The Things Nobody Puts In The Cost Of Living Breakdown.

Everyone does the cost of living breakdown.

It is the first serious research most people do before they commit to this life. Rent in Chiang Mai versus rent in London. Food in Hanoi versus food in New York. The number at the bottom of the spreadsheet versus the number at the bottom of the spreadsheet at home. The gap between the two is the argument for going. It is usually a compelling argument.

I have done this breakdown. I have updated it several times over the years as the cities changed and the costs adjusted and the version of the life I was living became more expensive and then more efficient and then more expensive again.

The breakdown is useful. It is also incomplete in ways that become visible at inconvenient moments.

Chiang Mai in February and March is one of the most popular nomad destinations in Southeast Asia. The coworking infrastructure is excellent. The cost is reasonable. The food is extraordinary. The community is established and welcoming. The weather is cooler than Bangkok, which is a selling point for people who find Bangkok's heat difficult.

In February and March the farmers in the surrounding regions burn their fields. This is agricultural practice, not malice, but the effect on the air quality in the city is significant and documented and not difficult to find if you look. The AQI during burning season regularly exceeds 150. On bad days it exceeds 200. For context, the WHO considers anything above 50 to be a level at which sensitive groups should reduce outdoor exposure. Above 150 is unhealthy for everyone.

The sky during burning season has a specific quality. Not dramatic. Not cinematic. A flat grey-brown that settles over everything and doesn't lift. A scratch at the back of the throat that arrives around day three and doesn't leave until you do. The eyes that water in the morning for reasons that aren't emotional.

Bangkok has its own air quality challenges. Not seasonal in the same way, but persistent. The traffic, the industry, the density of the city produce particulate levels that exceed safe limits on more days than the content celebrating Bangkok as a nomad destination tends to mention.

The mask goes on. Then it comes off because it's uncomfortable. Then it goes on again because the throat knows better than the inconvenience.

The spreadsheet has a line for accommodation. It does not have a line for the respiratory cost of the city you're living in.

Tap water in most Southeast Asian cities is not safe to drink. This is known. The workaround is bottled water, which is cheap and available and generates a quantity of plastic waste that is one of the things you stop thinking about after the first month because thinking about it doesn't change it and you are thirsty.

The bottled water has been sitting in plastic. Sometimes in the sun. The plastic is not always the grade that holds up to heat without leaching. The studies on this are not settled and the exposure from a single bottle is negligible. The exposure from drinking exclusively from plastic bottles for two years in a warm climate is a different calculation that nobody has fully made.

The ice in the café drink is probably from a reliable source. Probably. The ice in the street food cart is less certain. You make a calculation every time and usually the calculation goes in favour of the drink because the drink is good and the heat is real and you have been making this calculation for long enough that it feels like nothing.

The food safety standards are different. Not absent. Different. The street food that is extraordinary and has been feeding people for generations operates under conditions that would not pass inspection in the country you came from. Usually this is fine. Occasionally it isn't. The four days in the guesthouse room happen. They happen to everyone who has been here long enough. You lose the days, you recover, you go back to the same cart because the food is genuinely that good and the four days are genuinely that rare.

The spreadsheet has a line for food. It does not have a line for the food that costs you four days and the weight you lose in them.

The healthcare in Southeast Asia is genuinely good in the cities. Bangkok has hospitals that are world class by any standard. Chiang Mai has good facilities. The major Vietnamese cities have improving infrastructure. This is real and not nothing.

But good hospitals in a foreign country are not the same as a doctor who knows your history.

The doctor who knows your history is the one who remembers that you had that thing three years ago. Who knows the medication that didn't work. Who can read the pattern of the last five years and see what it suggests. Who speaks your language with the fluency that allows nuance and uncertainty and the specific vocabulary of something that is hard to describe.

The foreign hospital, however good, starts from zero every time. The history you provide is as complete as your memory of it, which is incomplete in the ways all human memory is incomplete about things that happened when you were not anticipating being asked about them.

The health insurance question is the one that gets deferred. It is expensive. The categories are confusing. The exclusions are written to be missed. The decision to deal with it later is made in the first month when the priority is the apartment and the SIM card and the coworking space and the visa and the seventeen other things that require immediate attention.

Later becomes the default. The default persists until the 2am moment when something feels wrong and the question of what is covered by what and where you would go and who you would call becomes suddenly and urgently relevant.

The spreadsheet has no line for health insurance. Or rather, it has a line, but the line is frequently left blank with a note that says sort this out and the note ages without being addressed.

None of these things is catastrophic individually.

The air quality on any given day is manageable. The water is probably fine. The food is usually extraordinary without consequence. The healthcare question is probably not going to matter this month.

The word probably is doing a lot of work in those sentences.

The accumulation is the thing the spreadsheet cannot capture. Two years of slightly compromised air. Two years of plastic bottles in the heat. Two years of the occasionally wrong food. Two years of the healthcare question deferred. Two years of the 2am moment that passed without incident and the relief that followed it and the fact that next time may be different.

I am not telling you not to come. I am here. I will continue to be here. The trade is still worth it for me on the balance of everything that goes into the calculation.

But the calculation should include these things. The real one. Not the spreadsheet that shows the number that makes the decision easy and leaves out the costs that don't have a number yet.

Get the health insurance. Actually get it, before you go, from a position of choice rather than necessity. Research the air quality by city and by season and build that into the decision about where and when. Drink the water from the sources you've actually investigated rather than the default. Know where the hospital is before you need it.

The life here is better than the spreadsheet suggests in most ways.

It is also more expensive than the spreadsheet suggests in the ways the spreadsheet cannot count.

Do the full breakdown.

Andrew - No Refunds •••