Cebu City one of Asia’s most expensive: High cost of living

CEBU, Philippines —  If you live in Cebu City, you must have enough resources to afford the high cost of living, at least according to a crowdsourcing survey.

Number, in its Asia: Cost of Living Index by City 2022 Mid-Year, placed the Queen City of the South in the 60th spot with a cost of living index of 34.75.

Cebu City follows Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam, which has a reported cost of living index of 34.78.

Cost of living, as defined by Investopedia, is the amount of money needed to cover basic expenses such as housing, food, taxes, and healthcare in a certain place and time period.

It is often used to compare how expensive it is to live in one city versus another.

As provided by the open database site’s summary about the cost of living in Cebu, as of July 2022, a family of four is estimated to spend at least P96,959 per month, excluding rent.

For a single person without rent, the estimated monthly cost is at P27,530.

According to Numbeo, “Cebu is 4.54% less expensive than Manila (without rent). Rent in Cebu is, on average, is 37.22% lower than in Manila.”

Other cities in the Philippines included in the open database site’s Top 107 most expensive cities to live in Asia are Makati, Quezon, and Manila.

Makati ranked 38th with a cost of living index of 45.34 while Quezon City ranked 43rd with a cost of living index of 40.00.

Meanwhile, Manila, having 36.66 cost of living index, is on the 52nd spot in the list.

According to the open database site, Beirut, the capital and largest city of Lebanon, is the most expensive city to live in Asia with a cost of living index of 95.65.

Launched in April 2009, Numbeo is a Serbian crowd-sourced global database of perceived consumer prices, crime rates, quality of health care, among other statistics.

It is a “collection of Web pages containing numerical and other itemizable data about cities and countries, designed to enable anyone to contribute or modify content.”

Meanwhile, experts have cautioned the public against taking Numbeo’s figures at face value.

They pointed out that the numbers are not based on “official and confirmed statistics” and were generated through user-contributed surveys and insights, therefore, vulnerable to “statistical misuse, misrepresentation, and inaccuracies.” – JMO (FREEMAN)