Cost of Living in Shenzhen, China

[Music] hi guys welcome back to my channel my name is poppy and I'm a travel blogger who currently lives in Shenzhen China and in this video I'm going to do a cost breakdown of my expenses for a month living here in China I do want to warn you ahead of time though that because I live in Schengen Schengen is a city that is one of the most if not the most expensive city and all of China it's up there with Hong Kong Hong Kong is definitely a lot more expensive but Shenzhen is pretty much equivalent now the cool thing though about shutdown which I've mentioned in other videos is it's kind of the best of both worlds because you can live here for really cheap and you can live here really luxuriously so really expensive and it's just kind of dependent on the person you are you know what is it that you need to spend your money on to feel comfortable and to be happy and I hope that it gives you a pretty good estimate of how much it would cost so let's just jump right into this I'm gonna break this video down into four categories number one general expenses so rents utilities cost of Internet phone all that fun stuff number two is going to be transportation number three foods so groceries eating out and number four all the extra fun activities extra expenses that you spend your money on and then I will give you a grand total at the end in this whole video I'm going to be giving you numbers for two people because I do live with my boyfriend and we just split the cost fifty-fifty for everything so everything I tell you is the cost for two people if you want to know how much it is to live here for one just take that number and cut it in half all right so let's jump right into this number one general expenses I just made a video about this my apartment here in Shenyang cost 5500 a month I made a video showing you everything it looks like so if you want to check that out I think I'm gonna put it right here that plus 500 for utilities which includes management fees cost for electricity and water brings us up to about 6000 arm be just for rent and expenses then we probably spend about 80 RMB at most for water we order water directly to our door we may be by at most four barrels it's pretty the very big barrel so you don't need a lot and that's probably how much we just spend on water because you cannot drink the water here from the tap you do need to order purified water then we have internet now internets very interesting here because you just pay for as you would with phone service like you pay how much you want to use versus in the u.s. when I've ever paid for Internet Comcast is what I used to pay for you had to pay per month a set fee well here when we run out of internet we're going to just pick a number like 100 usually we put about two hundred RMB and then we just top up our internet until it runs out and when it runs out we just put more money then we have our phone we've probably spent in total for seven months living here combined 200 rmb now we don't use our data all the time and that's because China is awesome and has Wi-Fi everywhere you can get Wi-Fi in the metros you can get Wi-Fi in grocery stores at the malls seriously probably parts of the street are gonna have Wi-Fi coming off the other buildings or whatnot so because of this you don't have to use your data that often because there's just so much Wi-Fi so cost of service not expensive and the best part about all of this all this rent and utilities is I've mentioned this app many times is WeChat all these expenses you just pay via WeChat WeChat is a super app it's basically take all the apps that you need and combine it into one app and that's WeChat so convenient so when you want to pay rent we do it via WeChat you want to pay your internet you top it up via WeChat your mobile service WeChat now let me talked about general expenses let's go to our second category which is transportation transportation is so cheap here it is one of the perks about living in China the Metro cost next to nothing and it's really convenient because you can buy these cards that cost 100 RMB for the card and it comes with 50 already sucked onto it and what you do is you just fill it up with how much you want to use the same idea with internet send my idea with your phone service however many rides you want to use you just pay for that you don't have a set fee I typically top-up my card about 100 RMB so for 2 people 200 for transportation a month and that gets us everywhere for us to go from for example nan-zhao where we live to the other side of food channel which is about an hour via Metro it costs about 5 qui which is not even a dollar one-way taxis are also really cheap also renting bikes that is so so so cheap there's bike sharing everywhere when you walk around China it's just unbelievable how many bikes are available to use and that costs one arm be per half-hour it is seriously like bike central here in China there are so many bike ridiculous but it's awesome because it's so cheap to rent the bike and it's so easy to just take your phone you walk over to a bike that you want and then you just literally scan it and then take the bike then you go we don't typically rent bikes here because we have long boards and that's probably get around China but if you don't have a longboard this is a great way to go about it when you're done you don't have to go look for a place to put the bike you can leave your bike clearly wherever I have found bikes and bushes I have found them under bridges now clearly if they're broken you're gonna have to pay for that but it's just convenient when you're done you just leave it and then you're done you can also take the bus here of course there's loads of them and it's the same process if you have a card you can use that as well the same one you use for the metro and you just scan your way into every bus I do recommend if you do travel to China even just for a few days a few weeks to buy a card because it's just really convenient the machines are pretty iffy when you try to go buy a ticket they don't always respond to your touch it's funny because when we've gone to Hong Kong Hong Kong is really expensive for transportation we just went there for a day and just taking the metro from the outskirts of Hong Kong to the center to the central area was I think 40 Hong Kong dollars a person there's really expensive comparable to Shenzhen in other areas so the third expense I want to talk about is food now I want to break this down into groceries and eating out groceries we spend on average together on four hundred five hundred RMB a month so about 100 RMB a week that's because we only shop at markets little individual markets that you're buying your food fruits and vegetables from vendors who probably own a farm somewhere and you know you're going to we buy carrots that still have all the dirt on them and it's really really cheap if you go to the grocery stores it's still cheap it's just not going to be that cheap they have grocery stores here like Walmart's which is a little different but it still has your general staples that you'd want they have another store called Olay which I like to refer to is basically the Whole Foods of China it's really expensive but it has really good food and products and a lot of Western products that I sometimes miss and want to buy and it's one thing about living here is that cheese is so expensive so my boyfriend I kind of just agreed to give up cheese in general so that's not included in our cost I'm watching other clocks but then I feel like myself now eating out is still probably pretty low but that's where we personally spend our most money is not eating out we probably spend on average eight hundred for two people a week so thirty two hundred a month our expenses are just for eating out now that's including coffees we got a coffee every single day I usually get a milk tea at the end of the day and we eat out at restaurants expensive restaurants not as expensive restaurants but all the time pretty frequently like if not once a day I think it's important when you're in another country to eat out because you are getting to experience another culture you know eating out here in China is very different from if you ate out in the u.s. then we get to the fourth category which is all the extra expenses activities you know travel and everything clothes whatnot I can't give you an exact estimate for this number because one we don't really have much money that goes into this category like sometime by the occasional piece of clothing because they're backpackers and wearing the same shirt over and over again I don't know how many holes are gonna accumulate somebody buy another shirt or I probably spend more money on flights for travel or on little things if you come to China you're probably get addicted to Tao about I still have a neck so I just I don't not a big shopper but if you're a big shopper you're probably gonna get addicted to things like Taba which is the I refer to as China's version of Amazon it's online shopping and it's really convenient you end up buying a lot of things they have malls everywhere [Music] there's missing tree but write me that I don't really know it's a point of it it's it kind of reminds me of Lord the Rings and the tree and Gondor but right for the small and I think it's over Ewan I lived in this area for about seven months and one day I walked outside and there was just a giant mall that just showed up out of nowhere and I think it's the biggest mall I've ever seen in Shenzhen called mixi it's huge super modern it's ridiculous but it's also really expensive so stuff like that they're gonna go shopping and go to malls like that it's really expensive they have stores like Victoria's Secret or HMS and first guys all these stores that you can find in other parts of the world but the prices tend to be jacked up a bit because it's not from here so it can actually be triple the price for some of the brands and products you're gonna buy here so a lot of people will buy things off tab out to avoid that I know that imported wine is always gonna be more expensive but this bottle of wine I usually get back home in California it cost me about seven eight dollars and here it cost $45 know that bit extreme one huge thing that cuts out a huge expense is that we don't really drink so we don't hit the club's we don't go to the bars we're just not big drinkers I've had a few beers here and there out of restaurants and it's pretty much equivalent to the same price and I probably pay in the u.s. maybe a little bit cheaper grocery stores beers are very cheap though I will say I buy a cider it costs I think I cost nine why for the ciders I drink so very cheap it costs my boyfriend like to cry maybe three before he drinks Tsingtao so cheap so if you buy them in the grocery store it cost nothing if you take three of the four categories that I mentioned at the beginning of this video that brings us to a sum of around 10,000 RMB that plus those extra expenses let's say 1000 RMB brings us to a new total of 11,000 RMB for two people we divide that by two that brings us to 5,500 a person so roughly 833 dollars that I will spend for a month to live here in China I'm very interested to hear your feedback if you think that's a lot of money to be spending here in China or if that's really little it's that's on the low end but that is pretty much our cost breakdown I hope you enjoyed this video if you found it interesting give it a thumbs up if you're new remember to subscribe follow my Instagram where I post a photo once a day and I also do a lot of my stories so you can see what I'm up to and yeah thank you guys for watching I will see you next time bye bye

Channel: Where's Poppy

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Keywords: travel, budget, traveling, female traveler, 深圳, Guangdong, 中国, Asia, Asian, Southeast China, wanderlust, explore, adventure, gap year, wander, travel the world, cheap, cheaply, quit job, digital nomad, backpacking, backpacker, apartment tour, things to do, things to see, travel vlog, vagabond, minimalists, expat, foreigner, americans in china, travel videos, expenses, money, affordable, abroad, overseas, 成本, 住在中国, 预算, 低廉, 公寓游览, how much does it cost, why china, general expenses, save money, expensive

Id: 9Gl1WnsAbJ0

Length: 11min 58sec (718 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 24 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/corgi_sloot]

Dem eyebrows are confusing me. Like I see angry brows but then she sounds nice?