Cost of Living in Vietnam

$1000 assuming Saigon because of the forum you selected. Maybe less but you need a safety margin.

Search the whole Vietnam forum for past opinions. Put in "cost of living" WITH the quotes.

Hi,

I agree with gobot.
Another town outside of Saigon, could be twice cheaper, about 500 $ per month.
True, many existing informations on this forum already.

saitama85 wrote:

Probably eat out everyday.

Cost of living estimates interest me.

To minimize the cost of eating out every day, that means quán ăn prices (tiny restaurant and street dining), probably about the same in every city. Let's guess. 

No dessert or other beverages because we are doing minimum cost.
Advantage: you can lose some weight.
Yes I added snacks because let's be realistic. Also a weekly splurge for mental health.

25.000 breakfast bowl of something
25.000 coffee
25.000 lunch + free tra da (iced tea)
20.000 snack or fruit
40.000 dinner + free tra da
30.000 Pick up something from FamilyMart because you are starving
-----------
165.000 daily total
x 31 days
-----------
5115.000 monthly
+ 400.000 Once a week, you allow yourself to splurge, e.g. MacDonald's every Saturday nite
-----------
5515.000 VND = US$ 243 monthly for food eating out only

Then you have to ask yourself, is this the lifestyle you want to live? At $400 a month you would have a lot more choices.

DELAFON wrote:

Another town outside of Saigon, could be twice cheaper, about 500 $ per month.
True, many existing informations on this forum already.

Yeah, well it appears that the cost of eating out is going to be the limiting factor, so $500 sounds too low. To hit $500 I think you need a roommate, and shop at the market instead of eating at restos. 

gobot wrote:

saitama85 wrote:

Probably eat out everyday.

Cost of living estimates interest me.

To minimize the cost of eating out every day, that means quán ăn prices (tiny restaurant and street dining), probably about the same in every city. Let's guess. 

No dessert or other beverages because we are doing minimum cost.
Advantage: you can lose some weight.
Yes I added snacks because let's be realistic. Also a weekly splurge for mental health.

25.000 breakfast bowl of something
25.000 coffee
25.000 lunch + free tra da (iced tea)
20.000 snack or fruit
40.000 dinner + free tra da
30.000 Pick up something from FamilyMart because you are starving
-----------
165.000 daily total
x 31 days
-----------
5115.000 monthly
+ 400.000 Once a week, you allow yourself to splurge, e.g. MacDonald's every Saturday nite
-----------
5515.000 VND = US$ 243 monthly for food eating out only

Then you have to ask yourself, is this the lifestyle you want to live? At $400 a month you would have a lot more choices.

DELAFON wrote:

Another town outside of Saigon, could be twice cheaper, about 500 $ per month.
True, many existing informations on this forum already.

Yeah, well it appears that the cost of eating out is going to be the limiting factor, so $500 sounds too low. To hit $500 I think you need a roommate, and shop at the market instead of eating at restos. 

Thanks for the info.  I really appreciate it.
Saigon is not set in stone. Looking at HCMC as well. Goal is to be under 800$/mo for Rent and Food. lol

saitama85 wrote:

Saigon is not set in stone. Looking at HCMC as well.

Saigon is HCMC,

or rather, HCMC is Saigon, since Saigon was here first. 

Saigon was, is, and will always be Saigon, no matter what aka it's forced to have.

Ciambella wrote:

Saigon is HCMC,

or rather, HCMC is Saigon, since Saigon was here first. 

Saigon was, is, and will always be Saigon, no matter what aka it's forced to have.

Far be it from me to contradict you on recent Vietnamese history but wouldn't it be more accurate to say that Saigon is part of what is now HCMC.  My understanding is that Saigon encompassed what is now D1, D3, D10 and maybe a bit more.  In the 60's places like Thu Duc and Go Vap were separate governmental entities with farmland in between.  I might add that using the term Saigon is not something that only VK hold to.  I have heard plenty of locals born after 1975 using the term Saigon as synonymous with the term Downtown.

You're absolutely correct, geographically speaking. 

Saigon was a small city, Le Petit Paris as it was known.  The hubbub that is a large part of Saigon now was not Saigon then.  Thủ Đức belonged to the City of Gia Định, far enough from Saigon to be the location of one of the four national military academies (for officers), the same way Gò Vấp was the location of Quang Trung, one of the national military schools for NCOs. 

There were 11 quận back then, none of them was half as large as the quận of today, still, Saigon wasn't only the city center as the children of post '75 are believing.  Phú Nhuận was part of Saigon then and still is.  My parents' last home was there; my present home is also there, on the same street, although the name is now a strange one.  I have been drowning in memories every day since my coming back.

People of my generation and the generation before mine have been holding on to Saigon for decades because it's the only thing we have left of our old identity.  Saigon was/is not Q1.  It was our lives, but in another 15 or 20 more years,  even that would be gone forever.

Ciambella wrote:

Saigon is HCMC

I am not an expert, but I just never liked calling it HCMC, I suppose for many of the reasons viet kieu don't. And I prefer historical names, at least historical to my upbringing: Saigon, Burma, Bombay, Karachi.

Geographically in 1975, Saigon and HCMC were identical. If one were hidebound and rejected the new name, then 40 years later, Saigon and HCMC are still identical and lots bigger.

I don't know, but curious to find out: is the post-1975 generation taught that Saigon is just a relic neighborhood of the current wondrous HCMC? If so, one more another reason to cling to my narrow-mindedness!

Regarding the land area, I just had to google "saigon map 1970s" and this link from Saigoneer features a regional map from 1968. To my eye, 7 years before the fall, this looks like one contiguous expanding city, not a group of smaller centers.

Follow the Saigoneer link to a 4meg image. This is just a thumbnail:

gobot wrote:

I am not an expert, but I just never liked calling it HCMC, I suppose for many of the reasons viet kieu don't.

I cannot bring myself to say the new name. 

Not just with VK, but my relatives and acquaintance and strangers whom I meet daily, most of them have never left the country, till see the city as Saigon.

More than that, everyone call the streets by both names.   Asking for directions to Nhà Thờ Đức Bà (Notre Dame), for instance, you would heard:  "Take Nam Kỳ Khởi Nghĩa/old Công Lý, turn left at Võ Thị Sáu or Hiền Vương, turn right at Pasteur, turn left at Lê Duẩn or Thống Nhất."  Not one day since our moving here that I haven't heard both old and new street names mentioned at the same time.  Destroyed landmarks are also alive the way their names are being used, not because of nostalgia, but because their existences are still solid to Saigon citizens.  It helps that *many* restaurants are still doing good business on the same locations for 60 or 70 years, serving the same food by the same families.  They are the soul of Saigon, the proof that the old heart of the city is still beating strongly no matter what new hands are at the helm.

One of the problems with how cities are defined by legal incorporation in the US is that they often do not reflect true economic units.  Hence the suburbs are separate cities and often have a stronger tax base than the central city which then degrades.  Detroit is the classic example. 

It seems that in Vietnam and other countries in Asia, the city limits are set by a higher level of government.  As the city grows economically, it swallows its smaller surrounding neighbors.  In Vietnam they seems to have gone beyond the present into the future, including the outer districts and Huyen.  The other thing that is unique to HCMC and a few other cities is that they are not part of a province.  The name of course is a political matter and may not change even as Vietnam evolves from Communist authority.

gobot wrote:

To my eye, 7 years before the fall, this looks like one contiguous expanding city, not a group of smaller centers.

It was one city with one center.  No small centers in different quận.  In fact, no one back then gave the slightest attention to which quận or phường they lived in.  Phường and quận are used only for governmental purpose, not to indicate the exact location of our homes.

Now, the same street numbers can be found on two or three different phường of the same street, and on the same location of the same street are two different phường, depending on whether it's on the West or East side of the street. 

For example, the nail salon I wanted to find is in phường 1 while the shop directly across the street from it belongs to phường 19, and bears a number that is not at all correspondent with the nail salon's number.  After spending 45 minutes walking from one end of a very long street to another trying to make sense of the mess, I wanted to forget my nails and instead, find the urban planners who designed that illogical system and whack him over the head a few times.

Absolutely agree on the street numbering system or lack thereof.  Numbers seem to change each time you transition to a new phường and sometimes the name changes too.

In Honolulu, we are blessed with a very logical system.  Each major cross street starts a new series of 100 so that a house at say 1050 will be in about the same relative location on all the parallel streets.  One of the few well thought out things in Hawaii. 

At least Vietnam may be better than Tokyo.  I have never been there but I have read that many homes have no address numbers at all but only verbal descriptions of what neighborhood they are in.

The most confusing street number I have had to find was in Tan Binh. I went to the street with my secretary, she couldn't find the business address we were looking for.I started thinking about how things get done here, so I started looking for the same name coming off the street we were on.  Sure enough, half way along the street there was a street that went off at a right angle, this also had the same street name. It then went for about 300 metres and again off at a right angle, the same street name. This took us about an hour to figure out, luckily we found what we needed.

Good luck finding these houses in Ho Chi Minh City
Wanna try?

Spouse and I are living in a very small apartment building with the address as 123 Cư Xá ABCDEFG.  The building is located on a thoroughfare (wide enough for two cars passing each other), not a hẻm. 

The term Cư Xá appeared in Saigon real estate in the early '60 when Cư Xá Lữ Gia was introduced as the first of its kind.  Back then, cư xá meant a master planned community on a very large scale, with variable lot sizes for detached or semi-detached houses.  It wasn't meant to be multi-family residential or multi-dwelling unit as it is now.   

Even though this apartment building isn't at all obscured, you would have a very difficult time finding it if you rely on its street name or its given title.  As a common practice in the last 20 or so years, this thoroughfare carries the same name as the major street from which it springs (read Colin's post above), except that the name isn't shown on any sign at any corner. 

My niece and I are very familiar with this neighbourhood, but when we first came to look at the apartment, we stood a few steps from the beginning of the thoroughfare for a good half an hour without knowing that's where we're supposed to enter.  We checked with the post office located 700m away, and not one person in the office knew where the address or the building was on the map.

Ciambella wrote:

....... except that the name isn't shown on any sign at any corner. 
..............We checked with the post office, located 700 m away, and not one person in the office knew where the address or the building was on the map.

This points to two other problems.  I know Vietnam is not a rich country but I really think streets signs at intersections would be within the government's means.  They exist but are rare.  I expect that most Vietnamese stay pretty close to home or else travel to work on routes that they know well.  I tried to use maps as a way to learn giving directions in English, using phrases like "turn right on xxxxx street." "go straight ahead," and "it's on your left."  To my surprise, I found that some of my most English-fluent students had a hard time, as they did not have the base skill of reading a map of their own area.  They may only know how to go to school and back on their xe đạp and are told never to go off the beaten path.  There seems to be a lingering fear of the unknown perhaps a residual from the war and the 75-86 period.  I know my wife is very reluctant to try out new routes.  As a middle schooler where I grew up, we knew every street for miles from our home.

The other is the VNPT generally.  I know Vietnam's cash culture means that people seldom or never conduct financial dealings by mail, and the cell phone/email culture like everywhere else in the world means they no longer write letters, but really the local VNPT should know every house in its assigned area.   That's just incompetence.  Maybe they bought their jobs.

colinoscapee wrote:

Sure enough, half way along the street there was a street that went off at a right angle, this also had the same street name. It then went for about 300 metres and again off at a right angle, the same street name.

That's the practice used by the Council to Rename the Streets (Hội Đồng Đặt Đổi Tên Đường), a governmental department created in 1995 for the sole purpose of changing street names in Saigon.  The Council of 20 members claimed that there were not enough names to give to all the streets (*), that they needed more than 2100 new names and couldn't think of any.  Therefore, they decided that many streets in the same neighbourhood would share the name of a major street if they're connected to said street at some point.  Their other incredible idea:  Streets were given the names 1, 2, 3, etc.  Less effort to think, fewer strokes of paint, less labour cost.  Win-win-win.

To be fair, the Council didn't have the support of People's Assembly (Hội Đồng Nhân Dân) who ranked everything related to streets (naming, repairing, cleaning, etc) the lowest priority, so it's not just that the Council's brainpower was limited, their hands were also tied.


(*):  Most streets already had perfect names for many decades and needed no changing.  For instance, there wasn't anything wrong with the old name Công Lý (Justice) , but now it's Nam Kỳ Khởi Nghĩa (Revolution of the South).  Is revolution actually better for society than justice?

I would like to have lived here when streets and parks weren't named for communist generals and revolutionary martyrs. Actually I would learn a lot if someone made a map with all streets translated to english.

Ciambella, if you are not busy for the next year...? 

Oh, I'm not too busy, but translating and explaining the old and new names may spike my blood pressure, especially when the work would remind me that many of the erased names were extremely important to Vietnamese history and culture.  The fabled forefathers, the warriors who fought against centuries of Chinese invaders, the great philosopher, the anti-colonial poet, the cultural researcher who spent his life collecting and categorising proverbs and folk songs, etc. and etc., they're all erased from street names, together with 5000 years of recorded history.

Let's talk about food, visa, banking, bad English teachers, and extremely frugal Vietnamese women instead.   

I just want to make a general comment on how far this thread has gone  and how much I  it.  Apologies to the OP but at least I think his questions were answered in the first 4 replies.  Some of the best threads are where people engage in a free flow of ideas.

Ciambella, It is always such a great pleasure to read your post. Your like a walking textbook of Vietnam past. Keep its up....even when off topic it is great info. I have always been mazed at the drunk that does the building numbering here. Never have quite understood the purpose of putting a number on a building. There is no sequence. On one side of the street might be single digit numbers and the other ones in the 300's. Then the great folks who decide to straighten out the crazy numbering system and the building keeps the old number and the new number ( and the new number still makes no sense). Job creation is what they call out I guess.

THIGV wrote:

I just want to make a general comment on how far this thread has gone  and how much I  it.  Apologies to the OP but at least I think his questions were answered in the first 4 replies.  Some of the best threads are where people engage in a free flow of ideas.

Started this  about 4 years ago, maybe time to revive it "The No Topic Thread"

https://www.expat.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=266038

Rick

There is a street in Go Vap that has a numbering system that would confuse a mathematician.I spent 40 mins driving up and down this street looking for a certain shop, the numbers had no order and it felt like there had been a lucky dip when they gave out numbers. The street was a combination of old and new numbers.

I lived in a house that was in a hem in Thu Duc. Our hem address ran off a street that was 500 metres away. The problem was that our hem ran off Duong 3, but our address was Duong 4. On Duong 4 there was a small lane that only bikes could travel on. When ringing a taxi we had to give directions, as the taxi would then have to drive another 2 klms just to arrive at our registered address.

colinoscapee wrote:

There is a street in Go Vap that has a numbering system that would confuse a mathematician.

Do you recall the name of the street?

THIGV wrote:

colinoscapee wrote:

There is a street in Go Vap that has a numbering system that would confuse a mathematician.

Do you recall the name of the street?

Not realy, as it was about 8 years ago. Im sure I could find it again if needed.

THIGV wrote:

Ciambella wrote:

Saigon is HCMC,

or rather, HCMC is Saigon, since Saigon was here first. 

Saigon was, is, and will always be Saigon, no matter what aka it's forced to have.

Far be it from me to contradict you on recent Vietnamese history but wouldn't it be more accurate to say that Saigon is part of what is now HCMC.  My understanding is that Saigon encompassed what is now D1, D3, D10 and maybe a bit more.  In the 60's places like Thu Duc and Go Vap were separate governmental entities with farmland in between.  I might add that using the term Saigon is not something that only VK hold to.  I have heard plenty of locals born after 1975 using the term Saigon as synonymous with the term Downtown.

WHAT was the O/p asking for?????????

MarkinNam wrote:

WHAT was the O/p asking for?????????

The OP's last question, or rather, statement, was "Saigon is not set in stone. Looking at HCMC as well", which sprang my reply that Saigon was the old name of HCMC.

And the off-topic conversation took off from there. 

I too call it Saigon, as do most of my older VN friends.