Free guide · 20 pages
Six chapters on what actually decides your first year. Where you should live. What it truly costs. How relationships work, your visa path, healthcare, and what daily life feels like once the vacation fades. The honest version, from someone who lives it.
FreeThe California Expat Guide
The honest guide to your first year: where to live, what it costs, relationships, visas, healthcare, and daily life.
6 Chapters
Match the right city to the life you actually want. Honest breakdowns of every major hub, plus the places most guides skip.
Real monthly budgets at four tiers, so you arrive with a number you trust instead of a guess that breaks.
Understand the family and money dynamics before they surprise you, so you read the situation right from day one.
Tourist extensions, SRRV, 13(a), the Digital Nomad Visa, and more. Find the path that fits your situation and what to sort first.
Hospital quality by city, the insurance that actually works here, and why local plans beat international ones for most people.
What shifts around month four, and what the people who stay and thrive do differently from the ones who leave.
From the Guide
The Philippines is not one place. Life in BGC is nothing like life in Dumaguete, and both are nothing like Bohol. The guide gives you every major hub honestly, so you choose the one that fits the life you want, not the highlight reel.
BGC, Metro Manila
The most to do, walkable, and the best hospital in the country. Rent per square meter runs about the same as Makati, Cebu, and Davao, so the idea that BGC is pricey does not really hold up.
Cebu City
The main alternative to Metro Manila. But the beach access you picture is mostly resort day passes at ₱1,200 or more. The real beaches sit 3 to 4 hours away, the same as Manila to Batangas.
Dumaguete
The default retirement city. The town itself is small with limited healthcare. What makes it work is everything around it: Siquijor, Apo Island, and the mountains inland.
The full guide covers 12 locations with honest pros, cons, healthcare, and who each place actually fits.
From the Guide
The Philippines costs less than the US, Canada, the UK, or Australia. It is not the thousand dollar paradise the internet sells you, though. That number is usually outdated, built on a lifestyle you would not enjoy, or quietly leaving out whole categories of spending. Here is what your money really looks like.
Survival
$800 to $1,200
Small condo, local food, a quiet social life
Comfortable, single
$1,500 to $2,500
Decent condo, eating out often, some travel
Comfortable, family
$2,500 to $4,000
Good condo, family costs, healthcare
BGC or Makati lifestyle
$3,500 to $5,000+
Nice condo, regular dining, gym, travel
What people underestimate: lifestyle creep, family financial expectations, healthcare costs, and the difference between surviving and actually enjoying your life. The guide breaks down each one with real numbers.
The full 20 pages go deeper on every chapter, with the specific numbers, locations, and visa details that take most people a year to learn the hard way. Get it free in your inbox.
From the Guide
This is where most guides either sell you a fantasy or dodge the topic. Neither one helps you.
When you enter a relationship with a Filipina, you're entering a relationship with her family's economic situation. There's no robust government welfare system. The person in the family with access to resources is expected to share them. This is not manipulation. It's how survival works in a country where most people don't have the safety nets Westerners take for granted.
Think about Maslow's hierarchy. Many Filipinas are operating at the security level — stable housing, reliable income, making sure family is okay. Many foreigners are at the belonging or self-actualization level — connection, adventure, personal growth. Neither is wrong. But if you don't recognize you might be standing on different steps of the pyramid, you'll misread almost everything.
If this is the part you most need to get right, Crossbuilt is the course built entirely around it.
From the Guide
The first three to six months feel like vacation. Then around month four or five, the vacation filter drops. You notice the traffic, the bureaucracy, the heat at 2pm in April. This is normal.
Filipino warmth is real, but it's not the same as friendship. Building genuine relationships takes time, consistency, and showing up in ways that go beyond being the foreigner at the bar.
Most expat men experience something that feels like an upgrade at first. But that status is based on what you are, not who you are. The ones who do best find something to build here.
Loneliness is real and underreported. A lot of expats here are lonely. The ones who do best build community intentionally.
The guide covers all of this — plus visas, healthcare, and the practical details of setting up your life.
Who wrote this
I moved to the Philippines in January 2020. Since then I have started several businesses, built teams in Cebu, Davao, and Manila, and created Bridgehouse, with weekly dinners at Bridgehouse BGC and Bridgehouse Cebu City that draw 60 to 100 people.
This guide is not from a vacation or a research binge. It is from years of living here, making the mistakes, building things, and helping other expats make the same calls you are about to make.
20 pages. Six chapters. The honest starting point most expats wish they had before they moved. Free, straight to your inbox.
Keep going
Getting to and around the Philippines
The companion guide for $9.99: airports, SIM cards, money, transport, the unwritten rules, and basic Tagalog.
Get it for $9.99The Letter
Your inside read on actually living here, every week. Free, and the easiest way to stay close to all of this.
Get the LetterWant to go deeper on a specific topic right now? These guides are free to read.
