Barry
Working in Bangkok
Monthly Earnings 50-70,000 baht
Q1. How much do you earn from teaching per month?
The salary from my Thai secondary school is 45,000 after tax and I can bump that up by 5,000 to 25,000 depending on how many private students I want to tutor or more to the point, how much energy I've got. It takes a lot of effort to do a full-time job and then be willing to sit with a beginner level student for a couple of hours.
Q2. How much of that can you realistically save per month?
I try to save at least 10,000 baht a month and that money goes towards an annual trip home with usually a bit left over.
Q3. How much do you pay for your accommodation and what do you live in exactly (house, apartment, condo)?
I got really lucky with accommodation because I rent a new one-bedroom apartment in central Bangkok but it actually belongs to a friend who bought it as an investment and he never stays there. I give him 8,000 baht a month but I think if I was renting directly from the building owner, it would cost anything from 12,000 baht a month up.
Q4. What do you spend a month on the following things?
Transportation
I go everywhere by sky-train and of course that's the advantage of living in downtown Bangkok. In fact I never go anywhere that requires taxis. So about 3,000 baht a month I guess.
Utility bills
That's all included in the 8,000 baht a month I give my pal for the rent. I don't abuse the air-conditioning though. I'm up on the 22nd floor so there's a great breeze that blows through the apartment when you open the balcony doors.
Food - both restaurants and supermarket shopping
Food is the one aspect of my budget that I do like to control. I limit myself to Western food only once or twice on weekends because it's Western food that can cost the earth if you develop too much of a craving for it. During the week I eat only Thai food and can spend probably 700 baht from Monday to Friday. Weekends I can spend about a thousand. Let's call it 7-8,000 baht for the month.
Nightlife and drinking
I don't go out much. I'll meet friends for a night out once in a while but it only amounts to three or four beers at most. I bet I spend less than 3,000 a month on booze and nights out. I prefer to stay home and watch a movie or play computer games.
Books, computers
I do like my gadgets but I think it's difficult to put a monthly figure on it.
Q5. How would you summarize your standard of living in one sentence?
Brilliant. I love my lifestyle. It's very comfortable. That said, I'm well aware I'm not saving as much as I should be.
Q6. What do you consider to be a real 'bargain' here?
It's easier for me to say what I don't consider to be a bargain and that's Western food. You can really pay through the nose here even for very average Western meals.
Q7. In your opinion, how much money does anyone need to earn here in order to survive?
I think you could 'survive' in Bangkok on 30,000 baht a month but once you move up to the 50-60K bracket, life doesn't become TWICE as good, it becomes TEN times better in my opinion.
Phil's analysis and comment
Just this last weekend, my wife and I were analyzing and talking about the cost of eating in Bangkok. What's always interesting to me is not so much that you have the choice of eating on two levels - Thai or Western, but how you have to fork out considerably money to choose from the international menu. You expect Western food to be more expensive than Thai food of course, but the difference in cost can be astounding.
From Monday to Friday, my wife has a 30 baht lunch at the subsidized company canteen and in the evening, she pays about 70-80 baht a meal, delivered by a company that specializes in 'clean food'. For breakfast she'll have a yoghurt and some fruit. Total daily food spend no more than 150 baht, so 750 baht takes care of food for the five weekdays.
On Sunday, we went to a mid-range local restaurant where smoothies, a couple of pasta dishes and a starter or two came to about 800 baht. Then we went to a coffee shop for a latte and a cake and the bill was another 450.
Eating Western food in Bangkok doesn't come cheap at all. If you're one of those people who can happily shun the tastes of home and eat only Thai food, you'll save a small fortune. However, I think most of us crave a change from 'something over rice' every now and again.
Submit your own Cost of Living survey
