On June 7th, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL published the article “Moving to Bali — How a retired California couple found a new life on a Pacific island” by JUDITH SCHNEIDER.  The article was republished by Yahoo, and made a splash among the readers of all ages.  At the moment of writing this blog, the Yahoo posting has 4,560 comments!

I am not commenting on people’s reaction to this article, although I was surprised to see such negativity.

As I wrote in my post, Bali is not on the list of retirement havens anymore. It was a very affordable place.  Thanks to the Elizabeth Gilbert’s book/movie “Eat, Pray, Love”, Bali has changed.

According to JUDITH SCHNEIDER, their monthly budget is around $1,000. “A reasonable monthly budget for home maintenance, transportation, food and entertainment is about $1,000.

When it comes to cooking—and cleaning and all of those other daily time-consumers—we hire Balinese help. Our cook, who is paid $75 a month, shops in the market at 6:30 a.m. and prepares all of our meals from scratch. It’s very healthy. Sundays we are on our own, and that is our brunch and pizza day. (We wouldn’t want to forget our roots.) A meal costs about $15 with no alcohol”.

I Google and found that you can rent a nice villa for $1,000/mo (long term rentals). For $1,500/mo you could have a much better, almost luxury,  accommodation.  So, on $2.0K-$2.5K/mo ($30K/year) you can live a “lawyer’s lifestyle”.  How much do you spend per month/year now? I am sure that more than $2.5K…

Later in the article you learn: “No, Bali isn’t perfect. Medical care, for the most part, is substandard when compared with the U.S.; thus, expats typically have evacuation insurance to a country chosen by their insurer, typically Singapore or Australia. (Fortunately, some excellent clinics are starting to appear.)” 

I enjoyed the article and author’s bravery to share insides of their lifestyle. We will visit  Bali one day, however  Bali will not be on the list of our retirement havens.