I have been reading most of the posts since joining the forum, especially about all of the requirements, places to live, cost of living etc...I have seen guys living for as little as $700 per month with a family but he lived in a small community on an island. From all of this I gathered that depending on your life style and where you retire in RP an income of $1000 per month is enough, to me that seems like a small amount but again, lifestyle and where you retire is key.
So ART, Lee and Coleman....what you you say is enough for a family of three to survive comfortably in the RP?
As you and others wrote, it depends on your lifestyle. One thing is to do what myself and others usually suggest and have a couple of high limit credit cards or a bunch of cash in the bank to fall back on but my advice would also be to make believe that cash or credit does not exist except for real emergencies and not wants.
If you wish to live like a local might do and possibly even move in with a wife's family, then you could probably live on very little except if family becomes an issue. I personally do not feel $1000 a month is enough for everything, at least not until you have gotten many of the issues out of the way such as being married, being lucky enough to not have family always asking for money and having a 13a or having already paid for a SRRV and then only having to pay the yearly fees. The one thing I have seen in the Philippines and even in the US is that nothing is a constant, so the rules change all the time and it seems the Philippine govt does its best to part us rich (as they think we are) foreigners with as much as they can, so they keep instituting new things such as ACR cards that end up costing some of us money.
I have a friend who went to the Philippines on about that amount you quoted a month and it was fine as long as he had some money in the bank to fall back on for emergencies and for unexpected things. I believe my friend lives a fairly simple life but he told me this year that he can no longer make ends meet on what he gets.
My former downstairs neighbor in the condo building we live was getting over $1000 a month and as the peso exchange went down, he had to stop his medicare payments in order to survive, that took a trip to the embassy in Manila which cost put him in a hole that he never seemed to come out of and on top of that he got sick and did not have the money for meds and had to borrow from neighbors but he went to the Philippines with cash and bought a condo unit that he later had to sell because his $1000 a month was no longer enough for his lifestyle, so he sold the larger unit he owned and downsized to a smaller condo in another building so that he had money left over but not long after he told me he put that other unit up for sale and once it is sold he wanted to rent a unit in our building which tells me he must have supplemented his income with the extra money he got for the larger condo unit over the smaller one until it almost ran out and now wants to rent with what is left over.
So again it is all about what makes a person happy, their health issues, visa costs and especially the cost of rent and electric which can be the biggest nut out of your $1000. I use my a/c 24/7 due to all the pollution and my health issues, so that cost us about $300 a month alone but used to cost us about $225 a month, no a/c would probably cost us less than $100 a month but we do not have rent because we own, so all we have is condo monthly fees of about $60 and property taxes of about $20 a month and while we used to eat out 5 or 6 times a week, this last trip we only ate out 2 or 3 times a week and still could not live on $1500 a month when we used to live on $1000 a month a few years back. The cost of living has gone up and they exchange rate has gone against us, so IMHO it is better to have more and not spend it than to have less and need more.
If all a person has it $1000 then so be it but then IMO they must learn to live on around $600 a month so they have something to fall back on when the unexpected comes about and they need to hope it does not happen for years while they build a nest egg. In the US there is the govt to fall back on, in the Philippines we (foreigners) are basically on our own. An example of unexpected costs for us is that this past stay my wife's sister needed an operation and her brother got stabbed and needed some help as well with the bills and both of them had some govt assistance such as PhilHealth etc but that did not cover some items and much of the costs, so there is no way I would or could not help them, even if it meant a much leaner life for us or borrowing the money which of course has to be repaid.
