Thailand is my favorite place so far on our international gap year. I have already covered in depth the reasons why it is my favorite place, and I will now turn to the financial side of things. In this Thailand expat family budget, I will show the cost of living full time in Chiang Mai Thailand based on my family’s actual spending.
To give an idea of what it would cost for a single person traveling alone, I will provide single person values on each budget line item, at least where it actually differs from the family amount. In the summary section at the end you can see the single person spending and investments needed alongside the family of four values.
I will not be including a scenario for buying a property. From what I have read Americans can’t buy property in Thailand without jumping through weird hoops, so I’ll stick to the realistic scenario of renting.
Assumptions
I will be making the following assumptions to simplify the scenarios presented:
- You are selling everything and moving to Chiang Mai Thailand.
- You are renting a 2 bed 1 bath condo somewhere outside of the main tourist areas of Nimman and the old city.
- You are using international health insurance, something similar to Cigna Global. You may have different more affordable options depending on your immigration status in Thailand.
- You will not own a car and will use Grab instead. We made all local trips farther than walking distance using Grab, and it was reliable and extremely affordable. Even more affordable when you are going somewhere alone and can choose the motorbike option.
Initial Projections
Before we started traveling, we projected location-specific costs for every candidate location using numbeo. The location-specific projections for Thailand were:
| Grocery Store | $506.70 |
| Airbnb | $1,500.00 |
| Transportation | $50.00 |
| Discretionary Spending | $257.00 |
Expenses
While I know the final details of our budget for February, it includes Sri Lanka numbers. I haven’t yet viewed the Thailand numbers in isolation. My sense of our spending in Thailand is that it was very affordable, and we were probably in the ballpark of the projected expenses. Aside from alcohol, nothing seemed to cost all that much in Chiang Mai.
Big Picture Numbers
| Monthly Expenses | $3,803.34 |
| Annual Expenses | $45,640.11 |
| Investments Needed | $1,141,002.79 |
Detailed Monthly Budget
| Accommodation | $1,937.54 | This is more expensive than necessary. We didn’t compromise on the location we wanted near Chiang Mai University, and paid more for that. You can find monthly Airbnbs for around $1,000 if you’re willing to be away from everything. That would reduce the FIRE number substantially to $841K. Single Person: you can get an amazing place right by Nimman, a guest favorite, with 4.9+ on reviews in the range of $523. |
| Cigna Global Silver w/ US | $558.42 | Sinking fund Single Person: ~$300 even if you are middle aged. |
| Grocery Store | $675.00 | At $7.50 per meal this was affordable but only a 25% cost reduction over eating out full time. Single Person: $168.75 |
| Discretionary | $108.09 | Tourist activities have been removed, leaving normal monthly things like streaming services, alcohol, etc. This could be increased to allow for meals at restaurants, but those meals drop grocery costs nearly 1:1 (.75:1). If every meal were eaten at restaurants it would only add $225 total per month. Single Person: Keep this value |
| Transportation | $88.29 | This is much higher than is really needed over a long term basis. This includes all of our tourist activity rides. Single Person: $50 because you may ride as much as we did, but you can sometimes take a motorbike. |
| Clothes | $100.00 | Sinking fund Single Person: $25 |
| Life Insurance | $99.81 | If you are a FIRE’d expat, you probably don’t need this, but we still have it. Single Person: $0 |
| Vaccines | $91.58 | Sinking fund for the average monthly vaccine amount for all of us if we continued traveling forever Single Person: $22.90 |
| Phone (Google FI) | $43.47 | Single Person: $20 |
| Gifts | $60.00 | Sinking fund Single Person: $0 |
| Global eSIM (Airalo) | $20.00 | Sinking fund Single Person: $6.67 |
| Virtual Mailbox (PostScanMail) | $18.15 | |
| Cloud Storage | $2.99 | Pictures and documents that we store “on the line” |
Analysis
There’s a pretty dramatic difference in what is needed for a family and for a solo traveler. The $1.14M family number is very similar to our FIRE number in CO. The one factor pushing the Chiang Mai budget up that high is the Airbnb that we chose, which is a very nice and even luxurious accommodation. Just reducing that by $500/month would pull the FIRE number under $1M. Moving farther away from things will save you $1K and reduce the FIRE number to $841K.
As a solo expat, you can live a really good life in Thailand for the ultra low investment total of $373,662.75. While that’s not quite as cheap as Vietnam, the quality of life upgrade is worth it.
As far as individual categories, nothing was surprising compared to the projections. Our actual spending ran over on every category except discretionary spending. However, that overage was more due to the choices we made (e.g. getting a nicer place) than the projections being wrong.
Summary Single vs Family
| Scenario | Monthly Cost | Investments Needed |
| Family | $3,803.34 | Total: $1,141,002.79 |
| Single | $1,245.54 | Total: $373,662.75 |
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