It is a great place to live on a budget. There are draw backs the chances of your foreign insurance being accepted are next to none. If you are a foreigner, you can buy a condo, but not land and the resell market in condos is next to nothing with as many as keep being built.
However with that said if you can adapt to the weather and are in relatively good health and have a retirement income it is a wonderful place. I have a nice comfortable 2 bed 1 bath house in a gated subdivision I rent for P6500 or roughly $130 my water bill has never been over $5 and my electricity runs about $40, though if I ran my aircon all day every day it would be another $100 to $150. /*Believe it or not you can get by with just a fan and cool drinks*/ My fiber internet and home phone runs P1900 or $38. My HD cable with HBO is $20. Streaming services are about the same price as in the US and an additional $10 to $15 for a VPN app is needed to watch all the American shows, but worth it both for cyber security and because some things like my American bank throw fits when I try and log in from abroad.
Incidentals I live in the northern area of Davao. Downtown is 30 minutes by taxi and costs me around $3 at the worst of times. My most expensive taxi ride was $10 going from my home in the north to a restaurant in the southwest of the city while fighting rush hour traffic and that was $10, it was $6 on the way home well after midnight. Tricycles can be had at the bottom of my hill for p20 anywhere close like the street market, 7–11 or the Jeepney terminal. A Jeepney is 20 minutes to the mall or 45 to downtown and costs me P10 or about 20 cents to go into downtown.
When you hear about the mall here n the Pinas, that is where everything is located from the hardware store to the grocery store and everything in between since it is much easier to cool a mall than a bunch of small buildings like an American strip mall where you would find all the incidental places in. My wife and I spend P5000 once a month and another P1000 to P1500 per week on groceries. We don’t eat excessive amounts of food or a lot of expensive meats at home. We save that for going out to nicer restaurants. This is actually more food than we need, so we send things home with her mother when she comes to visit about once a month.
A luxury buffet costs about $12 per person for lunch or $15-$18 for supper and on the weekends but well worth it. A luxury buffet will have huge amounts of delicious meats often including roast beef, lamb, lechon, and fine seafood. My favorite midweek lunch buffet has grill it at your table and Peking Duck, as well as some other duck offerings. My other two favorites have beer on tap and custom house made soft drinks /*sugary but very tasty*/. Non-luxury non-buffet places can be had for half the price or less. We go to the big night market about once a month and eat barbecue, drink beer, and sample all the other treats for less than $20 in total.
Movies are $5 or less and while they don’t have every US movie, they do have the major ones played in English at the nice mall theaters. I used to pay 3 to 4 times as much for a similar theater in the US. The wife and I go to the karaoke bar, eat and drink for about $20 in total
Kerry Baldwin points out if you have kids here it will be a bit more, but not a lot more. My figures are from before we had relatives move in with us, but even with her 2 sisters, her aunt and her 5 kids our fixed costs are only about $100 more than his.
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