Cheapest place in the World (No tourists here)

And when I came here, the per capita income was $800 per year. $800 a year. And I was getting I was I had money to spend of about $900 a month. I was a catch. >> More than 10x. >> Yeah, exactly. I had an algorithm for finding a wife. Not long after that, I said, "Okay, okay. Let's get married. Marry you. Marry you. I'm going to marry you." It always cracks me up when I'm reading the comments to your videos where somebody says, "No westerner could possibly live in Cambodia for under a thousand a month. It's absolutely impossible." >> And I said, "What are you you eating peanut butter sandwiches and and Texas steaks every day?" I was not yet old enough to get my social security pension. Freaking run out of money. And so we were po we was po. So I've been po in Cambodia. And my beloved wife stuck with me. This is Dan of Vagabon Awake and today we have Jim on the channel and we're delighted to have Jim. Jim, >> thanks. Pleasure. Thanks. >> Pleasure Dan. Pleasure everyone. [laughter] >> So, we are excited about Jim because we met him just the other day in a coffee shop and he's been in Cambodia for 12 years.

>> And that makes him, I would say, the godfather of Americans in Cambodia. >> There there are a lot of guys who've been here longer than me, but they're not going to talk to you. >> What part of the USA you from? What part of Cambodia are you living now? >> Uh, born in the United States, later got Australian citizenship. I I learned when I moved to Australia later that I'm a Yank. I am as yank as Yank can be. Uh, moved to Australia with my family after that, my wife and four kids. And we really learned from that experience living there for about five or six years that America was home, not Australia. I got nothing against Australia. Love Australia, right? Um, I have not cancelled my Australian citizenship. I may yet go back there, but 40 years in America just made me an American. >> Okay. >> And so I went back to America and, you know, went along from one various job to another until I uh until my beloved wife died, my first wife Patty in 2012. I was absolutely berefted, right?

griefstricken, unable to operate for about a year, year and a half. But I was getting close to retirement and between 401k and and various other things. I could retire until I I had enough to keep me going if I lived super cheap until I could get my social security pension. So I said, "Screw it. I'm going to move to Southeast Asia." I I not only missed my wife, I missed being married. I missed having that close emotional connection, that bond that's been part of human society since caveman. Nobody wanted to marry this. Nobody in America, there were no women in the Western world that wanted to marry this. It didn't matter how nice I was. It didn't matter unless I was making a massive income, which I wasn't, I was not going to find a Western woman that wanted to marry this. Now, that sounds terrible, but I will mention that before my first wife passed away, cuz we knew she was going. She said, "I have spent 25 years, that's 10, 25, that's a lot of years, training you, Jim, to be a good husband, a good man, and a good father." >> Yeah. Yeah.

>> Okay. It's been a lot of work, and I do not want to see that work go to waste. >> Very nice. >> You need to marry someone else and start a new family. >> Wow, that's great. >> Keeping in mind that two of our four children were hers by a previous marriage. So, she understood I could be a good stepdad. I wanted to marry somebody who could have kids, start a new family as my as my uh wife pointed out. That means, you know, below 25 or at least 30 or I decided I was going to get married again. Couldn't do it in the west. People told me very good things about Southeast Asia. And I did my research. Everybody said the best the easiest place to start was Thailand. And so I started in Chiang Mai, started there and said, "Wow, this is amazingly easy. It's so easy to live in Mai. It has been an international tourist and expat center for so long >> that you can just slide in there with without any lubrication whatsoever. Just you're right in. That was 2014. >> Okay. 2014. >> Okay. The Thai women, the Thai culture had been so exposed to American servicemen in uh the Vietnam War and then expats and sex tourists and everything that they were not as open to this getting married thing. just couldn't connect. So, I bought a motorcycle and drove the motorcycle to Cambodia cuz I've been a motorcyclist all my life in January, like the 1st of January 2015. How I met my wife.

Remember, I came to Cambodia cuz I was looking for a wife. I had a very detailed spec for what I was looking for. >> Sure. Sure. >> And I swear to God, it's as if she she had written the spec. Not too old. His goal was to have kids, you know, under 30, beautiful, obviously. Kind heart. The most important thing I really should have listed first was a kind heart because I'm an old fat guy and right you'd have to have a kind heart to put up with me. Right? And so that has to be number one because otherwise none of the others would come through. >> Preferably an orphan. Everybody talks about the savior complex that the western man's going to come in and save, you know, the poor family, the poor girl or whatever. Well, why not, right? If you've got the choice between marrying into some rich Cambodian family that doesn't need you or give a about you, >> right, where you're an embarrassment to them, >> okay, oh, my daughter married a bang and I couldn't stop her, right? >> Or marrying into some rural rice farming family where your social security pension is a significant improvement of an instability of income, right? I mean, you're getting money every month, baby.

That's not something most Cambodian rice farmers can can claim, >> right? They're getting money two at most three times a year. And often the harvest, the rain doesn't fall at the right time. It's the income is just terribly unsteady. >> And when I came here, the per capita income was $800 per year and the equivalent of a family for a family of like four and a half. $800 a year. And I was getting I was I had money to spend of about $900 a month. So yes, a girl from a a relatively poor provincial family was on the list. An an orphan was on the list. Need more help. Also, I wouldn't have to argue with her father being this old guy, right? Cambodia's culture respects elderly people, the old people. I'd slide right into that if I'm sort of the pseudo father and the husband, right? I'm I'm gaining, you know, prestige through both, right? Why not take that advantage if it's available to you? Yeah, >> a relatively small number of brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles because you marry if you marry the girl, you're marrying the whole family. And as both the father and the husband in effect filling both roles, I'm expected to pay, right? Cow gets sick, that's on me.

That's the deal. >> And that really freaks out a lot of Westerners. They think they're being taken for a ride. No, that's the deal. >> And if you come into it with with some other expectation, you're not going to be happy here. and the woman you marry is not going to be happy with you and it's going to cause a lot of friction. Orphan, not a lot of brothers, sisters, etc. And if it's she's an orphan, that sounds very calculating and everything. And it was. I don't think that's a bad thing. I mean, think of all the women in New York who are saying he's got to be over 6 feet tall, make six figure income, and have a six-pack, >> right? And and and that's just considered to be totally okay. So, I moved to Cmre, okay? this town >> because cmreap is the center of Cambodia's tourist industry >> and that means that money is flowing into CMRE from all over the world and spilling out of the pockets of the tourists right they don't realize the extent to which they are an absolute gold mine for Cambodia all this tourist money meant that there were great opportunities for kids to go to school Cambodian kids to go to school learn to be in in hospitality learn to to supply the tourist industry with receptionists and waitresses and housekeepers and general business managers and and everything and work the way up and then go to school, go to university with the money that tourists are just throwing at you, right? They leave you a tip that's more money than you would have made in a

month otherwise. My algorithm, I had an algorithm for finding a wife and it was very straightforward. Don't go to girly bars. The girls there are not bad. They've just had really really bad luck. >> Yeah. >> Very often they will have married a guy from or they will have gotten pregnant and then married a guy from their home village. Super common. He then dies in a moto accident. He gets drunk on a Saturday night. He's driving back to the wife and he gets in a wreck. He's not wearing a helmet. He's dead. She now has two kids to raise. Right. And you can't make enough money in the garment industry, which at the time was making $80 to $100 a month. A lot of which went to support you. And you're supposed to send money back to grandma to raise your two kids. It's not enough money. And so the girls drift into the only thing they can do to earn enough money to support themselves, which is prostitution. Not bad girls, bad circumstances. So I didn't go there. So I my algorithm was to go to to stay in a guest house for at least the first couple of weeks, couple of months, and then go in a spiral. That is in a spiral. If you'd like my free ebook about how I fired my boss and traveled the world for 17 years and how I pay for things, come to Vagabond Buddha and grab the free ebook and then go in a spiral out from my guest house, visiting every other guest house within walking distance, >> speaking to the receptionists there that were usually half male and half female, targeting the female receptionists and saying, "Hello, I'm looking for another room or a replacement for the room I've

got. I'm paying about $13 a night where I'm staying now. >> Can you show me? Do you have a room in that same general price range? And if so, can you show it with to me? And why receptionist? Because they were selected for speaking reasonably prof. And they would take me to the room with chaperon. That's the world. And so they show me and I ask about the room and the bed and the bathroom and were you born in CMRE or did you come here from another province? What province are you from? >> Right. what does your family do for a living? All that. And suddenly we're having a conversation. And if I liked the girl, I would then say, "Hey, this was really fun. Thank you for your help. Can I invite you and your chaperon friends to lunch at my expense at whatever restaurant nearby here you you want." Now, as I later learned from Sam, she was getting paid 88 $80 a month to work a full-time shift as a receptionist. And she was trying to send as much of that home to her family because they were depending on her.

She's the source of income, right? They're also farmers, but they've got to pay for seed and fertilizer and pesticide and everything, right? That's a very iffy business to begin with, right? And you got to have money up front. So, basically, every dime of this $80 a month has to go home to the family. To be invited to lunch at a nice restaurant or whatever restaurant they want is a great thing. And not just her, but the chaperons as well. So, I do that a few times. Within a week, I had met Sam. She was one of she was a receptionist at one of the hotels. She had brought a lot of her friends to lunch which I said please do invite many of your friends and maybe one of them would be better. I zeroed in on Sam within like the first week because she was the kindest, hardest girl and all of her friends clearly deferred to her in issues of advice and kindness and I'm having problems with a boyfriend and what should I do and everything. So I quit going to search for other girls after I met Sam. I said, "Look, you're working these two jobs, really long hours, low pay. How about you keep one job, but I you quit the other job and I pay you twice as much money for half as many hours to come sit with me in the lobby of hotels or restaurants or whatever with a chaperone if you want to teach me kai. And so we made that deal, you know, asking her about this pronunciation and this letter and all this stuff and then okay and what does your family do again and how are they doing this year and how many people are there and the by the end of the lesson we would just be talking about our family that you were very confused by this because clearly I did not want to

learn to speak to my not long after that I said okay okay let's get married you marry you I'm not going to marry you but it was on the table now marrying me didn't fit into that terribly Well, but it would definitely be the best thing for her family, right? Because even a the highest paid person at those kind of hotels is like 500 a month Cambodian person. My wife is sitting right over there saying, [laughter] "You should at least come on to the camera and wave." >> Hello. It always cracks me up when I'm reading the comments to your videos or to other frugal wanderer videos or something like that where somebody says, "No westerner could possibly live in Cambodia for under a,000 a month. It's absolutely impossible." >> And I said, "What are you you eating peanut butter sandwiches and and Texas steaks every day? Uh you living in an apartment like with a pool and air conditioning and hot water and so forth?" Clearly, Cambodians can live on less than that. When I first moved here, as I said, the per capita income was $800 a year.

>> It's now $1,800 a year. Right. >> Right. And if you look at household income and divide it by the number of people per household, it's also about $1,800 a year per person. >> Right. >> And so they're clearly living on $1,800 a year, which is $150 a month. $150 a month per person. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> So the idea that you can't live on $600 a month is factually incorrect. >> Yeah. The only thing is you've got to move closer to living like a kama. >> Yeah. >> Rather than living like a western person. >> If you insist on eating western food that's been imported from the west and therefore is even more expensive than it is in the west, then the only thing you're saving money on is rent. And if you can get an apartment for $65 a month, which I did when I first got here, then you can buy a lot of Western food because your rent is so low. The rent is the variable. And so I always recommend people spend the first few weeks in a guest house or something, but as soon as possible after that, live like a kami. Only eat kama food, live in a kamaya apartment. Anything under $100 a month.

>> $100 a month is 23 of the income of the average kami person. It's a ridiculous amount. Try to find something for 50 and work your way up. The way to do this, by the way, new subject, the way to live cheap in Cambodia, you hire a kama tuk tuk driver who speaks English. You pay him 20 bucks to take you around all morning, half the day, or all afternoon. Love it. Okay. And you say, "I want to see your apartment and the apartment that the other tuk tuk drivers live in." Okay. I want to see apartments like that. You used to not be able to rent kami style apartments as a foreigner because it put a lot of paperwork burden on on the landlord. Now, there's an app the foreigners required to do it themselves, which means the the kamay places are perfectly happy to rent you for $70, something they would normally rent out to a kamaya for $50. Okay, it's not going to have a hot water heater. You don't need one. It's freaking hot here. Senica, one of Rome's richest men, was the tutor to Nero and an adviser to Nero right? >> Uh and he was a famous stoic and he said despite being one of the richest men, inevitably he would fear losing his wealth. what would happen to him after that?

>> Yeah. Yeah. >> And so he said about 3 days out of every month he would live in absolute poverty, eating the most roughest, cheapest food, wearing the cheapest uh clothing, sleeping on the dirt because once you accustom yourself to living in poverty, >> you can't be afraid of it anymore. >> Your fear is gone. >> That's right. Recommendation is live absolutely as cheap as possible, which by definition is $150 a month. That's your target. Aim for $150 a month by following the tuk tuk drivers advice. Renting the cheapest place you can. Eating where the tuk tuk drivers eat. Buying clothes where the tuk tuk drivers shop. Except that will never work if you're a big fat westerner like me. [laughter] You cannot buy westernized clothes here in CMR. This is both absorbent, but it breathes super well. And you can see it's not wet at all. Right. I've been sitting here. >> I'm mine, you can see, is wet. You're dry, >> right? And it's it's dry because it evaporates immediately off the cloth.

And so tensil is a way Lizoel is a way better fabric for the tropics. Wow. >> And so every five years I upgrade my wardrobe. I have seven shirts exactly like this. Five pairs of pants exactly like this. So Kensel Lizoel. >> So you've been here 12 years. Like what's a typical month for you? And are you you're still in Sim Reap or have you moved? >> No, I moved to my beloved wife's village. >> Okay. which is again a tip for everybody here. I'm the luckiest guy ever because I have had two great marriages and and this one's even better. I sent you a link to a document called the rules for girls is chbabai. Chbab pro is rules for boys and these are the traditional rules for men and women in kamay society. The kamay empire once covered most of Vietnam, most of Laos, most of Thailand and so on. If you marry a Kamay girl, she has a family, she has history. family probably has land. At least they have a house. Live with her. Number one way to adapt to my society is live in it. I'm a nerd. My brain lives on the internet. So, it doesn't matter where my body lives. My body could live anywhere as long as I have internet access. And because we're living in a rural rice farming village, the family grows its own rice. We're not buying rice. So rice, which would otherwise cost about a dollar a kilo for reasonably good stuff, we're paying more like 30 to 50 cents for. The Cambodian diet is roughly rice with toppings.

>> Yeah. >> And the toppings can be eggs or, you know, some sauce with chicken or some sauce with it's like French cooking. It's always some It's always a topping with sauce. So if you live in the village, all that stuff's made locally. The rice is grown locally. The chickens are raised locally. The the fruit and veg are raised locally. Everything's local. and therefore it's not exposed to the the petrol prices. It's not exposed to the international prices of anything. And so there's been very little inflation in the 10 years I've been here in the cost of basic food stuff in the West. Prices have gone up by like 25% just in the last four or 5 years. Realel is still 4,000 real to the dollar, but the local prices haven't been inflated in either dollar or real terms the way they have elsewhere except international things like beer. All right, which is an international commodity price. Cigarettes, fuel, health insurance, health insurance for expats. Don't buy health insurance, >> okay? >> But don't write a moto because if you write a moto, you are exposing yourself to the number one cause of death and injury among Cambodians or and it's even higher among expats. So the best health insurance you can buy in Cambodia is taking a tuk tuk instead of riding a moto yourself. Now I'm saying that after just having a acute appendicitis health emergency healthcare in Cambodia on average is terrible. Now that's the reason that all the pharmaceuticals don't require a doctor's uh prescription. And there's an old saying the the pharmacist is the doctor to the poor.

>> Yeah. >> And that's definitely true here. Okay. So it's worth going to either the westernies or the seriously accredited Cambodianarmacies because then you're getting what you're paying for. So I had acute appendicitis, >> right? >> All right. Being a tough guy, right? I don't look like it, but I was once a tough guy. >> I thought, well, it's just trapped gas or something other pain. So I waited a couple of days before I went to the the I went to the Handa Medical Center, Haruhisa, a Japanese philanthropist who sponsors good hospitals around the world. It's the one reliable hospital in Kong Badamong, the big city provincial center. Yeah. >> The Kong Badamong is the city of Badam Bong, which is the capital of the province of Badamong. Okay. >> But it was closed >> and that's where the university is. >> No, it's it's associated with this one philanthropist guy from Japan. >> Okay. Okay. >> Thank you, Haruhisa. But it was closed. It had become so popular they needed to expand. >> Okay. >> And so it was closed for its expansion. Right. That's a good reason to be closed. And so I went back to the village for a couple of days before my beloved wife said, "No, this is bad. You must go to a real doctor." So she got me in a taxi, took me to the uh Royal Anchor International Hospital, which is the only hospital worth going to in northwestern Cambodia. That's here in Camry. And I got there, they examined me and said, "You have a ruptured appendix." And put me into emergency surgery. And the doctor told me later, "At that point, I figured you had a

50/50 chance because after he opened me up a little bit and was looking around with the laparoscope, he says, "I got to make a bigger incision because you had now have internal gangrine." >> Wow. >> Your internal organs are rotting due to the bacteria released into your body by the ruptured appendix. >> Yes. It cost, right? It was not cheap. 10,000 bucks. >> 10,000 bucks to deal. How long were you in the hospital? >> Uh, quite most of a month. The appendicitis, if it had been nipped in the bud before it ruptured. Sure. >> Would have been in and out. >> Oh, yeah. >> Right. Laparoscopic surgery through a little keyhole, nip it out, suck it. No problem. >> Maybe not even overnight. It would have been out a patient surgery. >> In and out. So, it was a while on serious antibiotics to get me over >> all that infection. A lot of people will tell you buy health insurance. Right. >> I'm I'm more of the keep a significant wad of cash. So, I have now in excess of $50,000 stored up. >> Okay. >> Right. And but you're in Sem Reef now, but you actually live in Batima. That's a typical month for you all in in Batima.

>> Uh so it's about 2,000 a month. Okay. >> But keep in mind that's not just me. >> Yeah. >> That's not just me and her. >> Yeah. >> That's her and me. That's her, me, grandma, uh her sister that we're still supporting. The sister's two kids and my adult son >> who's living with us also. Okay. >> So I'm supporting seven people on that 2,000 a month. Great. >> Right. So you know, you do the math there. That's not very much per person, but because it's all in the same household. >> Yeah. >> Right. That we're not paying rent. It's the ancestral family land, right? I built the house when I first moved in. So there's no, you know, continuing housing payments. >> Electricity for the for aircon that we're I use a lot of these days. Uh so it's about $100 a month for electricity. About 15 10 or 15 per month for city water. Internet we had up to 55. >> We're dropping it down to 30. food about 500 per month again for seven people. So less than 100 a month per person. We're out in the middle of freaking nowhere from a rest western perspective. It's not like I can get Uber Eats to deliver to me. There's no Uber Eats there.

>> You're in Cambodia. >> Yeah, I am in rural Cambodia at this point. I'm not in the western bubble. So I'm eating Kamay food every day, three meals a day. >> Jim, thanks for coming on the channel. We really appreciate it. It's amazing. And then from there you go. That ending is from Animal House. >> Animal House. Thank you. 1983. >> Chung and I have been all over Cambodia and we've interviewed people all over Cambodia. Watch our Cambodia playlist right here and thanks for watching. [music]