Hostel: $10 - $30 per night
Food: $10 - $30 per day
Alcohol: $0 - $6 per day
Transportation: $0 - $100 per day
Having enough money to pay rent when we get back to New York: PRICELESS
Most days, it is pretty easy to manage. Plus, we have developed 7 innovative tricks to make it work.
- Lower your standards. And then, lower them some more.
- Take your time. Rushing will cost you, and the point of the trip is not to do as many things as possible, but to enjoy what we do.
- Sharing is caring. It is often possible to share one dish between the 2 of us. According to our calculations, this cuts costs by approximately 50%.
- Skip meals for the wallet and the waistline. To our surprise, we are discovering that it is possible to skip a meal and survive to tell the tale. This approach also frees up funds for drinking.
- Negotiate Jeremy-style. This approach is difficult to master but, once perfected, it really pays off. A Jeremy-style negotiation begins by entering a store and identifying an object of interest. Then, you - the buyer - must quote a price that you make up out of thin air and make sure that it is laughably low. Wait for the clerk to reject it. Next, you quote that same price again. Finally, you leave the store empty-handed. And congratulate yourself, because you have won!
- Free is better than cheap. This is because something that is free will cost you nothing. For example, taking a quick taxi may cost you $1, or taking a bus will cost you 25 cents, but walking will be 100% free. Going to sleep early instead of getting wasted in a bar is also a good way to save, and we are really good at that. This is because sleep is free. Some may argue that you will in fact be paying for a hotel room to sleep. This is incorrect: we use hotel rooms mostly for AC and cold shower.
- Question Everything. Sometimes, Lonely Planet lies to fill up the pages. Some tourist attractions are just not worth it. Instead of paying to get to a touristy rooftop overlooking, just find a restaurant or bar on a tall building, and walk through it
Now, there are some perks to such a methodology (being able to pay rent when we get back for example), however we have also come to realize that there are some risks:
- Hanger. This is when you become angry from hunger. For example that one time when Jeremy got angry at Alina for eating his delicious fried banana
- Greedy Bites. A known tendency to use oversized bites when sharing, in order to get the better part of the sharing. For example that one time when Alina swallowed Jeremy’s fried banana in one bite
- Losing a Little Bit of Respect for Yourself. Sometimes it may take 15 minutes to gain 5,000 dongs in a negotiation. This equates to a whopping 25 cents. This also equates to $1 per hour, which may not seem like a very profitable line of work.
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