One thing that you must do when you move to a foreign country is get a general feel for the true cost of living in that place. When you first arrive, it may feel a like a vacation and you will really loosen the pursestrings, splashing out and treating yourself whatever luxury you feel like enjoying.
When came to Vietnam for the first time in 2014, I was guilting of splashing out on the ‘Afternoon Tea Chocolate Buffet’ at the Sofitel Legend Metropole hotel in Hanoi. If I remember correctly, it was around 600k VND including the service charge and compared to the prices that you’d be expected to pay at many a hotel tearoom of a similar standard in the West, this price that was equivalent to about £20 seemed rather reasonable, or at least it did when you consider the sheer amount of chocolate that I scoffed while I was there.
It was an awesome experience, but for 600k VND? I can now make that amount of money stretch to covering my dining expenses for a whole week. Mind you, I had probably consumed enough calories there in one sitting to cover me for that entire week. It’s something that I would recommend that people would try; if only just the once.
When you come to Vietnam, it may also appear that the country that you have just arrived in is rather cheap by Western standards and you’ll not care about the fact that you aren’t quite getting something at its absolute lowest price. For you, it may all seem to be so cheap that you won’t even bother to look at the price. This can appear to be quite liberating at first. You are freed from that mundane task of making price comparisons all the time; if you’re an idiot, you may even start to believe that you are rich.
Once you get past that stage of treating yourself to steaks and cocktails, spa treatments, massages or whatever it is that you like to do on a near daily basis, you’ll probably decided that its time to do things in a more normal kind of way and even avoid those nice things because too much of anything can feel like it is going to be a bad thing. You may then start to appear to be stingy; but it is still possible to unwittingly indulge in lesser comforts, even when you shouldn’t.
Back home, you may want to quit smoking because if you have a 20 a day habit in the UK; that’s going to cost you at least £300 a month. Here, smoking is cheaper than eating, drinking or even breathing. 10,000 VND for a packet of cigarettes at your local VinMart means that if you are going to avoid smoking, you’ve really got to do it without any kind of financial motivation. 3 cans of local lager can set you back the equivalent of £1, but that doesn’t mean that you should necessarily consume alcohol on a daily basis either, never mind two or three happy hour cocktails.
If you have intentions of running your own operation in a foreign country, you must get an idea about true local living costs. That means eating out at the same places that they do. Avoiding paying more than you actually need to pay for anything. Becoming rather stingy and refusing to pay prices that you can easily afford, purely out of principle. Some Western people may try to convince you to accept a two-tier pricing system because small differences do no matter, but in reality they do.
Relegating normal Western things to simply being occasional luxuries is the next step. What is often offered to you is an inferior version of what you would get back home anyway, therefore you will begin to question the idea of consuming such products on a regular basis. Is it really necessary to live in an ‘expat area’ when you can live on the West of the river for a much more reasonable price?
What should make you consider things from a different perspective are the hourly wages typically offered to part-time service staff. Somebody working part-time as a waiter or waitress might struggle to purchase a cup of coffee with a hour’s pay at a typical spot favoured by tourists when he or she gets off work; yet there was some other ‘nomad page’ that boasts that you can get coffee for prices as cheap as just over $1.
If they really wanted to know what was considered cheap here; they’d get out of An Thượng once in a while. When I did visit a more Western style of cafe the other morning, I was asked by one of the managers about what I thought their use of smaller fold-up seats outside of the restaurant. They did seem like a strange choice of furniture; something that you would expect to see at the sort of cafes preferred by those who aren’t so nomadic, where cakes aren’t sold and iced tea is offered, not water.
Apparently using regular chairs can make a place look ‘too expensive’ and will not appeal to locals getting their early morning coffee. Perception is everything it seems. So while we happily throw our money around and go to anywhere that has novelty value; we forget that in this country there are expectations and standards about what constitutes good value for money, what is considered classy, or considered down to earth etc.
Sometimes we need to rein in our excessive indulgences, not to save money but to stay in touch with reality. If locals think you’re an idiot for dropping 200k on a burger; they’ve probably got a point. We might not always get the ‘local price’ but we should know what it should be.
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