How Much it Costs to Live in PUEBLA, Mexico in 2021 - Four Weeks ACTUAL Spending with CATEGORIES

Today's video is dedicated to Dungo Down Under. Today we'll be talking about money again. So we'll be talking about our cost of living in Puebla. I'll probably be mostly comparing it to our time in Mexico City. I'll kick off by talking about what our forecasted cost of living would be, then I'll get into our actual spend and cost of living across the four weeks, and I'll have a categorical breakdown of said expenses. All right, so for our forecasted cost of living, there were two big or only changes. So we actually reduced our transportation budget by $150 or $200. I'll figure that out. And we reallocated that to food and beverage. So our total forecasted cost of living didn't change. It was still $2,500 for the month for both of us. The largest expense in that chunk was for accommodation. That was $1,350. Alcohol is now $900 instead of $750. Forecasted transportation went down from $350 to $200, so that's what it'll be now. Forecasted activities have stayed zero. We can talk about that later. Maybe you already know how I feel about that. And then the forecasted miscellaneous stayed the same at $50. The reason I made those changes to the cost of living, the reason I reduced transportation further, was I actually got done purchasing all of the remaining flights, long distance buses. So basically from May to November, when we'll be going home, I had the whole transportation thing fleshed out. So I averaged that out and it was like $170 or something. So I gave a buffer to $200. The reason I reallocated that to food and alcohol is that's what I like to spend my money on. And it seems like the trend is an increased spend in food and alcohol. Total actual cost of living for 28 nights or four weeks in Puebla was about a little over $1,600. Extrapolated for a full month, that would be almost $1,750. And then breaking that down, those are both for two. And then breaking that down per person, that would be a little over $816 per person per period, not per month. That's f***ing confusing. Or a little over $29 per person per day. That doesn't need to be extrapolated because 28 or 30 doesn't matter. Getting down to the categorical breakdown of those actual expenses, we'll start with accommodation. So for the four weeks or 28 nights, it was $698 rent for Airbnb. Extrapolated for a full month, that would be just under $750. And then the big takeaways from here are, unlike in Mexico City, our rent actually went down. And I think the weird thing, like obviously Puebla is not as big of a city as Mexico City, but I'm still confused why Puebla Airbnbs were so inexpensive. My only guess can be there's quite a lot of supplier inventory and not a lot of demand. And then last fact, our rent in Puebla was actually less than 50% of what we paid while we were in Mexico City. All right, now I want to talk about food and alcohol. We spent a little over $880 during those four weeks. Two interesting facts about our time in Puebla. Our actual spend per day on food and alcohol was within a dollar of Mexico City, which that's interesting to me. That might not be interesting to you. And our food and alcohol spend was actually higher in Puebla than Mexico City. I'll also be breaking down food and alcohol between groceries and eating in, as well as restaurants and going out. And then I'll break down that restaurants and going out further. So for groceries and eating in, we actually spent a little over $100. $100 definitely seems low for groceries for two. That was roughly only 70% of what we spent on groceries and eating in in Mexico City. For restaurants and eating out, we spent the devil's number, $666 for the two of us across four weeks. And then the last thing that I think is interesting, not sure if you will, while we were in Mexico City, our spend per meal was very consistent. It was like a third of our spend went to brunch, lunch and dinner. It's heavily skewed in our time in Puebla. And we spent something like, yeah, 60% of our restaurant and eating out spend was actually skewed towards dinner. So very different than our time in Mexico City. Breaking down our spend per meal or meal type, we spent $8.41 on coffee. That was us going to cafes twice. For brunch, we spent a little over $100 on eight brunches. Our cheapest brunch was $3.49. That was just for pastries. Our most expensive brunch was a little over $22. I'm deviating from the whole average thing. I hope this gives more context to the meals. For lunches, we spent a little over $165 on nine lunches. Our cheapest lunch was $5.57. Our most expensive lunch was $78.49. That meal was actually intro, my favorite meal so far. I'll add the card here if you want to check that lunch out. It's awesome. And for dinner, we spent almost $400 on 12 dinners. Our cheapest dinner was $4.70. That was just getting tacos. Our most expensive dinner was $64.37. Alright, so our bar spend in Puebla was about $100. That was about two-thirds of what we spent in Mexico City. And I think the major reason for that was we just went to bars less frequently in Puebla. As I mentioned, we had more cocktails and wine with dinner and at restaurants. So a lot of that alcohol spend would probably take place under restaurants instead of bars. Alcohol that I just mentioned. So any time we spent money on alcohol, whether that was groceries, going to a bar, or having cocktails, wine, or beer at a restaurant, that represents our alcohol category. We spent $306, a little over that, for two. Our alcohol spend was very, very similar to what it was in Mexico City. So our transportation spend was super low. The main reason is we're already here. So we didn't have here as in Mexico. So we didn't have to factor in anything like flights, only the bus to get to Puebla. So our transportation for two was $26.62, which is very low. And that broke down to mostly two bus tickets on Adeo from Mexico City to Puebla. That was $14.66. Ubers, that was $10.96. And two bus tickets to Cholula, which cost a dollar. We later found out that there was a free train. So the other three times we did back and forth between Cholula and Puebla was free, which is awesome. So yeah, extremely low transportation spend. So miscellaneous was extremely similar to our time in Mexico City. It really came down to water, beer, and like maybe fruit, or just something random. But usually water or beer. That came out to $28.77. And that was, yeah, typically like OXO runs, running to the convenience store just to maybe get more water, get a six-pack, something like that. So our activities again came in at $0. The reason for that is a lot of the activities we do are free. We did spend a dollar to go on the day trip to Cholula, but I categorize that as transportation. And then as I mentioned, all the other trips there were free on the free train. Otherwise, as usual, our activities really did boil down to like eating, drinking, restaurants, bars, etc. How would you feel if eating and drinking were your only activities? Let me know in the comments. So where and how did we reduce our spend or cost of living? Very similar to Mexico City. I think the top two ways are, you know, walking a ton. We hardly took any Ubers. One was from intro back just because that was like a two-hour walk. The other one was groceries and eating in. It saves a ton of money. Breakfast and lunch during the week cost a very low amount. And then the major difference in where we saved compared to Mexico City was obviously rent. We saved 50% or like $700 on rent. The places we could further save or reduce our cost of living or spend would definitely be alcohol. You know, there's $300 there. No one has to drink. So that's definitely an area or category we could save on. We could also reduce either the frequency or the niceness or cost of the restaurants we eat at. Because we came in so far under budget, I don't think we'll need to do any of those things. But it is nice to know that like if we needed to like tighten up the budget, those are the places we would bet. So final thoughts. I've got the table here so you can compare forecasted expenses to actual expenses on the actual, you know, 28-night basis and the extrapolated full month. Again, just to clarify, unlike Mexico City, there's no blending of cities. This is purely spent in Puebla and then the full month is extrapolated just to give you an idea of what a full month would look like. I wanted to talk about transportation. I talked about how we reduced that and why that number came down. As we travel to other countries and continents, I will have to revise our forecast budget. But because we're in Mexico and I did have that fully fleshed out, that's how we were able to get it down. Originally from $450, down to $350, now down to $200. Other caveat, traveling as a couple, we do save on things like Airbnbs or rent. That's a big thing that kind of cuts in half. We also save on Ubers. But things like food and alcohol, restaurants, groceries, bus tickets, basically everything else miscellaneous, we don't save on any of those expenses. And then I also wanted to note during our time in Puebla, we did have some friends visit. Shout out to Greg. He came for a long weekend. We'll have him in some videos. And then shout out to Carly and Dylan who did a day trip from Mexico City. If you're interested in that trip, I will link that above and drop a card so you can click that. Because they didn't stay for that long, it didn't affect our expenses. But as we spend more time in Mexico and friends visit longer, I do expect spend to go up. And then the last thing I wanted to mention is Puebla probably will go down as the cheapest or most inexpensive city during our time in Mexico. And then again, the big reason for that was just that massive rent savings. I do want to end talking about the fact that we love Puebla and Cholula. Definitely would consider having kind of like a home base here. Love the vibe, love the food, love the people. So it's definitely somewhere we want to come back to. Let me know if you have any questions in the comments about specific spends or if you need clarification. Also let me know, you know, do you think this was super cheap? Do you think we spent way too much money? Please let me know in the comments. Thanks for hanging out and listening to me talk about numbers and money. Until next time.