I have been living in Vietnam for a while. To be more specific, it’s been more than 3 months. When I first came to Vietnam, I got some friends. It helped a lot. I’ve always wanted to write about my experience so that if someone plans to move to Vietnam, they get a general idea. Initially, I was moving out to Vietnam to take a career break for a few months. I was thinking like maybe I will be staying there for like 3 months and we will see how it goes. Now here I am in Vietnam after 3 months staying here and writing this article.

Visa – First thing I want to know is visa. Is there any long-term visa like DTV in Thailand? No, there is no long-term visa like DTV or that sort. There is E-Visa which allows you to stay in VN for 3 months. You can continue doing this without any limitation. I got some people I know and they have been living in VN with E-Visa for a few years. Basically, every 90 days you have to get out of VN and get a new e-Visa. Normally E-Visa takes a while to get it. But, you can pay additional fees to make it faster. There are quite a lot of visa run services which include transportation to the border and getting e-Visa for you.

Living Cost – Currently, I live in Dalat. I like the weather here and the city is not too big like major cities as well. And it’s very affordable. Initially, I lived in Danang for one month. It’s a great city as well. I have been to HCM and big city is not for me at this moment. For living cost, for me and my wife it costs us around 1000 SGD per month, we cook at home and go out to eat at least 2/3 times a week. If we have to go out for visa run, we will probably add additional 500 SGD. Our apartment costs us around 500 SGD per month. Two bedrooms, electricity, water, internet and everything included. We look for apartments by posting in Facebook Groups. And we go and check out the condition. I rent a motorbike, it costs us around 20 SGD per month.

There are a few things that are essential in my opinion. Must know how to ride a motorbike and explore around with it, it’s the best. If you arrive in Vietnam, better buy a Vietnam simcard and set up Zalo. Zalo is like their WhatsApp/Viber. Locals like to communicate via there. Overall it’s very affordable and enjoyable. I hope this blog is helpful.

I am using Claude to check grammar and enhancement for this blog post.