hey guys what's up welcome back to my channel my name is ollie and on this channel we talk about
living and teaching english in south america if you haven't already please subscribe to my
channel and like this video to stay updated with everything that's going on in this video i'm going
to talk about the cost of living in bolivia's most expensive city santa cruz de la sierra
everybody knows that bolivia is kind of like the poorest country in south america so i want
to like put into perspective what the cost of living is like here in bolivia just so that if
you're thinking about coming to bolivia but you're unsure about how much things are going to cost
here in santa cruz you can have a kind of idea about that so i hope you find this video useful
and if you do leave a comment and let me know what's going on yeah let's get started here we are
on a website called numbio and i use this before i go traveling to look at like the cost of living in
terms of going to going for a meal and then in a restaurant or looking at the local beer or stuff
like that just so i have an idea and obviously today we're going to do santa cruz in bolivia
and you can see that it is the most expensive city in bolivia and it's between six and seven percent
higher than in la paz i'm going to leave it in the local currency because i think it's important to
know the local currency when you actually come to this country so for reference let's take a look at
the currency converter one dollar one us dollar is about 6.89 bolivianos and if we do 10 it's
about 68 bolivianos okay so that's what you need to know you can use this as your reference when
we go through the prices uh i'm a single person so without rent it says 3924 and this is actually
very accurate um i will show you i make a monthly budget and i will show you what my average monthly
budget is in a little while but this is super this is super accurate i think i spend around 275 uh us
dollars on rent so that is 1800 so you can add that on top of the 3000 to get your number there
so this if you're spending between three and a half and four thousand bees
without rent you're doing a good job okay so let's go down as you can see it's uh it's one of the
cheapest cities in the world um and it's the most expensive in bolivia so that gives you an idea of
actually how cheap bolivia as a country is okay a meal at an inexpensive restaurant this is pretty
accurate if you're spending between 15 and 25 bees at an inexpensive restaurant you're doing okay
and you'll probably get like chicken or some sort of like really thin beef with rice salad
and yucca yuca they add with every dish you can get it boiled or you can get it fried so that
really makes sense um and at an at an expensive restaurant for me in particular for example i
went to an expensive restaurant last night and the the price of food was your cheapest meal was
50 bolivianos and the most expensive was like 110 bolivianos and i got a delicious duck and risotto
for 85 bolivianos so that's maybe like you know 12.50 or something like that there's no mcdonald's
uh but you'll pay around 45 to 60 bolivianos for a meal in like an equivalent like a burger king or
a kfc like that and actually the quality of you know these fast food chains here in bolivia is
actually pretty good so not bad not bad um beer makes sense um talking about craft beer because
we're all interested in craft beer you're gonna look to pay between 25 bees and 35 bees for 400 cc
of beer um so yeah that's that's quite accurate and you know this is quite accurate just for
your 600 mil bottle um for me i don't shop at the markets because they give you everything in bulk
uh it makes sense for a family if you want to shop at the market like you'll buy you'll get
you'll pay 10 bolivianos for like you know 15 or 20 apples which is amazing if you're in a family
but being a single person i normally just go to the supermarket because i get everything that i
need there and and the supermarket is my largest expense each month obviously outside of rent
and i'll show you a a pie chart of my expenses which clearly shows that i spend so much money on
food uh in saying that the food is cheap like you know you have a bag of milk because they
are coming bags for less than a dollar fresh bread is quite i wouldn't call it fresh but
bread here is quite expensive um people normally get like french bread and they eat it that day
you can take a look at the the bread if you want at the market if you want that
transportation um you're basically going to be spending between 10 and 15 bolivianos 10
bolivianas is the the least amount of money you can spend and 15 bolivianos is for a short trip
anything other than that it's kind of like 20 25 or 30. they seem to do everything by
five bolivianos here uh so for example uh a trip that's more than two kilometers you're going to be
spending like around 20 bolivianos on that which is still pretty good right uh comparable to what
you would pay back home it's still pretty good let's move on to light utilities which
uh basically is electricity you don't need heating in santa cruz because it's so hot here
all the time or cooling uh water is about i think we pay between 50 and 80 bolivianos each month
for our water usage i think 50 is the lowest you can pay for my area in particular and electricity
is dependent on the month like in june and july because it's a little bit colder but not too much
you probably won't be spending much on electricity because you're not using the air conditioner
but in every other month you are using the air conditioner and i think me and my housemate um
we pay between like 100 bees and 300 bees a month on electricity in the hot months
it's not normally like 300 because you just can't sleep without the air conditioner on so
yeah this kind of makes sense here 318 boliviano it's quite accurate isn't it actually um depending
on what um fitness club you want to go to i pay 450 b's a month for my membership but i go to
like a country club where we have the gym we have a big 30 meter pool there's tennis courts there's
other types of courts there so that makes sense uh i actually don't do any shopping here because
the quality of clothing in like your markets is not very good and if you want to shop at like
uh the chain stores for example zara h m it's really really expensive like you're paying prices
that you would pay back home and you've got to think that like the salary here is a lot less so
if you're paying for things on your salary that you earn here but you're paying like first world
prices yeah no thanks yeah not good not good not good um yeah i i touched on what my apartment was
um so i pay around 275 and that's because we live in a three-bedroom apartment at the moment but uh
when another person moves in like it decreases to like almost two hundred dollars a month which is
super duper cheap uh i think i've i forgot to go through internet right uh yeah internet so here
that's a little bit expensive um i get my phone bill internet and cable tv for 485 bees a month
and we get 40 megs of speed each month which is great um yeah so you basically have to remember
that i am on a gringo salary and the normal boliviano would earn a lot less than this so
if you come here you notice that people probably can't afford to pay this which is
really noticeable but basically if you're gringo you're coming here or you're like well off you
you can live on on this amount of money uh but you will notice that there's a lot of poverty here and
people would struggle to live on this type of money but i hope that helped you a little bit
let's move on to my actual monthly budget now i use an app called travel spend it's super basic
you can basically add your trips as you want you can click the start button add your trip
name you can change the currency that you want um so i normally put it in bolivianos because i earn
bolivianos and i use with bolivianos and i try and track every month i've been a bit lazy in october
and september because i was like oh my god i'm spending so much money so let's go down to july
which was in the middle of the pandemic but things kind of started to open up here so if we have a
look at my july spendings i spent three and a half thousand bolivianos which is a little bit less
than a single person normally spends but that's fine that's fine here and you can see that 51
of my expenses was on groceries and i wasn't lying when i said that's what you spend the
money on right um as far as everything else goes we have fees and charges that's like my bills uh
like paying for electricity expenses internet things like that uh pediatric is like uber eats
where i order food drinks because you can't go out in the clubs i think this is i normally
spend this amount of money anyway because we have been just drinking at home instead of going out
transportation is obviously on taxis and uber coffee is when we go to coffee shops shopping
and in general so this is kind of like a normal month for me and as you can see i spend around 113
bolivianos a day and that really makes sense with everything that is going on there so you
can probably see that from numbio website which is super useful i definitely recommend you use it and
my app that i use to spend money on that number is pretty accurate obviously they're not accounting
for the amount of money that i spend on takeaway food but it's pretty accurate if you're thinking
about oh how much how far is my money going to go when i'm living in bolivia this website is pretty
accurate just don't spend money on pdos yeah on ubereats because that is where you lose lots of
money and that's where i have lost a lot of money but yeah it's super accurate and you can trust
this website that it will give you an accurate depiction of the cost of living here in santa cruz
uh before i finish up if you haven't already watched my video about the five things that i
love about santa cruz make sure you check it out this city is really beautiful it's really cool
and unfortunately i am leaving the city next month um not gonna cry but i like it's really
cool and i really do recommend that you you visit here one day because uh i've been i've created a
life here and people have been super welcoming bolivians have been super nice super friendly
and it's really the heart of south america it is so south american it is so different
from like buenos aires but different from rio different from other big cities in south america
santa cruz it's like a big town it's a big beautiful town and it's relatively cheap
if you have the money to to live here so yeah definitely visit definitely recommend thanks guys