Is It Really Cheaper To Live In The Phils

[Dave Hounddriver]

Lee, those are foreclosure auctions, there are almost sure to be additional costs like back taxes and liens. Also, you may not be able to inspect the property and will be required to pay the entire purchase price by bank check immediately. All kinds of legal problems are possible. Most of these purchases are by experienced investors, not 1st time home owners. From what I've heard, very risky.

Yes. Something is EXTREMELY fishy about those listings. On the same page that Lee refers to where the unit is available for 16,000 there are the following Similar units for sale. ALL the similar units are more than 5 times the 16,000 price tag. The similar priced units are right in line with the Cebu condos Lee mentioned.Anyway, I'm not trying to say Lee is wrong in his assessment. I'm trying to say that buying the 16,000 unit would be just as wrong in Florida as it would be in Cebu. Something stinks on that deal.Similar Homes For Sale549 N. University Dr. # 64, Plantation, FL 33324$110,000Beds: 2 Baths: 2 FullCondominium Unit9903 N.W. 6th Ct., Plantation, FL 33324$109,900Beds: 2 Baths: 2 Full, 1 HalfCondominium Unit8141 S.W. 24th St. 8141, Davie, FL 33324$109,900Beds: 2Condominium Unit2120 S.W. 93rd Way # 1403, Davie, FL 33324$99,000Beds: 2 Baths: 2 FullCondominium Unit1941 S.W. 81st Way, Davie, FL 3332

[Dave Hounddriver]

In the PHL size does matter :541: so you get much smaller spaces for the lower rents. I see guys quoting how they rent for $200 or $400 a month and then you ask them the square meters and they tell you 20 to 40 sq meters,

I know you are talking condos with those figures but very few long term residents live in condos. Let me be more accurate and say I do not know any that do.I live in the same size and type of unit as the ancient one. Both of us, (and many other foreigners that are living low budget and that I personally know in and around Cebu), live in 4-plex type apartments that have about 40 to 50 square meters of living space downstairs and the same again upstairs. Most units of this type are 2 bed 2 cr. A newer unit in the suburbs rents for about 10K pesos and an older unit for about 8K. Prices would be double that in Cebu city itself.So when I try to compare apples to apples I look for that type of generic rental accommodation anywhere else and see what it costs. I have yet to find anywhere in the world that it is cheaper at this moment in time but I invite you to enlighten me if you know of a place.It may be hard to picture the kind of 4 door apartment that is common here so I will give a generic picture. This is not the one I live in but very similar. What would one of these units rent for where you live?

[Mr Lee]

Lee, those are foreclosure auctions, there are almost sure to be additional costs like back taxes and liens. Also, you may not be able to inspect the property and will be required to pay the entire purchase price by bank check immediately. All kinds of legal problems are possible. Most of these purchases are by experienced investors, not 1st time home owners. From what I've heard, very risky.

Yes. Something is EXTREMELY fishy about those listings. On the same page that Lee refers to where the unit is available for 16,000 there are the following Similar units for sale. ALL the similar units are more than 5 times the 16,000 price tag. The similar priced units are right in line with the Cebu condos Lee mentioned.Anyway, I'm not trying to say Lee is wrong in his assessment. I'm trying to say that buying the 16,000 unit would be just as wrong in Florida as it would be in Cebu. Something stinks on that deal.

My guess is that those less expensive units are in over 55 years of age communities which makes them harder to sell, and I am sure they need work. There are also condos in south Florida which go for millions of dollars, so it would be where a unit is and what it includes. There are many deals to be had, HERE is another area with some units in a place called Century Village which is nice, gated and safe with security all over since I know someone who lives there, but it is an older development, but still gives a person a chance to have a place to lay their heads down and in a clean place, so the deals are there if a person knows where to look and a one or two bedroom in Century village would still be way less than a comparable unit in Cebu City. I think the main thing is that when comparing things that we compare them exactly and not just by price. Does a unit have a real kitchen, many in the PHL do not, does the unit have central air, most in the PHL do not, is the unit in a safe and clean part of town, we know the answer to that, does the unit have hot water, many in the PHL do not come with hot water, or if they do then it is not as we know it, does the unit have real toilets and showers, and so on and so on.

[Mr Lee]

In the PHL size does matter :541: so you get much smaller spaces for the lower rents. I see guys quoting how they rent for $200 or $400 a month and then you ask them the square meters and they tell you 20 to 40 sq meters,

I know you are talking condos with those figures but very few long term residents live in condos. Let me be more accurate and say I do not know any that do.I live in the same size and type of unit as the ancient one. Both of us, (and many other foreigners that are living low budget and that I personally know in and around Cebu), live in 4-plex type apartments that have about 40 to 50 square meters of living space downstairs and the same again upstairs. Most units of this type are 2 bed 2 cr. A newer unit in the suburbs rents for about 10K pesos and an older unit for about 8K. Prices would be double that in Cebu city itself.So when I try to compare apples to apples I look for that type of generic rental accommodation anywhere else and see what it costs. I have yet to find anywhere in the world that it is cheaper at this moment in time but I invite you to enlighten me if you know of a place.It may be hard to picture the kind of 4 door apartment that is common here so I will give a generic picture. This is not the one I live in but very similar. What would one of these units rent for where you live?

Where I live it would be expensive and I am guessing at least in the area of $2000 a month and they do not have anything such as that where I live, but I see in the newspapers and online rentals in similar condos that I listed that are 800 to 1200 square feet for $400 to $600 a month, but again IMO the US Florida version would put the place you are showing to shame because I have been into some of those row houses and also in some of the condos. I of course do not know what the inside of the one you or ancienrocka rent look like. There is no question that living outside the city is much less expensive and living in the provinces is even less expensive, so it is all up to where a person wishes to live. HERE is a link to some I did a quick search for in similar areas of what I listed before. Edited January 22, 2011 by Mr. Lee
add link

[Mr Lee]

Below is basically one of the condo types I am talking about for low money in that part of Florida.

This particular one is a 2/2 and on the lake.

• Price: $17,900
• Status: For Sale
• MLS/Source ID: M1461064
• 2 Bedrooms
• 2 Bathrooms
• Apt/Condo/Twnhm
• Parking: Assigned
• Parking: Carport
• Parking: Garage
• Parking: Open
• Rooms: 2
• View: Lake
• Porch
• Waterfront
• Floors: Carpet
• Floors: Tile
• Refrigerator
• Range - Electric

And to answer your question units such as the one shown can be bought with a mortgage for much less than rent. The estimate payments were $105 plus the maint for at total of about $500 a month. Please note the real kitchen. Oh and I do know of round eyes who live full time in condos. Different strokes for different tastes. So while I do not dispute your living costs being much lower and I do not know what stores etc are around where you live, homes in Cebu usually cost even more than many homes in the US are now selling for.

It is not my desire to talk people out of moving to the PHL, it is just my wish to open their eyes to make sure they know what they will get for the lower price they wish to pay. I now have a number of friends who live in the PHL who are now struggling to live on their small pensions or Social Security, and some have to do without many things such as aircon to do so, since the costs have gone up and exchange rate has gone against them. So as with everything in life, let the buyer, or in this case maybe renter, beware, or maybe better to say be aware. :541:

Edited January 30, 2011 by Mr. Lee
add content

[Art2ro]

I base my comments and comparison on a high standard of living cost, not quality and not from those areas that are hard hit by the recession which I agree has degraded substantially in property value! So yes, my comparison in the standard of living cost is from my experiences in California where I grew up through out my teenage years until up to the time I was an adult and retired! And no, I wouldn't want to live in an area or state that is depressed housing market wise, because it would all be too depressing seeing the condition what a lot of the homes and areas look like in a depressed area with abandon homes, buildings and business infrastructures boarded up due to the recession! I've seen some of those types of areas even here in California and it's not a lovely sight to see or even a good place to live in! So, if those of you just barely surviving on Social Security with no other source of income, yes it is now cheaper to live in the U.S. in those States hit hard by the recession! Lee's comments on low priced homes and condos in Florida is proof that it's really now cheap to live in certain parts of Florida! Don't move to California, because your Social Security pension won't be enough to live on anywhere in California, unless one doesn't mind living in a depressed area of California!

Edited January 22, 2011 by Fil/AmArt

[Mr Lee]

I base my comments and comparison on a high standard of living cost, not quality and not from those areas that are hard hit by the recession which I agree has degraded substantially in property value! So yes, my comparison in the standard of living cost is from my experiences in California where I grew up through out my teenage years until up to the time I was an adult and retired! And no, I wouldn't want to live in an area or state that is depressed housing market wise, because it would all be too depressing seeing the condition what a lot of the homes and areas look like in a depressed area with abandon homes, buildings and business infrastructures boarded up due to the recession! I've seen some of those types of areas even here in California and it's not a lovely sight to see or even a good place to live in! So, if those of you just barely surviving on Social Security with no other source of income, yes it is now cheaper to live in the U.S. in those States hit hard by the recession! Lee's comments on low priced homes and condos in Florida is proof that it's really now cheap to live in certain parts of Florida! Don't move to California, because your Social Security pension won't be enough to live on anywhere in California, unless one doesn't mind living in a depressed area of California!

Because of me we are drifting way off topic and it is totally my fault, but to answer your post, riding around and looking at many of those areas, one would never know they are depressed and I see few abandoned houses or condos in most areas of South Florida, so it is not as bad as it might sound. The problem is that there are many more homes for sale than buyers, yet at the same time there are investors who have nothing better to do with their money, so they are snatching up all the good deals and then renting them out until the market hopefully comes back.Now to get back on topic, I have watched a lot of the costs of overall living climbing in many of the major areas of the PHL and the costs of homes in areas we wished to live in have also gone up significantly. I saw the home that United Army posted HERE and that site shows that home costing about US $78,000 or P3,461,920 just to give an example, so it seems to me that prices have gone wild in some areas and I have found that the cost of housing often reflects on the cost of other items in an area. It does seem to me that rents increases are not going up proportionately to the increases in property values, which is a good thing for those who wish to rent a home or condo instead of buying one. Dave's post has opened my eyes to costs outside of the city proper and it seems like they are much more reasonable there, so I thank him for posting his rents and the photo to give us all an idea that there are lower cost choices.

[Art2ro]

Well, if one wants to live in an area of the Philippines that is somewhat comparable to U.S. standards and lifestyle, one will now pay a hefty price living with the likes of "the Jones", Filipino upscale style with 2 to 3 luxury vehicles with driver included and 2 to 3 live-in maids! We have neither of those, but our lifestyle is comfortable! We live in a nice and quiet gated subdivision. Our small house sits on only 187 sq meters and paid P2.9 million in 2000 just with the basic structure, 4 walls with a roof and without a garage. When all is said and done, our home's fair market value is at P5 million or it's worth what people will pay for it! All the other homes in our subdivision is 3 to 5 times bigger then size of ours at P10,000+ per sq meters just for the land alone! Pretty damn expensive! Our subdivision was meant for upper middle class, but here's just a description on just 2 neighbors of ours down the street from us, one is an old lady who's house sits on 4 lots and her 1st floor alone has an indoor swimming pool and 4 luxury vehicles in her garage! The other family, the guy is a building contractor, their mansion sits on 1,000 sq meters and their separate 400 sq meter corner lot has a 2 story garage just to house his 5 luxury vehicles and the 2nd floor for his personal drivers and house boys! Oh, and another guy who too has a nice home and he drives around in Porsches, Ferraris and Lamborginis, must be an exotic used car saleman! There are other homes here outside the vicinity of our subdivision in the millions of dollars! Sharon Cueneta, a famous Filipina singer/actress/TV talk show host and married to a Congressman, lives in West Grove Heights, an upscale subdivision just behind where we live and her what they call their "rest home" is worth I believe stated, P160 million on a 3,000 sq meter lot with swimming pool and with their own private armed security guards separate from their subdivison's security personnel! And Manny "Pac Man" Paquiao , has a home in Brentville and where his kids goes to school there just across the freeway from the SLEX toll booth near Binan, Laguna only a few minutes away from where we live! No wonder why it's so expensive where we live, we have a "Star Bucks" just across the street!

Edited January 22, 2011 by Fil/AmArt

[Rudderless]

As for Florida / Cebu, you guys are comparing a heavily depressed area of the US with Cebu which doesn't sound like it's depressed. Not a real comparison at all. Here in Raleigh NC a small home with no garage can run 120k... and these condos you speak of... 500$ a month in community fees? Wow. Comparing apples to oranges is true though. A western lifestyle in any area is gonna cost a western amount of $. The idea is that you make trade offs. If you want to move to a place and bring your lifestyle with you, I wouldn't expect a significantly cheaper cost of living.Compare the cost of living of the 2nd biggest US city with the 2nd biggest PH city. Maybe that is an alternate comparison.If you want a western lifestyle on the cheap, I'm not sure where you'll find that. Then again, why come to PH with that intention anyway? My idea is to live life, cut out my crazy materialistic and spoiled ways, and enjoy my time not working.Last night my gf, myself, and another couple went out to eat and dropped 200$ Not planning on doing much of that in Cebu. How often do you spend 4000php on dinner out with friends?Rudderless

[Mr Lee]

As for Florida / Cebu, you guys are comparing a heavily depressed area of the US with Cebu which doesn't sound like it's depressed. Not a real comparison at all. Here in Raleigh NC a small home with no garage can run 120k... and these condos you speak of... 500$ a month in community fees? Wow. Comparing apples to oranges is true though. A western lifestyle in any area is gonna cost a western amount of $. The idea is that you make trade offs. If you want to move to a place and bring your lifestyle with you, I wouldn't expect a significantly cheaper cost of living. Compare the cost of living of the 2nd biggest US city with the 2nd biggest PH city. Maybe that is an alternate comparison. If you want a western lifestyle on the cheap, I'm not sure where you'll find that. Then again, why come to PH with that intention anyway? My idea is to live life, cut out my crazy materialistic and spoiled ways, and enjoy my time not working. Last night my gf, myself, and another couple went out to eat and dropped 200$ Not planning on doing much of that in Cebu. How often do you spend 4000php on dinner out with friends? Rudderless

There are condos in Florida that I know of with condo fees as high as $2000 a month, and there are probably some with higher fees and you get a lot with those fees, but back to the $500 that I posted above, that included the mortgage, so for $500 they got to own that condo I posted HERE and not rent it, cable TV, water, homeowners insurance (still needed apartment dwellers insurance if they want to), a club house, a number of swimming pools, shows, exercise rooms, etc. Back to the topic at hand, my wife and I have spent over p4000 on dinner a few times in Cebu and that is really not hard to do if one wants a good steak at say Olio's in Cross Roads, or a large variety buffet such as the Marco Polo Cebu with drinks etc. Now when comparing a depressed area of Florida with Cebu, Florida infrastructure puts Cebu to shame and there are no real depressed areas that I was writing about, there are just overbuilt areas where stupid people bought much more than they could afford and lost their condos or homes, or people refinanced and took out the money the unit had gained when the market went crazy. The units that are now selling for under or around $20,000, were around $100,000 or more at one time, and some are still asking that much, so a lot of people are letting them go because they are no longer worth what their payments are costing them. We had one neighbor in Florida (not the same area) who refinanced their home when it was worth about $400,000 and then when it went down to half he got mad at the bank and demanded they cut his mortgage in half and they laughed at him and foreclosed and sold it for $175,000 out of spite. Mind you he did not buy it at the overprice, instead he pulled the money out of it by a refi and then thought the bank owed him something for his own greed or possibly poor planning, and that is the story with lots of the homes and condos that are now on the market in some areas of the states. I am not judging those people, only stating what happened. I love Cebu and live there part of the year for now because it is what makes my wife happy, and as a compromise to living there full time, but if a person can afford to live anywhere they want to, then IMO they would not wish to live in any part of the PHL unless they went there for the women or to make their wives happy, or possibly other reasons that I cannot think of right now, so settling for less in retirement is not my idea of living out my golden years, but IMHO only once a person actually lives there a good part of the year, or all of the year, would they fully understand if the PHL is for them, and those who have visited, no matter how many times, really have no idea what actually living there might be like, take it from me because I was one of those people who spent a few weeks to a month every year starting in the 1990's and thought it was paradise and woke up to realize it is far from a paradise, yet is still nice to live within the reality and not the illusion.