Numbeo - comparison of cost of living around the world | Hacker News Reader

Numbeo - comparison of cost of living around the world

numbeo.com

107 pointsBerislavLopac40 comments

I appreciate the hard work that went into this, but we still have to be careful as this is a very tricky measure.

E.G. Colombo, Sri Lanka :

http://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/city_result.jsp?country...

"Colombo" is actually pretty big and diverse.

Depending on which area and even street you turn into, which collection of shops you go to, the price will vary wildly. You can see this especially with regard to Bread (66.14 - 165.00), Tomato (60.00 - 150.00) etc...

I'm sure this will be very helpful in areas where this is not the case, but I don't think it's applicable where finer granularity is really needed. Good way to gauge this is to see how wide the green bar is and how different the prices. If you see a swath of wide green bars, then you know you need finer granularity or the chart isn't applicable due to the volatility in price.

This is the case almost everywhere (except places where some goods are government regulated). In Russia shops with a price of bread (same or almost same) from some like 70 cent to almost 10 dollars a loaf are commonplace within walking distance from each other. They just serve different demographics. And i think this is just fine and tells more good of Russian economy than bad.

I'm traveling around the world (5 continents) for 1 year and I couldn't never have done that properly without Numbeo's figures, really. Actually I'm surprised it has been "discovered" only now. Most people miss the point here as they tend to think of it as some "big data" or whatever, but it's right on spot for daily expenses at least in the almost-100-cities list I'm visiting (including my own, in Brazil). It's very useful to get an idea of what to expect budget-wise when you have no idea whatsoever about costs in random countries. But you have to use your brain as well and not trust the numbers blindly :-)

Btw, I'm in Nepal right now about to start trekking in the mountains, thanks Holy Engineers for wifi in the Himalayas! You can google translate it if you want: http://alfanumerico.net

Isn't the data taken from expatistan.com ? Are they affiliated somehow? Expatistan has been collecting data for a very long time now using crowdsourcing with expats.

As far as I know, they have been around for a long time too, and have been collecting their own data. I have never heard of Expatistan, thanks for the tip!

Expatistan.com creator here.

No, we are not affiliated with numbeo in any way. As far as I know, they collect all their prices in their website, just as we do in Expatistan.

It'd be nice if there was a way to sort by multiple categories.

For example, what's the best balance between low crime, high quality of living, and cost of living?

The kind of filters you see on item databases for MMOs would be sensationally useful here.

You'd probably also want "available jobs in my industry" as a category. Low crime, low cost of living etc. doesn't do you any good if you can't pay for it.

Can someone explain to me what happened in Australia? They've had a notable rising cost of living in the last few years.

Mining boom. There are legions of cashed up FIFO (fly in - fly out) bogans that have more money than sense, and so the price of everything has gone up.

Not just that - mining only accounts for 2% of our GDP. It's that our dollar was worth 50-60 US cents, and so all of our prices normalised to that. Then it strengthed quickly from the mining boom (somewhat abnormally) and achieved parity with the greenback. Local prices did not fall, of course...

Apart from housing, which saw some years of 30-40% increase in the late noughties, the cost of living hasn't risen much at all - inflation has been reasonably low for a while.

The housing market commentary has been pretty funny. The years of 30% increase had people going "this is pretty good". Now faced with a year of low single digit deflation, the newspapers act like the sky is falling...

Local prices did not fall, of course...

I think one reason for this is that rent, especially in shopping centres (malls), had kept pace and didn't drop away even though their tenants were facing tougher competition from abroad. Another is that distributors were less than keen to give up their slice. So, even when some retailers might've wanted to drop prices to compete, they were facing pressure on the cost of floor space as well as product.

Neither of these arguments stack up. COGS went down went the dollar went up. That meant gross profits went up. If rent stayed the same, retailers had more flexibility to cut prices and they chose not to.

I used this site to gauge my future cost of living before moving to another country. Once I moved I noticed it was off a bit, but didn't think much of it.

Then one day, while bragging about how cool this site was, I noticed that it does other things (crime index, health care index, etc), and when I looked I was shocked to see that it listed some very wonky crime stats. So I looked over everything and realized that a) it's all based on voluntarily submitted data, with no checks on anything; and b) the sample size was very very small. No wonder people thought my Western Canadian town had more crime than the Tenderloin, SF. The sample sizes (at the time) were 8 vs 6

Super awesome site but it needs 300x as much data before it'll be particularly accurate

My biggest problem with numbeo & expatistan is that they do not reflect the true cost of living. They are heavily biased towards data from travellers & expats. In particular these expats don't seem to speak the local language and refuse to live like a local - they seem to insist on western values of living.

Example, http://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/city_result.jsp?country...

Says "Apartment (1 bedroom) in City Centre" ranges from 15,000 to 25,000. I had a fairly westernized place for 8,000 baht. If I had gone for a more thai place, I could have had a place for between 3,000-5,000.

> heavily biased towards data from travellers & expats

That's funny because I was about to say exactly the opposite -- that the data is biased towards data from and for residents.

Using Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro as examples, Numbeo's figures make them seem quite inexpensive.

The problem is that as a tourist or as a business visitor, you are paying hotel prices, not rent. Hotels in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro are surprisingly expensive (approaching New York City prices).

For reasons I can't understand, the ratio of hotel room price to annual rental price of an unfurnished apartment in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro is much worse than in other cities around the world I'm familiar with. Renting a furnished flat on a monthly basis is also very expensive.

This distorts the picture hugely. As a tourist or business visitor, Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro end up being very expensive cities to visit, whereas as a resident, it wouldn't be so bad.

I see what you mean, actually in my experience even supposedly cheap countries turn out to be expensive, there isn't really many truly cheap places, and hotels tend to be surprisingly expensive, especially the ones that cater to westerners, that are found easily online (i.e. in english).

By the way, when I think of "Cost Of Living" I am thinking of long-term stay of 6+ months, especially since many landlords insist on 6-12+ months leases.

Why don't you enter the numbers you've experienced yourself? That's the whole point of the site -- collecting values from a number of sources and calculating indexes out of them.

I did, but haven't noticed any impact. I'm in the minority :)

The best feature is being able to compare two cities. They also have a national average feature. Unfortunately it seems you can't compare a national average to a city. See also: http://www.numbeo.com/quality-of-life/country_result.jsp?cou...

I'd love to see this data combined with http://mikemcbrearty.com/climate/ so you could query: somewhere with the same climate, but cheaper

...and you end up in a total hole. Picking a place to live doesn't work that way. You want a place with nice interesting people, and these tend to be rich, and... oops you find yourself in a very expensive place. I have yet to see a place good for living which isn't reddish on numbeo map.

+1 for not using Google Maps.

Slightly off topic: I would like to know where it's still cheap to buy a beach front house that is accessible from the United States? Is anyone doing global real estate pricing?

That's quite an interesting search problem - I guess it depends on what you mean by "accessible from the United States" and the implicit requirement to be able to do something on the beach without hypothermia?

Owning a beachfront property in some countries might be easy, but there are some tricky logistics involved:

For example, there are some very cheap places in my country, Uruguay, and in neighbouring Brazil, but, are you going to pay for a housekeeper?. If you don't visit often, you're likely to find either a dismantled house or an illegal tenant.

Also, people from out of country might not know the local taxes or regulations, and you could have your house seized due to ignorance.

I think that renting is a much better solution, unless you expect to spend a significant amount of time in your beach house :)

BTW, The housekeeper is probably going to be more expensive than the house. Maintenance is often as expensive as the house too.

On the plus side, beach houses can be rented :) to get some expenses back.

What's a good place to search for rentals. I hear punta del este is nice in December ;-)

Hmm: locals usually check http://www.gallito.com.uy/ , and Argentineans their local equivalents.

Many go for a weekend a month in advance, and look at the "For Rent" signs, then make a deal with the homeowner (usually haggling on price). That is of course not very practical for someone from the U.S. !!

Punta del Este is nice (though some people like other kinds of vacations, like Punta del Diablo), but it's very expensive (even for people from the U.S.), especially in January. December is a little cheaper.

The times I've been there I went to a hostel. My parents use the "haggling" option, so I don't have a good recommendation for online search. Airbnb is slightly more expensive than the average listing, but not by much.

That is true, so the variables rise. You need to factor ambient temperature, water temp, electricity, etc. this day and age these should all be real estate database variables.

Croatia has some nice places, and the prices have been falling for the past few years. But you need to be ready to engage the local bureaucracy, which can be quite a Kafkian experience sometimes.

This is a good site that's been around quite a while: http://www.globalpropertyguide.com/

Actually, the prices are right on target for Seoul, South Korea.

Unlike most websites of this sort, I'm surprised to find the information accurate.

Please put the currency on the charts! I have no idea what do those numbers mean!

http://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/cpi_explained.jsp

This has been there for a long time. Has there been any change recently?

I really like it, it is very useful and accurate

Well, I don't think so, since I lived in multiple cities, the order is totally messed up.

Also for e.g. in Amman, public transportation, might cost 0.40 JD, but they don't get anywhere, and in most of times, walking is much faster that taking the bus.

Also there is no such thing as unlimited data plans there too.

So at least for the middle east, I don't think it's accurate.

It doesn't seem very accurate in Munich, either, particularly WRT housing — all the 1BR flats we saw were north of 1,200€/mo.

the numbers for my country (argentina) are at least 7 years outdated.

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