I have spoken to many expat's who live in country all year round, a good friend of mine John from Bacolod City, says you need about P1500 per day to live on, thats about P45,000 a month.

John told me this pays for his house, 2 maids, he also runs a Kia Sportage around, and has a driver/bodyguard, and he eats out about once per day.

Some of you are right in your assertions that it really depends on what you want to do from one day to the next.

If you think about it, £1000.00 at the current exchange rate today of 80.50 would give you somewhere in the region of P80,000 a month, you should be able to live a comfortable lifestyle on that sort of money.

I also have consulted many long term residents in the Philippines who are also expats, they say, if you can learn to eat the local food, you stand a good chance of cutting down your budget.

For example: if you can develop a taste for fish, rice, and soy sauce, vinegar etc, and simple Filipino food, naturally your budgetary requirements move down quite considerably.

However, would you be able to do that ? I always put my hands up and am very truthful about the style of life I have when in country.

Do any of us really understand what it is like to live on a bottom line budget, chances are..all of us here at this forum do not.

Watch how the Filipino family lives, you will be very surprised how they save money on the most amazing things, for example, in our house in the provinces, we have a lovely American style fridge freezer, very nice you may all say, of course it looks nice, it dispenses lovely cold water and juice, makes ice, the problem is, its so expensive to use on electricity, that the moment my back is turned the fridge gets turned off by the caretaker.

Its not that the caretaker thinks that I cannot afford to run this electricity guzzling kano fridge !

Its just that, she thinks it costs too much to run, quite simply, her Filipino cultural cost saving measures kick in, then of course we have a nice water cooler, quite frankly, every time I turn my back, that also, gets switched off, the cost savings measures of Filipinos tend to kick in.

Also, with air conditioning which i like to run, it costs P6000 everytime I have it on for 3 weeks, again, the minute I walk out of aroom the aircon is switched off.

Costs are very imporant in determining what sort of lifestyle you will need when you arrive, doing some research into what others spend against what you think you will need is also important, especially if you will be on a fixed budget.