Malaysia Cost of Living in Georgetown Penang - Hotels AirBnb Accomodations, Food & More

Georgetown, Malaysia. This mid-sized city on the island of Penang is really popular with tourists, expats and retirees alike. Its warm climate, amazing cuisine, friendly people and reasonable cost of living make it a very attractive destination. Today we're breaking down our cost of living for one month in this amazing city. Sadly this is going to be our last video from here in Malaysia. We have absolutely fallen in love with this country. Everything about it, the food, the country itself, the people, everything in this country is absolutely amazing and we love it here. Super impressed with it. We want to take just a second to thank all of the Malaysian people for all of their support and for welcoming us so kindly during our time here. And it's a big country and we only had the chance to see a small part of it so hopefully we'll be back sometime soon. That being said stick around for the end of the video where we'll be letting you know what country we're going to next and now let's jump into the cost of living with the first category as always accommodation. Okay start off with our accommodations here. Usually when we're trying to book airbnbs we try and find somewhere that's pretty centrally located so it's very walkable easy access to everything and it seems now two months in a row we have chosen the touristy of all touristy areas. If you know Penang we are staying on a street called Lebu Armenian. It is the most touristy street in all of I think Georgetown in general. Probably. It's kind of crazy like outside there's trishaws that are outside that Blair TikToks through their speakers on their trishaw all day long. At full volume. Some nights it'll go on until 11 o'clock which i guess is a good thing it ends early enough that it's not that big a deal to be able to sleep but the neighborhood itself is kind of crazy. As for the unit itself it is a pre-war typical Penang shop house. So on the ground floor there's a kitchen behind us as well as a bathroom. This space that we're in right now is now a dining area but this is where the family who would have lived here would have had their shop and that's facing the street. Upstairs there's a bedroom, a bathroom, a shower kind of a strange outdoor shower and it's got this really kind of interesting old school artsy crafty kind of vibe so the place is decorated with a ton of little knickknacks you can probably see behind us and you know it is a pre-war house so it kind of has a lot of the rough around the edgesness that you would associate with a house this old. That being said we did have everything that we needed. The wi-fi was good, we had a washing machine, a workspace for Jeff, the bed was comfortable so we really can't complain about it and the total price for it was $1,147. Our activities for this month didn't wasn't a whole lot we didn't do very much one of the main reasons for that is we've just released a new website if you'd like to check it out you can check the description down below but we have a lot of work to do this month and we've put a lot of time into trying to get this release on this website up and going. Yeah when we weren't working on the website the one activity that we did pay for this month was a food tour. We booked it right when we arrived our guide Beth gave us a really great lay of the land a really great introduction to the regional cuisine we enjoyed that a lot. The total cost for the food tour with tip of course was $105. Next category up is our dining out and as you guys know we travel for food. The food here in Georgetown has been phenomenal I honestly don't think that we've had a bad meal since we got here and we eat out pretty much every day multiple times a day on many occasions. Our total cost for the month were $390. In one of our previous cost of living videos a viewer by the name of Andre Camacho mentioned that they're looking for more what a per meal cost would be and that really depends obviously on what it is you're trying to eat. For instance Angela and I went out one night for nachos and margaritas that was like 45 US dollars for both of us. Typically though if we go out in the evenings for a bowl of a noodle soup and just a beer we can get that for 10 to 15 US dollars for the both of us. If you're doing a lunch meal where you're getting a small plate of food and an iced coffee you can get that for anywhere from four to eight US dollars per meal so it's really affordable Next category is groceries. As Jeff mentioned we ate out almost every single meal here so there really wasn't a ton of groceries we did. That being said we did jump over to the local supermarket every now and then to buy things like toast, eggs, yogurt, snacks around the house things like that also of course coffee. By the way if you are enjoying our videos and you do want to help support our work you can buy us a coffee we'll leave a link up there. Total cost for groceries for the month $134. Next category up is our cell phone plans. When we arrived in Malaysia back in October we bought cellcom sim cards for our phones and the only thing we had to do this month here in Georgetown was to top them up. Super easy to do you just get the app top it up online we both got unlimited data for the full month for $14 US for both of us. Cheap. Next category up is transportation we didn't spend a lot on that this month. We found that Georgetown was extremely walkable really easy to get around on foot. We did get a grab a couple of times if we were carrying the cameras around somewhere a little bit further away or if we needed to get groceries back to the Airbnb. We also took the ferry from the main station at Butterworth to the island which was actually about 50 cents for the both of us. Super affordable. Our total transportation costs for the entire month was only $9. Next category up is our visas. Malaysia allows 90 days visa free in the country and during our time here in Malaysia we spent one week in Singapore so we were able to renew for another 90 days when we left the country. Zero dollars for our visas for the month. Next up in this category is miscellaneous. We purchased a couple of random things like a cell phone charger, some clothes for Jeff, some random toiletries. We also always include alcohol in this category just because we feel that you know if you don't drink we don't we want you to be able to remove that from your expenses so you could get an idea of what your cost of living might be if you're here. In total the miscellaneous expenses this month including alcohol were $416. And our grand totals for the month were a very affordable $2,213. We were actually very pleased with that. We feel that that is an extremely reasonable price for the quality of living in this gorgeous city. And that wraps up our videos here in Malaysia. Once again we want to thank everybody who we met here for being extremely kind and welcoming to us. We hope to be back again someday soon. And as promised our next country coming up is Manila, Philippines. See you soon. Bye.