My family moved here from Chicago six years ago. We had the same excitement everyone has before that flight. We told ourselves this was it.

Then we landed in Subic, got bait and switched on our Airbnb, and got robbed our first couple of nights. Laptops gone. Phones gone. A few thousand dollars gone with them.

We thought BGC would be safer. It was. But it came with its own lesson.

Watch the full breakdown here

Mistake One: The Skin Tax

We found a unit in BGC, negotiated the agent down from 70,000 pesos to 65,000 pesos a month, and signed a 12 month lease thinking we had won.

A few months later a realtor friend told me the truth. That same unit was listed at local market rate for 45,000 pesos a month. $750. We had been paying $1,100.

Over the full lease that was $4,200 we did not need to spend. That is a vacation we did not take and an emergency fund we drained, because nobody was there to tell us the real number before we signed.

Compare that to Todd, one of our clients from Washington. Our team locked him into a centrally located penthouse in BGC, floor to ceiling windows, for $2,000 a month. Same city. Same excitement. Completely different outcome, because someone who actually knew the market was standing next to him.

Mistake Two: The Paperwork

The SRRV process is not complicated because the Philippines is disorganized. It is complicated because one wrong document, one wrong date format, can quietly send you back to square one.

One of our clients last year tried to handle his SRRV himself, using ChatGPT to walk him through the steps. He lost three months of his retirement to a single clearance document that needed to be apostilled all over again because of a formatting issue he never even knew existed.

Three months, gone, over a stapler and a stamp.

Mistake Three: Money You Cannot Touch

You cannot open a Philippine bank account until your ACR card clears, and that takes 59 days. Until then you are moving money through Wise, Remitly, or a US debit card and hoping nothing goes wrong.

Here is the part almost nobody plans for. Transfer more than $10,000 in a single month and it can get flagged for anti money laundering review. I know a retired couple who split their first year of savings across two separate transfers to be careful. It still got flagged. It took 11 days to prove their own money was, in fact, their own money.

Mistake Four: The Fear Nobody Names Out Loud

A retiree in Florida once told me he had delayed his move for over a year, not because the Philippines was not ready for him, but because he had no plan for his healthcare and nobody to ask.

For what it is worth, St. Luke's in BGC is JCI accredited, the same international standard as hospitals back home, with English speaking doctors trained in the US and Australia. The hospital was never the problem. The not knowing was.

The Real Fifth Mistake

Every one of these problems is solvable. What makes them dangerous is trying to solve all four of them alone, 6,000 miles from anyone who has actually done this before, piecing together advice from Facebook groups where half the posts contradict the other half.

That $8,000 tuition fee my family paid is the entire reason this company exists. We have since helped 180+ Americans avoid paying it themselves.

Click here to start your move to the Philippines the right way.

Travel Well,
Evan Lorezca
The Savvy Expat