Living in Bali on a Budget: Week 1 (Ubud)

September 02, 2017

Living in Bali on a Budget: Week 1 (Ubud)

If you want to travel on a budget, living in Bali is a great place to go! Bali is affordable, fun, welcoming, and a great place for a cheap tropical vacation.

Our goal: $50 per day total, including transportation, accommodation, visas, and bills back home. For two people.

In every budget update I will add a prorated estimate of our bills back home (loans, phone plan, etc.) to include in our $50/day travel budget. I am not including travel insurance -- this would add about $5.75 per day to our total.

Days: 8

Location(s): Ubud, Bali, Indonesia

Avg. spending per day: $40.94

Splurges: visa, transportation, sim card

Avg. spending per day incl. bills back home: $44.61

Rice paddies just a short walk from the center of Ubud

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So where did all that money go?

Conversion rate: 10,000 Indonesian rupiah (IDR) = US$0.75.

Accommodation: $120

We are staying here and loving it (remember to use my code if you want to AirBnB!):

Visa: $70

Visits less than 30 days do not require a visa. We will be extending our stay to be in Bali for eight weeks, so we purchased a VOA. For more info check out my visa round-up.

Transportation: $22.50

Our only cost here has been a private car hire arranged through our accommodation, to get us from Denpasar (Ngurah Rai Intl'l Airport) to Ubud for 300,000 IDR.

Food and drinks: $97

Restaurants in Bali are cheap, and we picked up some jam, salt, raisins, oatmeal, and bananas for breakfast to save a bit of cash.

We have mostly been sticking to water at 15,500 IDR ($1.16) for six liters. We have bought four large beers to split and a couple of sodas. Our homestay provides coffee.

Sim card: $5.62

I splurged and bought the 75,000 IDR Telkomsel sim card so that I would have service around town, and enough data for two months of getting lost. I could have probably haggled it down another 10,000...

Misc: $12.36

Warren needed new flip-flops and I have taken two 90-minute yoga classes at Yoga Saraswati for 50,000 IDR a piece!

Cooking class: $0

I used credit card bonus points to book Jambangan Bali Cooking Class for two. It was very fun!

For you, this could have been $70 cheaper without the visa, taking you down to about $32 a day. Personally, I would spend that on classes -- yoga is $3.75 and the are many handicraft classes offered all around town!