Five thousand dollars a month in Makati for an ordinary Southern California lifestyle. What am I doing wrong?
Hi everyone,
I moved here four years ago from Los Angeles. I'm in my late 20s to early 30s, my partner and I both work, and we don't have kids. Before moving, all I read on Reddit was that you could live like royalty on $1,500 a month. But now that I'm tracking our spending and planning for a child, I'm confused. Tuition alone costs an extra $20,000 a year if we want Western-standard education.
Four years later, I still don't understand how people live like that without their quality of life falling off a cliff. My partner and I aren't trying to splurge. We just want to maintain a basic, comfortable Southern California standard: being able to walk to places, having breathing room, air conditioning that runs all the time, clean food, and some help with housework.
Our monthly expenses in Makati for two people (and we can't move because of work):
* Rent: 130,000 pesos (Makati CBD, 123 sqm, 2 bedrooms, 2.5 bathrooms; *we needed central air to stay sane*)
* Electricity: 16,000
* Internet and water: 4,000
* Groceries: 40,000 (Santi's, Kitayama, S&R, Marketplace, wet markets)
* GrabFood/delivery: 20,000
* Dining out, alcohol, coffee: 25,000
* Commuting helper: 8,000
* Gas and tolls: 6,000 (we don't drive much, just grocery runs and the occasional trip)
* Health insurance: 30,000 (comprehensive, for both of us)
* Car insurance: 5,000
* Miscellaneous: 10,000
Total spending: 294,000 pesos per month, about $5,000
To be clear, this is just recreating our life in LA, not luxury.
What do the people who say they live like royalty on $1,500 a month actually look like? Are they all living in 28-square-meter studios in Quezon City, eating street food, riding tricycles through traffic while a window AC unit rattles in their face?
Where are you all cutting costs without sacrificing basic comfort?
What am I doing wrong?
You're spending almost 85,000 pesos on food for two people and 130,000 on rent for a 2-bedroom house. I'm curious what exactly counts as the Southern California standard…
Are you really asking what's off here???? What's off is that you're living in one of the most expensive areas in the Philippines and living luxuriously. Nobody spending 1.5K pays high rent, orders delivery, eats out every week, and drinks coffee every day. If you went back to California, the same lifestyle would easily cost three times as much. In that sense, moving to any country (third world or not) and keeping that lifestyle would cost about the same or more. There's no secret trick. What's off is wanting to live luxuriously on pocket change, and in 2026 that's impossible anywhere in the world.
I earn a similar amount and I'm the same age. You should go back to the US, mostly to a low-cost-of-living state. Whatever you can do here, you can do there, and do even better. Don't let your income stagnate; grow it. The Philippines should be a last-chance, last-hope destination. If the Philippines becomes your ceiling, you'll get trapped. Grow in the US, and spend maybe half the time here at most.
You know that 'living like a king' people aren't talking about sending their kids to private school, right? It's a single guy in a shoebox-sized condo who thinks living like a king means walking to the bar for happy hour, having fast food spoon-fed to him via Grab, and getting a 500-peso massage a few times a week.
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