Ok, so you've decided to take a flier on the idea of investigating a different type of life. There can be any number of reasons for this, including (but obviously not limited to!) a recent retirement, a major life change which has left you scratching your head, a disillusionment with the current situation in your home country, or just an overdeveloped sense of adventure. The prospect of leaving the places and culture with which you've become familiar is a duanting one, no question about it. But rather than trying to convince you that it's a good idea, I'm going to skip to the next part, which is preparation for the first dipping of your toes in foreign waters.
Whenever you travel to another country (or, in the increasingly bureaucratic civilized world, even to another state/province of your own country) there are certain documents which are required in order to "clear in," as it is called. This is simply the process by which you can smoothly and accurately identify yourself in broad terms to a foreign destination. We used to do this with declarations of lineage, accompanied by family crests and cross-referenced by essentially word-of-mouth affirmation by those who recognize us as being who we say we are. Nowadays, we have a much more efficient method of declaring ourselves: photo ID. Specifically, a government issued passport is the single best document to carry with you during any journey to a foreign destination. In fact, they're practically required for you to set foot outside of your own country (most airlines won't even accept you on a flight if you don't have a valid passport). In the USA the process requires going to either the post office or a county courthouse and filling out an application, which requires a few forms of identification such as driver's license, social security card, birth certificate, etc.. Once you have these documents, filling out the form is quick and easy. There is a filing fee (should be less than $100) to pay at this time, and if you want to receive the passport more quickly than the state 4-6 weeks, you pay an additional fee to expedite the process. I received my last passport in less than two weeks using the expedite option.
(A side-note here. I'll be mostly discussing travel to and from the Philippine Islands, but the broad strokes apply to pretty much any other country. If you're from the USA, Europe or Australia, then you can travel to the PI without a pre-approved visa. Wherever your destination might be, make sure to check their government's website to find out if you need to get a pre-approved visa to travel there. This is a simple, but absolutely critical step. You can either walk into your destination country's local embassy and receive the visa, or you can physically mail your passport to their nearest embassy.)
After you've received your passport, it's a good idea to have a few other forms of identification on hand for your trip. A driver's license or state-issued ID card is a good start, as are any credit/debit cards with your name and picture on them. A social security card is generally a good piece to have along, since many of the "clearing in" forms require this number, along with your passport number and driver's license number. Truthfully, this is about all you need to bring with you, outside of your plane ticket. Obviously you're going to need some money while you're there, as well as whatever gadgets you like to take with you for communication, like your cellphone or laptop. But in general, it's best to travel extremely light for your first trip to a new place. My advice is to keep it to one backpack. I know that may seem pretty extreme, but try it sometime. Remember that when traveling to a tropical country like the Philippines, you won't need long sleeves, coats or thick material of any kind. Shorts, t-shirts and sunglasses are the best attire (until you've lived in the bright, tropical sun, you can't properly appreciate the difference between northern and equatorial latitude sunlight).
Accessing money isn't difficult at all in the Philippines, and it's steadily improving in other developing countries, as well. If you prefer to travel with cash, understand that there's a $10,000 limit on physical cash you can bring into the country on any given trip. Ten years ago, bringing cash would have been your only viable option, but today there are ATM's in every major shopping center. Be sure your card provider is aware that you will be traveling to your country of destination, as the banks will sometimes automatically lock your account if they start seeing withdrawals happening from another country. PLUS and STAR debit card affiliates are essentially everywhere, especially in the cities, so if your card's a part of those networks then you're good to go!
Now you have to get your plane ticket. Use any travel agent/broker you like, or check the internet on comparison shopping sites like kayak.com or travelocity. Generally speaking, airfare will be around $1,000 roundtrip from the USA to Cebu, Philippines. Remember that your entry visa to the Philippines will be good for twenty one days, so when planning your trip be sure to keep this in mind. Most roundtrip prices are best between ten and twenty days, anyways, so that keeps the question of trip duration a simple one. I'd recommend ten to fourteen days for your first trip, especially if you've never been anywhere like this before. Try to fly directly into Cebu if you can, but getting a flight on a local airline from Manila to Cebu isn't that difficult, especially if you're ok with waiting outside the airport for a few hours until it's time for your flight.
It's becoming obvious that I recommend Cebu City, Philippines as your destination. There are six main reasons for this, and here they are:
1. Safety: For the better part of the last decade, Cebu has been consistently voted among the safest destinations in all of Southeast Asia. This is not a fluke, it is due to a concerted effort by the local politicians and business leaders to reduce crime and 'mafia-style' violence which runs rampant in the southern regions of the country (like Mindanao). The leaders of Cebu understand how important actual safety is for travelers and foreign investors, and they also understand that we aren't easily fooled by pretty websites spouting made-up statistics. Any comprehensive search for crime rates in Cebu will confirm this to be accurate.
2. Weather: We've all seen the news about terrible typhoons that routinely smash into Southeast Asia. These are similar to the hurricanes we see on the southeast coast of the USA, with the key difference being the lack of proper building standards for the majority of people here. Most people build their own houses out of coconut lumber and tin roofing or old-fashioned leaf thatching, so naturally the durability is not great to begin with (remember the Haitian earthquake devastation? it's the same, unfortunate principle). The reason I point this out is simple, as Cebu has been hit by one major typhoon in the last twenty years. This area simply doesn't suffer from the ill effects of typhoon season in the same way that the rest of the country does. Luzon, where the national capital of Manila is located, gets a major typhoon at least once per year. The reason for this shelter is simple: geography. Cebu is located with a major island to any direction of the compass. North is Luzon, south is Mindanao, west is Negros and east is Samar. SoCebu's located in a little shielded pocket which makes it nearly impossible for typhoons to come to it. There was recently a super-typhoon that passed over Luzon with winds measuring over 265km/hour at the center, and the worst Cebu got was about 50km/hour for an hour or two.
3. Geography: Cebu is located exactly in the center of the country. It is a long, skinny island with miles and miles of undeveloped, pristine white sand beaches and even more unspoiled 'mountain' areas. Citizens not only of this country, but of many others are quickly realizing that the sheltered, central location of Cebu makes it the prime destination in which to live and travel from in Southeast Asia. World famous Boracay is also located within the greater province of which Cebu is a part, and the last five years have seen Boracay transform into a vacation destination to rival Maui, Hawaii.
4. Culture: Cebu is where Magellan first landed, so it is where Catholicism first took root. As a result, Western Christian values are the strongest here of anywhere else in the country. The northern part is also strongly Catholic, but southern Mindanao is almost entirely populated by Muslim culture and religion (it's also essentially lawless, as the local tribes have far more power than the government in Mindanao). The importance of this cultural identity is significant for foreign travelers in that the local people (Cebuanos) here really do like to see foreigners come to their home. Whenever I, a 29 year old white guy walk down the street I am greeted by a chorus of "Hey, Joe! Where are you going?" from the kids playing in front of their houses. Sometimes even the adults like to get in on the action and try out their English on you for a few minutes. I've never seen such honest, happy and welcoming people in all of my travels. And believe me, I've seen a few places in my life.
5. Language: You'll note that I've mentioned the use of English a few times already, so let me clarify. The Philippines has been colonized more times than they care to remember, and part of that process inevitably involves incorporation of language. Many nouns they use come straight from the Spanish dictionary, which is understandable due to their history of affiliation with Spain during the days of Magellan. With English, however, it's a bit different. The national language of education and business is English, so every school kid learns English in the course of general schooling! Every street sign you'll see is in English, and most everybody you will meet speaks at the very least 'working' English, meaning communication is no difficulty for an American. This is mostly due to the positive relationship between the USA and the Philippines, with most of the goodwill being built during World War II.
6. Cost of living: Here we come to the meat and potatoes of the issue, at least for myself. Having an accomodating culture, geography and not having to learn a new language is all well-and-good, but if the price tag is more than I can afford, what's the point? I mean, Hawaii essentially provides the same general climate and geography and they speak English there, but most of us can't afford to live in Hawaii, at least not in the parts we'd like to live in. Understanding that most of us would not choose to live without many of the modern conveniences to which we've become accustomed, the average per capita earning power of the Filipino people is around $3,500/year. And remember, most of these people are individually happier than msot of us put together! The title of this article suggests you can live like a king for $1,000/month, and that's absolutely accurate. It's what I've done for the last two years, and I wouldn't have traded my time here for anything. But $1,000/month is living like a king, not living a simple, peaceful life.
There are plenty of options for living in one of the many suburbs of Cebu City which can be done for half of that, easily. Houses are available to rent for between $100-250/month that are roughly equivalent to what you'd expect to see in small-town-USA for $1000-1500/month. Utilities are similar (power, water, etc..) in price to the USA, and food is roughly the same (some things are more, like fresh fruits, but other things like fresh meat are significantly cheaper in the Philippines). But there aren't any 'hidden' costs like homeowner's insurance or, in the event you decide to purchase property here, sky-high real estate taxes. Most people I know pay less than $10/year for their two-storey house's property taxes! Yes, you read that properly. A 1500-2000 square foot house's property taxes cost less than $10/year for most people. 50-60 acres of farmland can cost less than $50/year in total taxes!
Now, let me be clear about something. You can pay just as much to live here as you do to live wherever you are right now. No question about it, if you want to stay in the Marriott and pay $200/night for a nice room with air-conditioning and foreign cable channels, you can do it here as well as anywhere else. But if staying on the beach in your own private bungalow with kilometers of quiet, sandy beach to either side of you for about $15/day plus food is more your style, then stay tuned. If you have the need to eat out every night at glossy places located in a mega-mall, then you will end up spending roughly the same amount on those activites here as you will anywhere else in the world. Definitely not more, and probably not much less. Until recently there wasn't a good steakhouse in all of Cebu, but now there's one located at a big mall that's better than any place I've been to in the USA. I end up spending more on those guilty pleasures than I do on rent, some months!
So, there's my sales pitch on Cebu. If you're not locked in to another foreign location, give this one a shot. The only downside is it's a pretty long plane ride, but I'm 6'3" and can manage the 14 hours just fine in those little seats, so you can probably do it, too. There are plenty of other good reasons for coming here, if you're feeling adventurous or are ready for a change of pace to your life, and I'll discuss some of these in later articles. But for now, get your passport, plane ticket and a little money together. How much money depends on how adventurous you feel ;) I never pay more than $15/day to stay in a local motel, but everyone's different on their first trip. A good, round number would be $100/day for your first trip, and if you follow my advice in later articles, you'll go back with a huge chunk of that intact.
Next up: Arrival.
Monday, November 22, 2010
Sunday, November 21, 2010
How To Live Like A King For $1,000/month: An Introduction
Since this is an introduction, I guess we should start at the beginning. My name is Caleb and I decided to start this blog with my girlfriend Jho. I'm a 29 year old American, a Registered Nurse and I own my own house. School was easier for me than for most people, but throughout my life I've found that to be as great of a disadvantage as an advantage, maybe even a bigger disadvantage. Traveling was always important for my family while I was growing up, and it shaped me in a lot of ways, some of which have only recently become apparent.
Like so many others, I decided to start this blog because I feel like I've got something important to share with others, but I've never had a great idea of how to connect with enough people that I could actually make some kind of a positive impact in people's lives. Then the question arose 'How do you expect to actually help people, exactly?' It's a good question, and one that I've given quite a bit of thought in the last few months. No matter how good a piece of advice may be for you, there will be countless others for whom it will simply be useless. Everyone's lives are different, and everyone has different goals they wish to accomplish.
With this in mind, rather than assuming myself capable of reaching virtually any and everybody who reads or hears my words and attempting to be the second coming of Zig Ziglar, I thought I'd take a little more targeted approach. I think of people like Ziglar or even past political leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr. and Ronald Reagan as being (forgive the crude term) ICBM's in their efficacy: all you have to do is stand somewhere in the general target area and you'll have little choice but to seriously consider their real or potential impact, . I've got to be a bit more like a smart bomb, and only pick those few subjects with which I am thoroughly familiar, if I'm to have any hope of being more than a mosquito bite in your reading day. And I'm sure my subject matter (let alone my personality!) will be appreciated by some, scoffed at by others, and generally dismissed for whatever reason. If you've read this far, you may already be beyond hope, in which case you might as well pull up a chair and get comfortable ;) So without further ado, let's get down to it.
This first article should be simple and to the point, so I'll only talk about one major subject.
Money. It's one of the driving issues in all of our lives, and there's no reason to try explaining it away. Money represents many different things to each of us. It can represent security, comfort, status, our individual value (or more importantly, our individual worth), opportunity (both positive and negative) or a plethora of alternatives. Most of us take great pride in our ability to go into the world and force our way into the life we want for ourselves, using our talents, our creativity and our determination. Each of us also spends sleepless nights pondering what potential calamities might befall us while we lie in our beds waiting for the next day to arrive. Am I going to somehow suggest a solution to the issues that money presents to our lives? Not really, no. Those problems will always be there, like a teenager's extra loud music pulsating through the sheetrock of their bedroom, but I might be able to make a suggestion or two which can turn the volume down a few notches, if you're anything like me.
One thing I can say with absolute certainty is that there can never be 'enough' money. It's impossible to get 'enough,' no matter what mental acrobatics you've gone through to arrive at whatever number is firmly lodged in your head. I've seen people with jobs paying barely above the minimum wage living happier, fuller lives than people raking in $250k/year with the beautiful imported cars, huge houses and expensive toys. Having seen multiple examples of this in my own life, I feared that there simply wasn't a viable way to get where I wanted to go. Everywhere I turned, I saw another reason why my newest plan would fail. First I thought I'd go to medical school and become a doctor, but then I saw how much liability and downside there is to being a doctor in the current climate of the USA's healthcare system and threw that idea in the roundfile. Next I thought I'd just work double-hard as a nurse, banking double-time shifts once or twice a week and ratcheting up my total earnings to roughly equivalent of a lower/middle-tier doctor's. Then I saw a few examples of people who'd had the same idea fifteen or twenty years ago and decided I didn't want the stress-lines, either. I thought about starting up a small business, a restaurant or maybe even an import/export company, but found the regulations were becoming absurd for pretty much every idea I could come up with. Heck, I've even been involved in some online business ventures that produced pretty well, but liability reared its ugly head again, causing me to exit stage left. Every door I peeked through, there were another ten reasons why I couldn't do it.
Now please understand, I'm not a negative person by nature. I've always believed that with the proper application of time and leverage, you could accomplish what you wanted to in life, within reason. That's why it was such a shock that whenever I would come up with a new idea, it would get shot down before it got out of the box. I once read in a magazine that the entrepreneurs make up between three and seven percent of a given society's population. That sounds right to me, and at the risk of sounding arrogant, I've always considered myself a part of that group.
So, after slowly coming to the realization that increasing my earning power would be quite a bit more difficult than I had originally suspected, I decided to look at the other end of the scale: expenses. My dad always used to say that there are two ways to generate more money for yourself; you either earn more, or you spend less. Made sense to me when I was five, and it still makes sense to me today. I had a pretty reasonable mortgage with a total payment including taxes and insurance of less than $1,000/month, and the ability to work a $25/hour job whenever I wanted to work as a nurse. Not a bad situation to be in, truth be told. I might have even stuck with it if I hadn't taken a left turn when I was supposed to take a right, and the world opened up to me in ways I'd never thought were possible.
That's what this blog is about. I took a turn at a point in my life that led me to where I am today, and I almost can't believe that it's possible to live as I do. I'm not some get-rick-quick salesman. I'm not selling snake oil, or trying to convince people that my way is the only way. A philosopher once said “You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.” When you're right, you're right, and Fred had it nailed with that one.
So, if you're still here and reading this, you probably want some sort of a payoff for your sore eyes. To that end, I will say that for almost two years I've lived in a two story house on almost an acre of land, with fifty coconut trees and about forty feet of beach frontage, and the total cost has been about $1,000/month. That's rent, food (for two and a half people, plus two big dogs), power, water, trips to town for watching movies, whatever. That covers a trip I took to a great hospital (remember, I'm a nurse!) to get some pre-cancerous crap examined, biospied and cut off my toe. It even includes paying for a full-time groundskeeper to take care of the trees and house maintenance. And believe me when I say that I've eaten better in the last two years than at any other point in my life, as my waistline will confirm. It hasn't been all Ramen noodles and canned pasta, but rather fresh fruit more days than not and local meat dishes for dinner every day. It also helps that I was able to plant enough bananas to keep them on the kitchen table indefinitely.
The real kicker? I didn't even have to learn a foreign language! If you're interested in learning if this life is for you, favorite the page/subscribe to the blog and see the updates as they come. I'll be doing a step-by-step breakdown of the process as I understand it, including how to avoid a few of the minor stumbles I've experienced along the way. That's it, no strings attached. I'm not trying to get rich here, I'm just trying to illuminate a poorly understood option which is far more available to each and every one of us than we've been led to believe. And if you've read this whole thing, you deserve to learn how you can do it, too.
Like so many others, I decided to start this blog because I feel like I've got something important to share with others, but I've never had a great idea of how to connect with enough people that I could actually make some kind of a positive impact in people's lives. Then the question arose 'How do you expect to actually help people, exactly?' It's a good question, and one that I've given quite a bit of thought in the last few months. No matter how good a piece of advice may be for you, there will be countless others for whom it will simply be useless. Everyone's lives are different, and everyone has different goals they wish to accomplish.
With this in mind, rather than assuming myself capable of reaching virtually any and everybody who reads or hears my words and attempting to be the second coming of Zig Ziglar, I thought I'd take a little more targeted approach. I think of people like Ziglar or even past political leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr. and Ronald Reagan as being (forgive the crude term) ICBM's in their efficacy: all you have to do is stand somewhere in the general target area and you'll have little choice but to seriously consider their real or potential impact, . I've got to be a bit more like a smart bomb, and only pick those few subjects with which I am thoroughly familiar, if I'm to have any hope of being more than a mosquito bite in your reading day. And I'm sure my subject matter (let alone my personality!) will be appreciated by some, scoffed at by others, and generally dismissed for whatever reason. If you've read this far, you may already be beyond hope, in which case you might as well pull up a chair and get comfortable ;) So without further ado, let's get down to it.
This first article should be simple and to the point, so I'll only talk about one major subject.
Money. It's one of the driving issues in all of our lives, and there's no reason to try explaining it away. Money represents many different things to each of us. It can represent security, comfort, status, our individual value (or more importantly, our individual worth), opportunity (both positive and negative) or a plethora of alternatives. Most of us take great pride in our ability to go into the world and force our way into the life we want for ourselves, using our talents, our creativity and our determination. Each of us also spends sleepless nights pondering what potential calamities might befall us while we lie in our beds waiting for the next day to arrive. Am I going to somehow suggest a solution to the issues that money presents to our lives? Not really, no. Those problems will always be there, like a teenager's extra loud music pulsating through the sheetrock of their bedroom, but I might be able to make a suggestion or two which can turn the volume down a few notches, if you're anything like me.
One thing I can say with absolute certainty is that there can never be 'enough' money. It's impossible to get 'enough,' no matter what mental acrobatics you've gone through to arrive at whatever number is firmly lodged in your head. I've seen people with jobs paying barely above the minimum wage living happier, fuller lives than people raking in $250k/year with the beautiful imported cars, huge houses and expensive toys. Having seen multiple examples of this in my own life, I feared that there simply wasn't a viable way to get where I wanted to go. Everywhere I turned, I saw another reason why my newest plan would fail. First I thought I'd go to medical school and become a doctor, but then I saw how much liability and downside there is to being a doctor in the current climate of the USA's healthcare system and threw that idea in the roundfile. Next I thought I'd just work double-hard as a nurse, banking double-time shifts once or twice a week and ratcheting up my total earnings to roughly equivalent of a lower/middle-tier doctor's. Then I saw a few examples of people who'd had the same idea fifteen or twenty years ago and decided I didn't want the stress-lines, either. I thought about starting up a small business, a restaurant or maybe even an import/export company, but found the regulations were becoming absurd for pretty much every idea I could come up with. Heck, I've even been involved in some online business ventures that produced pretty well, but liability reared its ugly head again, causing me to exit stage left. Every door I peeked through, there were another ten reasons why I couldn't do it.
Now please understand, I'm not a negative person by nature. I've always believed that with the proper application of time and leverage, you could accomplish what you wanted to in life, within reason. That's why it was such a shock that whenever I would come up with a new idea, it would get shot down before it got out of the box. I once read in a magazine that the entrepreneurs make up between three and seven percent of a given society's population. That sounds right to me, and at the risk of sounding arrogant, I've always considered myself a part of that group.
So, after slowly coming to the realization that increasing my earning power would be quite a bit more difficult than I had originally suspected, I decided to look at the other end of the scale: expenses. My dad always used to say that there are two ways to generate more money for yourself; you either earn more, or you spend less. Made sense to me when I was five, and it still makes sense to me today. I had a pretty reasonable mortgage with a total payment including taxes and insurance of less than $1,000/month, and the ability to work a $25/hour job whenever I wanted to work as a nurse. Not a bad situation to be in, truth be told. I might have even stuck with it if I hadn't taken a left turn when I was supposed to take a right, and the world opened up to me in ways I'd never thought were possible.
That's what this blog is about. I took a turn at a point in my life that led me to where I am today, and I almost can't believe that it's possible to live as I do. I'm not some get-rick-quick salesman. I'm not selling snake oil, or trying to convince people that my way is the only way. A philosopher once said “You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.” When you're right, you're right, and Fred had it nailed with that one.
So, if you're still here and reading this, you probably want some sort of a payoff for your sore eyes. To that end, I will say that for almost two years I've lived in a two story house on almost an acre of land, with fifty coconut trees and about forty feet of beach frontage, and the total cost has been about $1,000/month. That's rent, food (for two and a half people, plus two big dogs), power, water, trips to town for watching movies, whatever. That covers a trip I took to a great hospital (remember, I'm a nurse!) to get some pre-cancerous crap examined, biospied and cut off my toe. It even includes paying for a full-time groundskeeper to take care of the trees and house maintenance. And believe me when I say that I've eaten better in the last two years than at any other point in my life, as my waistline will confirm. It hasn't been all Ramen noodles and canned pasta, but rather fresh fruit more days than not and local meat dishes for dinner every day. It also helps that I was able to plant enough bananas to keep them on the kitchen table indefinitely.
The real kicker? I didn't even have to learn a foreign language! If you're interested in learning if this life is for you, favorite the page/subscribe to the blog and see the updates as they come. I'll be doing a step-by-step breakdown of the process as I understand it, including how to avoid a few of the minor stumbles I've experienced along the way. That's it, no strings attached. I'm not trying to get rich here, I'm just trying to illuminate a poorly understood option which is far more available to each and every one of us than we've been led to believe. And if you've read this whole thing, you deserve to learn how you can do it, too.
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