once you head out of Manila to the provinces, availability of “luxury” goods drops quickly… Remember where those with the money tend to live ….
To a great extent people reading this site and others in this genre are here for one reason … they are researching … seriously considering, or at least “toying” with the idea of moving to the Philippines … and they have a great thirst to know ‘what it is like” here.
Now researching, reading, questioning, soaking up the information like a sponge, even performing “due diligence” is a useful and important thing to do. No question. No argument from me.
But the point I want to make and the one I find it hard to explain is this. It is not what you don’t know about the Philippines that is likely to get you in trouble if you want to move here. It is much more likely to be what you do know that will cause a problem.
Confusing? In one paragraph I say that learning is a good thing and then I turn around and say don’t learn? Wassup?
Well here’s what I am trying to get across. This is an especially important consideration for those of you who have always lived in the US, or in some other first-tier, developed country. because the Philippines has always been talked about and categorized as a “poor” or “developing” or “third-world” country, while the US is always at the top of the economic heap, you most likely think you “know” a lot of things about the Philippines that just are not so.
As John mentions in the excerpt I quoted above, this is, at the same time, a country of vast poverty and a country with a huge amount of money floating about. There are some very rich people here. There is virtually every form of luxury good and every sort of personal service available. In fact many European fashions and certain fancy designer goods, jewelry, electronics and things of that nature may be available in the Philippines before they are seen in America … Rodeo Drive in Hollywood as a possible exception.
So don’t expect that because you know that some Westerners come here and live quite happily on $770 USD per month, or $1,000 or $1200 (my personal ‘low end limit’), that you can live “happily” on that sort of money if you want to “live large” in any way, shape or form.
If you like to shop where the “nicer” people shop … let’s say perhaps you are a dedicated “avoid Wal*Mart” shopper in the USA … then don’t think that that magical, mystical $770 USD is going to let you shop at all the better places. It’s going to facilitate a decent standard of living, but as an example, my wife and I shop at TriNoma perhaps once every other month, to stock up on items in the Landmark supermarket that aren’t stocked anywhere else. And we don’t go into any of the exclusive designers shops along the way. Those are way out of our league (at least the league we chose to spend in), just as we would never be seen shopping in a Neiman Marcus store in the USA.
Now don’t get me wrong … I think Neiman Marcus is a fine company and anyone who wants to shop their should … by all means. However, don’t expect many trips there per month on your magical $770 a month.
Just because you know the Philippines is a poor country, do not get the idea that:
- We don’t have the “finer things” in life and
- They don’t cost,and cost like crazy in some cases.
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Great article Dave. I think you’ve captured the essence of why it can be less expensive to live in the Philippines. One has to be willing to leave much of the Western life behind.
Thank you David. Indeed, thinking this through I realize why there often seems to be extremely conflicting information about the cost of living in the Philippines. The articles that say it’s “cheap as chips” to live here and the contrasting ones that say it can expensive as the devils own dwelling place? They are all true.
I think my dear wife put it best ..after some years in the US, working there and earning her US citizenship, plus working in the Philippines and in a number of other SEAN countries .. her impression is, no where else is there as broad a range in living costs.
That is perhaps why it seems hard for an ‘outsider’ to pin down. Example … even as a kano and a pretty un-accomplished cook, I could feed goodness knows how many people if you gave me just, say, P100 .. about $2 USD. Let’s say I chose spaghetti. I could buy a _lot_ of spaghetti noodles, tomatoes, onion and garlic at my local sari-sari store and make a huge batch of meatless but tasty spaghetti. Way more than I could make for $2 in the USA.
But suppose I wanted US-made bottled spaghetti sauce instead of home made? Then expect to go to a specialty store and pay like &7 or $8 USD for each small bottle of Barilla or Ragu or whatever your favorite brand.
Thus the question “How much to make a huge pot of spaghetti amd sauce” here in the Philippines likely has a huge range of “correct” answers, whereas in the US it would vary more by small factors like state tax on food or no tax on food … the ingredients would be pretty much the same price, New Yprk or California, and in the US, people pretty much open jars … read my article on my good freinds Martha and Gaida Can Martha Teach You About Philippine Living?
Yeah I know exactly what you mean. For me Christmas (which as far as my family is concerned started a month ago but I resolutely refuse even to mention Pasko until at least November) means trips to Divisoria and the 168 Mall where you can buy an awful lot of stuff for not much money. My family loves it … but it’s CHEAP stuff and much of it poor quality. So yes we can have a great time at Christmas with all the family loving their gifts but it’s great in terms of their expectations, not those of most Australians.
My friends from Australia would mainly head for Trinomial or Mall of Asia and observe correctly that everything costs about the same as it does back home.
I refuse to express my budget in terms of dollars. To live here happily you have to learn to live with Filipino values. Primarily that means cultural values but a good first step is monetary values. Once I learned to think in terms of pesos, managing my finances got a lot simpler. My family would never suggest going to Trinomial because it’s too expensive, and now I think in Filipino terms I agree with them completely.
Folks back in Australia don’t realise how captive they are to ‘buying stuff’. I know that’s trite but I didn’t understand how true it is until I began to understand life here in Navotas City. I asked my 12 year old nephew the other day what he’d like under the tree on Noche Buena and he was literally unable to think of anything. Imagine a 12 year old in Sydney or New York or London telling you he couldn’t think of anything he wanted for Christmas. This kid in Navotas lives in a squat shack with three tiny rooms, no running water or CR or kitchen and regular electricity only since my partner and I agreed to pay for a legal connection. And there are no material possessions he can think of that he’d like from rich Tito Ken for Christmas.
On the other hand I’ve found I have to shell out quite a lot of money at times from simple human compassion. My family would never seek proper medical care because they don’t have any money so I’ve had to insist from time to time that people go to a proper hospital and get proper treatment. If I hadn’t, one brother would still have untreated TB and one of our new baby nieces would quite probably be dead. And while medical care is not as expensive as developed countries it’s still not free and I guess I’ve forked out upwards of 50,000 pesos this year for one thing and another. Not because anyone asked, I hasten to add, but because I could not live with myself if I saw family members being very sick and I didn’t do anything to help.
As your post suggests Philly, “How much money will I need to live there” is far from a simple question.
Thank you, Ken, informative and illustrative as always.
That’s a part it is always hard to write about … the things we do voluntarily. There are so many sad/mad stories about people with problems due to family asking for money that I dislike mentioning things my wife and I might chose to spend, because I don’t want others thinking it was money that was extorted or ‘weaseled ‘ out of us. I am very fortunate, my family asks for nothing. But if you saw the lok on the face of someone we bought a cataract operation for .. someone who had been nearly blind for years … you’d consider it money very well spent, indeed. I just don’t talk about it much … considering how I used to waste money on those things I ‘had’ to have back in the USA …or those things that cost 5 or 10 times as mich. like cable TV or cell phones … giving something like the gift of sight seems like pocket change.
Very interesting slant.
I also believe there are many people in the Philippines who are very well to do and I am not talking about the super wealthy families.
Many people also tend to think quite vaguely that all Filipinos here in the US work as nannys, home help and in the medical field as nurses ect. Not true.
Many Filipinos have also achieved extraordinary wealth and affluence here in the US. I wathed a few guys bid a rarther poor set of books in Christies (to do with the Philippines) auction house to extraordinary heights. Two of the guys made a great deal of money in the construction / real estate businessin Bergen Co., NJ.
Good points there, Jody. In particular the fact that Filipinos are certainly not all service workers. There are many successful Filipinos at all levels … however, perhaps less than there should be. And the ‘less’ (in my personal view, of course) is because I have gotten the view from many Filipino freinds and family that success, especially with money, is somehow sinful or being less than a ‘good’ person.
This surely doesn’t apply to _all_ Filipinos, of course, but I will never forget some years ago discussing a Filipino businessman here in our town with a family member … a person older and in most cases quite wiser than me, in my estimation.
When we mentioned the successful man, my mentor said, “Oh, him”, followed by a very unfavorable estimation of the man’s character.
“Tell me, tell me”. I pressed, expecting to hear some sort of cops and robbers or “sly practice” tale about the wealthy man really got wealthy. I mean, admit it, we all like a good crime story or “chismis”.
Well the rich man’s sin? “He keeps putting up one project that makes money after another … he should stop.”
Hmmm. I am still trying to figure out why this man should have ‘stopped’ and why it was wrong that he builds things, gives people work and, oh yes, makes money. To my mind he’s one of those Real Filipinos I ought to write more about.
PS, no worries about typos, if people are kind enough to put up with mine, they will certainly not worry about the very few of yours.
Yikes sorry about all the typos