Good morning friends and welcome to another video.
As per this recording, I have been living on the Paradise Island of Bali for almost 2 months now,
and you know what this means?
This means it's time to talk through how much it costs living in Bali for one month.
So, if you're down the rabbit hole and you've been watching a lot of these videos,
then my subgenres will be very similar to other videos.
I'm going to go ahead and assume.
But in this video I'm going to be talking about accommodation,
transport, food,
essentials and non-essentials,
and all the prices mentioned in this video will be from my own personal experience of living in Canggu
and some things just may be a little bit more expensive
or a little bit cheaper in different areas of the island.
The current conversion rate between pound sterling and Indonesia rupiah
is currently about £one to 19,000 rupiah,
so to make that easier for me, I'm going to round that up to 20,000 rupiah,
which means £1 equals 20,000 rupiah,
and that should make it a bit easier for everyone to understand
and a little bit easier to convert.
Bear in mind, this video is going to be talking about the cost of me living in Bali for 1 month,
using my first month as a basis,
but also talking about what my monthly cost will be as well
regularly carrying on in the future.
So let's go ahead and get on with it.
So, when it comes to accommodation here in Bali, the price can vary massively.
You could probably go as cheap as about £3-5 per night in a dorm room in a hostel,
and the top end can go pretty much as high as you like,
not stopping until it's in the thousands of dollars per month for a private villa.
But if you decide to go on the cheap cheap side,
just bear in mind that you might have dusty rooms,
cold showers and broken and cheap furniture.
So, when we arrived on the island, we actually found somewhere to stay for a week
and we only paid for the week up front,
so it gave us time to drive around and look at other places to live
to make sure the place we picked looked like it did on the photos.
Unfortunately, in Bali it happens quite a lot that people
book a place to stay and when they turn up, it looks nothing like the images
and it's actually a lot worse condition than what they thought it was going to be.
So I definitely recommend just booking a place for maybe like 3 to 7 days
while you go around and have a look at other areas
and other places you might find somewhere better to live.
We spent an entire day riding around, checking out guest houses
that range from anywhere between £150 pounds per month to £500 per month,
and eventually we settled on a place where we are staying now
and that's called Gangga guest house in Canggu
and we are renting a queen-size room with an ensuite.
We picked this place specifically because it has a pool,
the kitchen is clean, which in cheaper accommodations we looked in was not,
and there are two dogs that live here which is a bonus in our eyes.
And since moving in, we also discovered that the family are really nice.
We get our room cleaned every two days,
and fresh towels and linen every four days.
All in all, this guest house sets us back about 5 million per month,
which is around £260 per month.
In time, it would be nice if I was in a position to sort of rent my own space,
my own villa where I could have multiple rooms and have an office or a bedroom separate,
but for now, I'm quite content here and I think I'm gonna stay here for quite a while.
It comes to no surprise that eating out in Bali is incredibly cheap.
Originally, when we scouted out our guest house,
we wanted to make sure we had a place with a nice kitchen,
so that we could go to the supermarket, buy our own food and cook our own food.
However, we quickly discovered, as I'm sure everyone else did,
after our supermarket shop,
that it's actually a lot cheaper to eat out anyway.
When it comes to eating out, it's very possible to eat healthy if you want to.
There are loads of healthy food based restaurants
and most places have a healthy option as well.
But by the nature of Indonesian cuisine,
the food here is quite often fried and a lot of Indonesian dishes
will include things like fried vegetables, fried rice, fried noodles,
so you're probably going to end up consuming a lot of oil.
In terms of prices, we actually decide to stick to a few different places for breakfast.
There's a lovely place across the road I go to quite often,
where I could get an avocado on toast with a juice for around 40,000 IDR.
Another one of my favourite breakfast places is Warung Jaba down the road.
I can grab an omelet and a coke for 40,000.
You can get a fruits platter for 17,000 IDR,
and I'm telling you, this is the best omelet that I have...
ever had in Indonesia.
A lot of the times though, we do skip breakfast.
We end going straight to these places for lunch instead.
Speaking of lunch, we mostly stick to Warung Jaba,
the same place I just mentioned, or we go to Warung local,
which is the Warung restaurant that's located literally in front of our guest house.
We don't have to walk far at all.
The buffet options in the Warungs here offer a very versatile price
and you can get a bigger or smaller dish depending on how hungry you are.
Whenever I go for this buffet option,
it probably costs me on average between 30 and 50,000 IDR
for a food and drink combination.
Some dinners though, if we're feeling fancy or we don't fancy Warung
or we're eating out with friends, we'll go on a little bit on the more expensive side.
But on average, it usually costs around 100,000 per person each time we go,
and we tend to do this maybe twice a week, whenever we feel like it.
So taking all that into account, if we skip breakfast 5 times a week,
stick mostly to what we know and the Warongs,
then maybe splash out twice a week for dinner,
then we spend around 500,000 IDR per week,
which is obviously two million per month.
As you may or may not know, it is not recommended to drink from the water here.
It will make you incredibly ill,
so you need to factor in the cost of water here as well.
We actually buy a big 20 litre sort of water dispenser sized bottle of water from the convenience store,
and we go for about one a week,
because a 20 litre bottle of water is so cheap at 20,000 IDR, or one pound.
The cheapest and most popular way to get around Bali,
as you know, is by scooter
or moped, if you're from the UK.
Most places give you the option to rent a scooter from days to weeks to months,
and obviously, the longer you commit to renting, the cheaper it's going to be.
For 125cc Honda Vario, which is probably the most common scooter around here,
it's usually around 40 to 60,000 IDR per day,
or around 300 to 400,000 per week.
I have this scooter to start with, but when you need to nip around a lot with two people
it becomes really uncomfortable, it struggles with hillls
and this scooter is quite quite narrow and quite skinny
and it does really ache your ass after a while.
We upgraded to a Yamaha Max in our second week here,
getting rid of the Honda Vario.
It's larger, it has more boot space, it's 155cc instead of 125,
which makes it slightly more powerful.
It's not overly more powerful, but it is noticeable
when you're trying to go up hills or trying to pull away fast.
Our scooter costs us 1.2 million,
or around 60 pounds per month to rent.
We fill it up with fuel maybe once or twice a week,
which every time is around 40,000 to 50,000 IDR.
For the sake of this video, I'm just gonna say that we filled it up six times a month,
so that's around 300,000 IDR.
We also spent 150,000 IDR each this month
on helmets with advisors that...
stop the bugs from hitting you in the face and stop your eyes from drying out
when you're going down the main roads.
If you're worried about riding a scooter for the first time,
it is possible to buy lessons for around 150,000 IDR,
or about seven pound fifty,
and this should teach you the basics and help smooth out those nerves about going into the asian traffic.
Other forms of transport could be getting a grab car or Gojek car or bike,
which we have done once or twice to move all of our belongings from one place to another,
and this cost us around 22,000 IDR,
so not a lot to move from our first place into the place that we're living now.
There are also a lot of balinese drivers that will offer to show for you around the island as well,
if that's what you want to do.
They're not overly expensive, but they are a lot more expensive than having your own scooter
or getting a grab taxi.
Honestly, I would just recommend renting your own scooter while you're here.
It is by far the simplest and most convenient way of getting around.
In this section of the video, I'm going to be talking about the miscellaneous costs
that are essential to everyday life.
It is incredibly uncommon for a guest house or villa in Bali to have its own washing facility,
so the chances are you're going to probably want to take a wash bag
full of your dirty clothes to the local laundry.
Again, the price of laundry changes depending on where you go
and you could pay anywhere between 5,000 per kilogram or 30,000 per kilogram.
We actually pay very little for our laundry, we go to a place called Laundryhub
and they have a special covered promotion at the moment
where it's only 5,000 IDR per kilogram with a minimum of 3 kilograms each time.
We usually take around 4 kilograms of laundry,
so that's around 20 000 idr every time we take it
and we probably do our laundry 4 to 6 times a month.
We have tried another place as well that was 15,000 per kilogram,
hoping that maybe it would wash better or it would come back smelling nicer,
but it actually did the same job wherever you go,
to a 5,000 per kilogram laundry place or a 15,000 kilogram per laundry place.
So, you know, we don't you feel the need to splash out all that much,
but I know from past experiences, if you go to a place like the Gili islands,
it actually ramps up in price. It could be anywhere from 30 to 50,000
because you're on an island and you don't have an option but to pay it.
Next, we'll tackle sim cards.
I decided to go with Telkomsel which is actually a pain in the ass.
It's set up and a little bit more expensive than the other brands,
but it does have the best coverage on the island
and it's really easy to top up using the app.
You don't have to go out and get a new sim card every time you want to top up,
or you don't have to go to the little sim card shops that they find here to do that.
I went to the Telkomsel shop in the shopping center and I paid 235 000 IDR
for a sim that has 35 gigabyte of local internet,
because here in Indonesia it tells you it's 35 gigabyte,
but it splits it between local and national.
Local can be used in Bali and national gets used across Indonesia
and this was further broken down into 25 gigabytes of internet and 10 gigabytes of multimedia,
but I'm not sure what that is.
I also got 3 gigabytes of national coverage as well.
I also paid a premium for this sim card which you always pay
when you get your first sim card with tokumsel,
and then the top ups after that are actually quite cheaper
than the initial registration of the sim card.
I think topping up on the app would cost me about 150,000 IDR
for the same internet plan as I paid when i first bought the sim card.
There are also other providers such as Smartfren,
which Robyn is with, or XL or ic3 Freedom,
and these do tend to be slightly cheaper,
as Robyn only paid 90,000 for her sim card
and she got 19 gigabytes of internet.
But as I said, the coverage isn't supposed to be as good as Telkomsel.
Lastly, I have always and I will always get a haircut once a month.
Here in Bali, I paid 150 000 to get that fresh barnet,
but there are places you can actually get it a lot cheaper
and obviously there are more expensive places as well,
but there isn't really much else to say on that, that's just what I pay.
So, non-essential costs are the ones that sort of encompass leisure and activities.
Some may argue they're not necessities, but it is good to go out and have fun,
and have hobbies and see people and all of that jazz, otherwise you're going to get bored.
The first thing I've been trying to do more of recently is actually surfing.
Surfing is actually really inexpensive here in Bali
and the rent of a board is around 50,000 IDR
or about two pound fifty for around a 2 to 3 hour window,
which I think isn't really bad at all.
I want to be surfing around twice a week,
which brings the cost of surfing to about 150,000 per week,
but we'll see how that goes in the future.
So this month you may have seen one of my last videos,
we decided to take a trip over east
and this was to see some temples and go to the Hangar suite.
It wasn't overly expensive and probably cost us 50,000 in fuel,
150,000 for the room,
150 000 in entry fees to the temples
and around 40,000 in food and water.
To be honest, I think it was pretty cheap for an overnight stay.
We got there around sunset on the first day and then we left around midday on the next day,
so we didn't spend too much on food.
I think it was pretty reasonable, to be honest.
The other week I also bought myself a rash top for surfing.
I was wearing a short sleeve shirt,
and while I was doing that, I was getting terrible rashes down my forearms.
I looked hard, but I actually couldn't find a cheap rash top anywhere,
so I ended up paying around 600 000 idr for mine,
but I think the amount that I'm going to be surfing,
I think it was worth the price.
I also bought a new pair of sunglasses,
because my old ones were like 6 years old and incredibly scratched up,
and these cost me 175,000 IDR.
I bought 2 vest tops from a shop for 200,000
because they had a sale on where all items were 100,000 each,
And we had big night out with some friends this month at the local brewery
called Black Sand brewery.
It's a great place if you like craft beer and we spent around...
800,000 there that night
so around 400,000 per person on some tasters and then a couple of pints afterwards.
We don't do this very often, which is why I've put this in the non-essential section,
because I don't think it belongs in the food section
because I haven't done it since
and it is definitely a one-off activity.
And that pretty much sums up the cost of everything in my first month in Bali.
So, this is a bit you've all been waiting for, let's tally up all the costs
and I can let you know how much my first month in Bali cost me.
For accommodation, I spent 5 million this month
for my scooter rental 1.2 million,
150,000 in fuel,
150,000 on a helmet
and 10,000 on a grab taxi.
500,000 on food,
60,000 on laundry 235 000 for my sim card,
150,000 on a haircut,
around probably 400 to 450,000 on surfing,
200,000 on my trip out east,
600,000 on a surfing rush top,
200,000 on some vest tops,
175,000 on some sunglasses,
and that brings our total to... drumroll please...
9,485,000 IDR,
or 4£92.62 in total.
This is probably a tad on the higher side
because of the non-essential stuff that I've been buying this month
while I've been settling into Bali.
So, next month will probably be cheaper and more like around £400 to £450 for the month.
This actually surprised me because when I was researching it,
I thought it was going to cost me around like £500 plus per month,
so I'm actually very happy for the price I have spent
and I'm glad to know that I'm already below that. Yay!
Ao as you can tell, it's incredibly cheap to live here in Bali
and that is why I have chosen this beautiful island to be my home
while I attempt to become a full-time creative.
And if I had stayed in my apartment I was living in,
this probably would have been closer to sort of £1,100 to £1,300 per month.
If you're looking to come to Bali as a remote worker,
then I definitely recommend it.
There is a massive community of digital nomads here
and a lot of people are trying to do the same thing that I'm sure that you're trying to do.
I have made a video that outlines the process of how you can get to Bali,
so if this is something that interests you, I definitely recommend you go and watch that.
I 'll leave it linked in the description below and up above here.
However, just bear in mind that it has changed a bit since i posted that video,
and right now people from I think 13 countries can't enter Indonesia,
including the UK, Denmark and Norway,
and if you can enter, then the quarantine is currently sitting at 14 days,
which is a lot longer than what I did.
But hopefully this will start to go down very soon.
Feel free to follow me on Instagram and Twitter,
and reach out with any questions that you have. I'm always happy to answer questions.
And it would really help me out massively if you gave this video a like,
if you subscribed to the channel for more videos and if you leave a comment below.
I always answer every single comment.
I'll be making Bali content
every week, so make sure you're subscribed for that.
And with all that said, thank you very much for watching
and I will see you again in the next one.
Peace.