Living in Buenos Aires, Argentina as a Foreigner: Cost-of-Living & Travel Guide

heaven on my name hey guys welcome back to another episode of digital Nomad destinations on my show digital Nomad TV mbm the needles are Ken Cena we're here in the capital city of Buenos Aires in the middle of December perfect weather and I've been trying to come to this city for as long as I can remember and I've spent the last month living here so I wanted to share a video about what it's like to live here as digital nomads see if you should make it one of your next digital Nomad destinations in part one of this video I'll talk a little bit about the cost of living and the lifestyle here and then in part two we'll talk to some of my foreigner expat or digital Nomad friends about why they chose to make one Oh sigh today's their home base so in this video I'm going to cover a few of the things that I like about living in Buenos Aires and a few of the things that are you know pros and cons so that you guys can decide for yourself so first of all let's get to some of the basics when Osiris is the capital of Argentina and it is the second largest city in all of South America while Argentina is the second largest country in South America the city has a population of about 3 million people but in the entire metropolitan area it can be up to 15 million so one of the most important things that people want to know about when they're thinking of where to go as a digital nomad is what is the cost of living the currency is the Argentine peso and right now one u.s. dollar is equivalent to about 40 pesos and because foreign currencies are so strong here you have really a lot of flexibility in what you want your cost of living to be so it's important to note that the cost of living is going to be different if you are a local if you are a local expat if you are a digital nomad or if you are a tourist so I kind of break it up into four different categories you can live like a king for quite a small amount of money paired to many Western countries but you can also live on a really tight budget and still have a really good lifestyle for $1,000 a month up to $2,000 a month so while the base cost of living could be around $1,000 US per month depending on how long you're staying here that's going to affect how much you pay in rent and the cost of living could go up to even up to two or three thousand dollars a month it just depends on what your lifestyle is going to be if you're a foreigner coming here I think you can expect to pay anywhere from $500 a month to $1,500 a month if you're staying short-term for just a few weeks or month to month then you can get an Airbnb a CO living space like Salina an apart hotel or a regular hotel for anywhere from typically forty to sixty dollars a night on average the same apartment that would be four or five hundred dollars a month on a one-year lease could cost you a thousand or fifteen hundred dollars a month as a fully furnished Airbnb so that's important to keep in mind the good news is that way no Sardis is a huge city with tons of different neighborhoods so there's plenty of places to choose from as far as where you want to live what kind of vibe you want to have and how much you want to spend and if you're renting a furnished apartment typically your utilities are going to be included one thing that digital nomads always want to know about is the Internet that the Internet is super fast there's a wide range of plans if you're on a budget you can get 10 or 15 megabytes per month for around $20 per month but the speeds go up really quickly from there 50 100 300 or even one gig so in my co-working space we have 300 megabytes up and down if you are going to get that at your home it could cost you about $50 a month or maybe even up to 70 or 90 dollars a month 300 megabytes and one gig speeds right now we're at one of the many co-working spaces in Buenos Aires I counted at least 20 or 30 different ones the prices are quite affordable it ranges from about $10 for a day pass up to 300 a month for a place like we work so you can expect to pay usually anywhere between 40 50 up to 150 dollars a month in most of the co-working spaces around town there's also a couple co-living spaces that I found as well Selina just opened a location here in the Palermo district of Buenos Aires and there's also a coal living place called nomad hub which I will show you guys a little bit of and link to it below you can see changes so much but in u.s. dollars still so cheap so less than five hundred dollars per month after nomad hub yeah for no mahalo it's insane because you get your own room the new one that we're going to it that we were telling you about it has a pool it has a co-working space it includes like why fighting basically gives all the amenities that you need and it's what Nomad hobbit is doing great they're mixing people that are traveling here for short term generally expats where they don't know much from other countries with local people that are like live here most of the time like ostrich yeah like in my case what I do is I travel ele two months and he live here two months so that's why I love the flexibility that was one of the biggest things and then like the community factor came after and it's so nice because you start meeting people that you wouldn't normally yea meet because you're in this environment right the other major cost of living for anyone is food if you're eating out you can expect to pay let's say for a bottle of water usually about a dollar or less same for a coffee one to two dollars a beer or a glass of wine also one to two dollars and in some cases you can buy a whole bottle of wine for the price of just a glass of wine at a restaurant for breakfast lunch and dinner it really depends on where you go I've actually seen the same food for vastly different prices on the same block so for breakfast you could get a coffee and a couple of media Lunas which are traditional croissant style pastries here for anywhere from a dollar to four dollars together and for lunch you could get a salad for two or three dollars and then down the street the same salad could cost you five or six dollars so you really have to be aware of where you're buying food and remember that the price and pesos can keep going up and keep changing over time with inflation for dinner you could get let's say a burger and fries or something like that for about two hundred and fifty pesos and I've seen main courses on menus appetizers for two or three hundred pesos each and I've seen main courses from 300 to 600 pesos each so if you're going out for a really nice dinner with a glass of wine depending on the restaurant you could pay anywhere from four hundred and fifty to a thousand pesos so the most I've spent going out to dinner is about 25 dollars for a really nice dinner but you could definitely eat well for $10 guys it's time to get serious and start trying some of the amazing food that way no spy days is known for I'm standing in front of Havana which is one of the coffee shops that you'll see on almost every corner here one of the most common places to come if you want to get a coffee in the desert so we're gonna try to out which is the ocean Kamiya let's see what an alpha bar looks like guys this is the most typical desserts here in Buenos Aires it is chocolate on the outside filled with caramel or dulce de leche on the inside and dry it oh my god that's so good so this is like subway no sightings version of the Frappuccino but better and then what is there to do so when you're not working when oh sorry days and Argentina in general offers a really great quality of life but Osiris has everything that you would expect from a large city it has amazing culinary scene lots of bars restaurants it has a wine culture it has lots of art museums there's lots of outdoor spaces as you can see we're here in Porto Madero so there's a lot of action lots of shopping boats marina apartments pretty much anything that you could want and if you want to get out of the city for a little while there's plenty of places to go in bariloche - mendoza - the vineyards - patagonia to see the glaciers and you could go hiking you can go to lakes and pretty much do anything let's talk traffic as you can see there's a lot of it here but the transportation system is actually quite good you can rent bikes there's buses there's taxis there's also a metro but it can take a long time to get from one des of the city to the other so that's one of the downsides of living here is that you could spend a lot of time getting from point A to point B the transportation is not that expensive it's about a hundred to two hundred pesos for about fifteen or twenty minutes of driving but it could easily take you thirty minutes or an hour to get somewhere in the city [Music] so let's just cover some of the basic pros and cons of living here some of the things that I've liked and some of the things that aren't ideal so on the pro side of Buenos Aires has so much to do you'll never get bored and it has a really good infrastructure and an internet I also really liked the time zone being between East Coast time and Europe time so that puts you in a really good side of the world where you can get work done crossing over into multiple time zones during the workweek I think that the most different thing is that you can allow yourself a really nice level of life without spending a lot of money the culture and nightlife and art are as good as it gets a lot of the things that I enjoy lifer at my fingertips here and affordabl there's more theaters here than any city in the world I mean more than New York more than Paris more than London four or five hundred live theater performances every week you've got a lot of different great music and the food is actually getting far more international more diverse there's museums everywhere there's tango in the streets and bars and restaurants are open super late you can go out until 7 o'clock in the morning but if you're an early bird you can also eat dinner before everybody else so if you eat a 6 7 8 o'clock p.m. you'll never have to wait in line because everyone simply goes out to dinner around 9:00 or 10:00 p.m. or even later so I've kind of liked that if I want to eat early I can just walk in anywhere without a week there's also a lot to do outside of Buenos Aires if you want to get out of the city have so much nature everywhere you could take the bus or you can fly to different part of the country so you can get out and go hiking or kind of see the sights see the glaciers and get some peace and quiet and for the downsides because nowhere is perfect I would say the location is not good for people who want to be able to come in and out very easily to go to different places we're quite isolated down here in the southern hemisphere so if you need to travel a lot for work it might not be the best place for you you probably want to come and stay for at least a month or a few months at a time speaking the language so I'm fortunate that I speak Spanish so that has made things very easy for me here but some of my friends have said that they've had some trouble communicating so I think it would be helpful if you know some Spanish because definitely not everybody speaks English nor should they be expected to in another situation with the money so I have noticed that credit cards and debit cards are not very widely accepted so if you don't have a local bank account and debit card you'll be spending a lot of time at the ATM and with that being said that ATM limits are very low so the most I've been able to take out at a time is about a hundred and fifty dollars so you're going to be paying a lot of ATM fees safety can also be a factor due to the current economic and political situation but I haven't had any problems with that directly I would just say to always be aware of your surroundings and be careful like you would anywhere in the world [Music] so what about the digital nomad community there are a lot of co-working spaces there's co-living spaces like Selena and Nomad hub but because it's such a large city you really need to make an effort to find the digital nomad pockets throughout the urban area I hope that you guys like this quick look at 105 days on the digital nomad destination where do you want to see next let me know in the comments below and make sure to subscribe for more weekly episodes of digital Nomad TV make sure to stay tuned for part two and I'm going to talk to some of my friends from the u.s. to have made one Osiris their home if there's anything else you want to know just drop me a comment below and I'll answer there and also you can check out the link in the description for my fully detailed blog with everything that you need to know about living in Buenos Aires as a digital nomad [Music]

Channel: Traveling with Kristin

Views: 357,701

Keywords: buenos aires, buenos aires argentina, living in buenos aires, living in argentina, living in buenos aires argentina, living in buenos aires as a foreigner, living in buenos aires as an expat, living in buenos aires as an american, buenos aires travel, buenos aires cost of living, buenos aires cost of living guide, living in argentina pros and cons, buenos aires travel vlog, buenos aires food, buenos aires apartment, expat guide, digital nomads, living abroad, kristin wilson

Id: xEKTJtnJlyg

Length: 15min 35sec (935 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 02 2019