I only know about where I live, Saigon, but the numbers are pretty wrong for Saigon.
Thanks for taking the time to comment. I am not surprised that the numbers for Saigon are off. There are a couple of reasons for this:
* I was not very good at researching the first couple of editions of this series. The budgeting methodology I use to try to come up with plausible budgets has changed a lot since the first post in this series, I think for the better (and it certainly produces higher budgets). When I wrote the first edition of this series, the budget methodology was pretty bad. With the second, it got a little better, but the grocery budget still wasn't reasonable and I didn't do the kind of checking and re-checking against third party blogs and sources that I now do with the latter three editions in the series. I often think about deleting the first two in the series, or at least rewriting them, but I haven't had an opportunity to do so yet.
* Time passes, and costs of living change. I wrote the first two posts in this series between 9 months and a year ago, and prices have changed somewhat. That's why I always leave a link to the Numbeo listing for a location so that people can get the most up to date numbers. I have some ideas for how to keep numbers current and account for differing tastes, and am working on some projects to that end, but I'd rather keep quiet about those until I have something to show for it.
* Differing tastes. Everyone (!) is going to have different tolerances and tastes. I try to include a caution in each article (another thing that has improved over time) that the budgets represent a very lean, but reasonable, existence. Most people will want more money and I acknowledge that things like creature comforts, visits home, and major medical emergencies are not covered in these budgets. Person A might spend under this budget, person B might find it impossible. Case in point, several of your critiques of the budget are less "this is impossible to find" and more "but you'd really want more than that." For example, you list the prices for fiber internet, and mention having a maid-- I definitely am not aiming to provide budgets that include those kinds of luxuries.
$265 does not get you a 1-bedroom apartment in the city center. $300 in the city center gets you a room (i.e. tiny studio apartment with no kitchen).
Just for the record, the apartment cost listed was for the outside of the city center, and from back in November or so. I see that Numbeo now lists that closer to $315 as of today. In the newest articles in the series (anything after the first two), I actually spend a few hours perusing real estate listings to determine price accuracy on housing. I often adjust housing prices in the articles up or down from the Numbeo numbers based on what I find.
Monthly grocery cost feels low. I just spent $120 last weekend and that didn't include any meat or vegetables. If you eat "local-style" then $120 is do-able. If you want cheese, dairy, and beef I think it is going to be too low.
Yeah, as mentioned above, the grocery methodology would produce a different budget on posts I write today-- probably closer to $220 or so. There's no beef in the budget, but there are a lot of eggs and chicken.
Anyway, time passes and these articles will skew further and further from reality. I'm doing my best to make the ones I write reasonable as of when I write them, and am working on a new way of doing things so that the numbers you look at are closer to real-time accurate.
In the end, it's impossible to produce a static article that represents the needs and preferences of everyone who reads it-- the biggest goals of the series are to get people who worry about the possibility of retirement
at all thinking outside the box, and for those on the FIRE path, to take stock of just how early on in their journey they might realistically be able to FIRE if their lifestyle is flexible enough to consider an expat retirement.