The Expense Report: Part I
👊 Hey there
I haven’t written anything in more than a year, but Katie’s taking a break from writing this week and has asked That Dude Denis to get his lazy ass off the bench and be a team player.
As we wrap up our time in Bangkok and head north to Chiang Mai to continue the second half of our Thailand adventure, I thought it might be cool to share with you how much living abroad actually costs these days for a couple of stingy Asian-Americans. I know Katie’s been doing a great job describing what our lives have been like during the past couple of months, but I’m sure at least some of you have been wondering how much damage we’ve done to our bank account.
Today’s post will hopefully help put your mind at ease! Maybe it’ll even inspire a few of you to open up your Airbnb app to take a quick peek at the monthly rates in places like Bangkok or Ljubljana.
I’ve broken down our expenses into a few major categories - in each category, I give you the daily average cost for both of us combined in each of the 4 places we’ve stayed (Budapest, Zagreb, Ljubljana, and Bangkok) and add a bit of commentary on each section to prevent things from getting too stale and boring.
But before we get into the details, let me just remind you that because Katie and I are 1) Asian, and 2) earning little to no money, we’re probably a bit tighter with our money than you are, so just keep that in mind when you see these numbers. This is decidedly not the Uncle Tim-sponsored “must spend $100 a day” extravaganza that many of you think of when you think “Asia Trip” (if you don’t get the reference, don’t worry about it - joke’s not for you).
🍜 Category 1: Yummy delicious things
Mega group consisting of restaurants, snacks, street food, groceries…
Budapest: $25.52
Zagreb: $20.22
Ljubljana: $31.32
Bangkok: $16.03
My first reaction when I saw these numbers: how can we possibly be spending $16 on average in Bangkok when a bowl of noodles costs $2? I don’t remember eating any gold leaf caviar…So it turns out, just eating $2 bowls of noodles every day for every meal isn’t super realistic, at least in Bangkok.
Most of our meals cost more like $3-4 per person, so when you have 2 of those meals a day and add in some snacks or fruits here and there (Katie cannot put up much resistance when we pass by a boba shop or street-side mango sticky rice), you’re pretty much right at that $16 per day number.
Compared to Eastern Europe, where we actually cooked a decent amount to save some money and eat something besides sausage, in Bangkok we pretty much ate out the majority of the time, so that’s another reason why the difference doesn’t look huge on paper.
If you look at the per meal averages, you’ll notice a much bigger difference. The numbers below represent the average damage done each time we ate out. This way of looking at things really makes Bangkok stand out, doesn’t it?
Budapest: $20.69
Zagreb: $19.67
Ljubljana: $19.82
Bangkok: $7.24
🚌 Category 2: Paying to not wait for the bus
Boats, Subways, Metros, Trains, “Ubers”…but sometimes, still buses.
Budapest: $2.47
Zagreb: $0.60
Ljubljana: $1.00
Bangkok: $4.58
Besides a few bus rides to get from city to city, we mostly relied on our own two feet to get around in Eastern Europe. In Bangkok, though, we took a lot of Grab taxis (the Uber-equivalent of this region), for two main reasons.
Firstly, Bangkok is too spread out and too hot to really walk anywhere. At this time of year, the moment you step outside, your skin becomes sticky. Plus the sidewalks are shitty, if they exist at all. A lot of times you’re just walking on the road as cars and scooter rumble by you. Not ideal. Oh yeah, I almost forgot to mention, the sky opens up and dumps rain on you whenever it feels like it, so you don’t want to get caught in a flash thunderstorm (from personal experience).
Secondly, Grab is super cheap, which means that the convenience and time saving of private door-to-door transportation usually beats out waiting for unreliable and unpredictable public transportation which could also involve having to walk outside for part of the journey. When I say cheap, I’m talking 2-3 bucks for most of our rides under 25 minutes long.
For longer trips, though, we still went with public transportation in order to save a few bucks. Grab’s can cost up to $10+ for long rides, so we could save $6-7 per long trip by using some combination of the BTS (Bangkok’s Skytrain), the MRT (the underground), and buses (long wait, totally unreliable, but you already knew that from a previous post).
You scoff, but remember, that $6-7 is like an entire dinner in Bangkok. Or at least 2 mango sticky rices. Or if you’re someone like Katie, bucketloads of passionfruit.
🏢 Category 3: Airbnbs & pools we only use once
Homes away from home.
Budapest: $42
Zagreb: $48
Ljubljana: $59
Bangkok: $26
It might be an unfair comparison because we did stay an entire month in Bangkok which unlocks a special monthly rate, but on the other hand, that $26 a night average includes our first night in Bangkok at a “special” Covid hotel where they absolutely gauged us for a whooping $191 for a single night. How much of a rip-off was this? That single night was worth literally 10 nights at our luxury condo Airbnb. And that was already one of the more affordable options we could find…
The $26 a night may already seem super cheap to you, but just to make a point - when you throw that first night out, our per night average drops by 23% to $20 a night!
I don’t even know what $20 a night gets you where you’re living. But I’m willing to bet it doesn’t come with an infinity pool, almost private gym with all glass windows, and two (yes, two) library / lounge areas, one of which boasts a rooftop panorama view of the Bangkok skyline. Of course, I was mostly looking at my 13” laptop screen while I was up there, but still, it’s a nice view to have in your periphery.
💆♀️Category 4: We can’t just eat the whole time…
So we do other things to entertain ourselves, which usually costs money.
Budapest: $5.47
Zagreb: $16.83
Ljubljana: $2.45
Bangkok: $7.94
We try to eat and drink as much as we can, but a human stomach can only take so much. So we try to entertain ourselves with other activities.
In Budapest, we went to some hot baths.
In Ljubljana, we did a guided walking tour of the city and visited Bled.
In Bangkok, we learned how to cook Thai stuff, saw some totally blinged-out Thai temples, and pampered ourselves at a Japanese Onsen spa with a Thai massage for good measure. To be fair, we did celebrate Katie’s birthday during this month so we were willing to spend a bit more than normal for her special day.
All of these were excellent experiences.
On the other hand, we were pretty let down by our day trip to Plitvice Lakes National Park from Zagreb. Not only did it cost us a bunch of money ($136 in total for a rental car, gas, tolls, and park tickets), but when we got to the park we found out that more than half of it was actually still closed off to visitors.
I don’t even want to think about how many Thai massages we could have gotten with that money (answer: 9 each, EACH!). But hey, you live and you learn! Maybe we would have preferred to spend a bit less, but at the end of the day our goal of not being bored was still achieved. And now, we can say that we’ve been there, done that.
Category 5: Place with good coffee
And more importantly, fast free Wi-Fi.
Budapest: $3.69
Zagreb: $4.01
Ljubljana: $2.92
Bangkok: $4.62
Pretty negligible difference here. Coffee is coffee is coffee.
The coffee was actually super affordable in Eastern Europe compared to in Paris, and the prices in Thailand so far aren’t that different. The only difference here is that in Bangkok, Katie consistently went with me to coffee shops instead of staying at home.
Out of the eastern European cities, Budapest had the best coffee shops for work, whereas Zagreb probably had the lamest selection of the bunch. On our first day there, we walked into one of the coffee shops near us that’s supposedly a great place to work from (according to bloggers who I no longer trust), only to be immediately greeted by the stench of cigarette smoke. We walked right back out.
Bangkok has a ton of great work spots, and we really tried to hit up a bunch of different ones within a few kilometers of where we lived. Buy a single iced oat latte for about $3.50, and the Instagram-friendly interior, fast Wi-Fi, and super strong air-conditioning are all yours. If you just want the iced drink though and don’t care about the ambiance or work space, then a more wallet-friendly option is to just find a coffee-making street stall vendor - you’ll walk away with an iced coffee or Thai Iced tea for just a buck or two.
Ah yes, by the way, we have almost completely replaced hot cappuccinos with iced drinks now - iced coffees, iced teas, fruit smoothies, etc. When it’s 100 degrees outside and your shirt is drenched with sweat, a hot cappuccino isn’t really at the top of your wishlist.
Alright, well that’s it for me this week! Hope you enjoyed this brief dive into the financial details of our adventures so far. If you have any specific questions for us, feel free to ask us in the comments and we’ll try to give you an answer based on our experiences.
Per special request by my mother-in-law to “take more pictures of people living their daily lives”, here are some random pics of people doing people things.
Stay tuned for another update on our Thailand adventures - Katie will be back next time to tell you all about our stay so far in Chiang Mai!
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Haha, the funny That Dude Dennis is back, this time as a great accountant :) Wonderful photos, too.
I burst out laughing so hard when reading the captions of the photos that Taro scared and run off the table he shared with me! Thanks for taking my request for more photos. It is very interesting reading.