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I Lived Like a Baller for a Month in Venezuela on Just £75 (2015)
- HippoViolation 10y agoThis article is nearly a year old. The living situation in Venezuela, a year later, is much more dire now.
- jacquesm 10y agoIn the time before the wall fell most communist countries had an 'official' (ridiculous) and a black market exchange rate much like the one in the article. You were forced to exchange a certain amount of money for every day of your stay at the official rate, if you managed to smuggle just a few extra notes into the country and exchanged those on the black market it would usually translate into 'more money than you can sensibly spend'. The reason those black markets are so popular is that people living in a country like that far prefer to hold on to some hard currency instead of the local currency which is devaluating so fast that even a few weeks can make a huge difference. Saving the local currency makes no sense and hence the black market materializes. One person I know paid off a mortgage entered into a few years earlier with a single months pay, rapid inflation creates all kinds of havoc.
- woah 10y agoThis guy seems like a decent writer. Apparently, if I hired him at US rates, he would be wealthy beyond his wildest dreams. Why isn't there more remote work going on?
- Spooky23 10y agoThere's the minor detail of the neuveau-communist military dictatorship. The whole problem with the country are self-inflicted wounds.
- dexwiz 10y agoBecause they just enacted a law that allows the government and corporations to force employees to go work in the fields due the food shortage.
- v768 10y agoMost of the laws are never applied and specially in the case of the ones like this one that are clearly impossible to apply and mostly for the show.
- rafaelm 10y agoWell, we don't know how bad things will get. Today they law is a useless paper. Tomorrow if things get bad enough, they could start enforcing it. I think you are the second person in Venezuela I've found on HN. Check my profile for my contact info.
- brianbreslin 10y agoI have a few friends who hired programmers remotely, they had to fly down with cash to pay them, no other way to get them money. Eventually the situation got too dangerous despite the incredible wage arbitrage they were getting by paying in US dollars. (too dangerous for the employees who were getting robbed frequently, and the bosses to carry the cash down there)
- rafaelm 10y agoI know Huawei and ZTE pay the very first employees they hired when they first setup offices here in Venezuela in USD and they are all paid in accounts in the US. It used to be pretty easy to open an account in Panama or the US from Venezuela, don't know if that has changed. The thing is getting the funds for the initial deposit.
- modeless 10y agoDid they look into Bitcoin? It seems tailor made for this situation. Immune to hyperinflation, difficult for offline criminals to steal, and difficult for the government to block. There is a Venezuelan Bitcoin exchange SurBitcoin and also LocalBitcoins.com, though I don't know the feasibility of using either right now. But at least the initial payment would be no problem.
- derekdahmer 10y agoDepends on the BTC / VEF exchange rate inside the country. $100 -> .17BTC -> 102 VEF -> $10.25. So you'd lose 90% of the dollar value even at the generous official VEF/USD exchange rate. https://surbitcoin.com/#market https://surbitcoin.com/#market
- rafaelm 10y agoI've never really looked in to BTC because here you can sell dollars much easier. Although I can see that as a good way to receive dollars for those that do not have any other way. Right now, $1 = $1004 VEF I see that 1 BTC = $583.79 From localbitcoin.com I see people selling in Venezuela at around 628000.00 VEF / BTC. So the price is the same. I think what's going on, is they are calculating the price of the dollar at one of the govt rates of 645 VEF per dollar. That's not realistic. Anyone with dollars in Venezuela is going to sell them at the black market rate of VEF 1000 per dollar. Of course, the black market rate is illegal here and the government even went so far as blocking the black market rate information websites here. That's their idea of economic policy. EDIT: Just realized, surbitcoin rate is around BsF 600k per Bitcoin. We use the dot (.) as the thousands separator.
- v768 10y agoThings have changed a lot since this was written in December. I live in Caracas, there's massive national food shortages. Now you can't have 3 meals a day for a month with 100€, and would spend quite some time finding it (on the black market). Last time I saw sugar, it was around 3€ per kilo. Edit: If you want a realistic picture of how is life today, read this piece, written by a foreign journalist that actually lives there (sadly, most things I see in foreign media is written from outside): http://bigstory.ap.org/article/7c0464c1dd404aca99458a8a19930bad/life-line-venezuela-economic-crisis-worsens http://bigstory.ap.org/article/7c0464c1dd404aca99458a8a19930...
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- Havoc 10y ago>Now you can't have 3 meals a day for a month with 100€ Pretty insane that things can get so desperate that even hard currency can't get you 3 meals.
- swe 10y agoIt can happen anywhere there's fiat currency and long supply lines.
- syedkarim 10y agoI often read that gold is superior to fiat currency, but how would any kind of currency or precious commodity make a difference in this case, since demand is outstripping supply of finite tangible goods.
- Locke1689 10y agoIt wouldn't. Don't believe what you read on the internet about money. The goldbugs are a vocal minority, not taken seriously in real economics discussions.
- sevenless 10y agoI think getting murdered would be more of a concern than the low cost of living.
- trevyn 10y ago(2015)
- rwallace 10y agoThat was last year when the crisis could still be attributed to incompetence, mismanagement. The situation has changed considerably since then. I'm going to call it now: the Venezuela crisis is not incompetence after all. It's the first steps of a highly competent plan to do what several other communist governments did last century: bring about the death of a large percentage of the country's population. I don't lightly advocate military intervention. I think it's almost always the wrong thing to do. But I'm advocating it now. The communist government of Venezuela needs to be taken down hard and fast, before this turns into full-blown genocide.
- astronautjones 10y agoThey don't have a communist government.
- tim333 10y agoAlthough they are probably heading that way if Maduro can get away with it. I still think the food shortages are incompetence rather than design though.
- narrator 10y agoI said that they were getting a terror famine ready last year and everyone thought I was a lunatic. The idea, pioneered in the Soviet Union in the 30s, is that the government has to control all distribution of food and goods produced by workers to earn hard currency abroad by exporting the food and goods instead of feeding people domestically so it can use the proceeds to "build socialism". That means they have to confiscate factories and force people onto collective farms who don't want to be there as they're doing now. Sure they could have a normal capitalist economy and just tax them like a normal country, but this is communism and they have to remove the "capitalist running-dog exploiter" class from power and give all economic power to the government. If you want to read about Soviet forced collectivization and all that messy history for a preview of what's coming up, this is a pretty good source: http://acienciala.faculty.ku.edu/communistnationssince1917/ch3.html http://acienciala.faculty.ku.edu/communistnationssince1917/c... Ctrl-F for "Collectivization" and start reading from there, or read the whole thing if you want the background. Remember, the guys running Venezuela are communists. They've read up and talked with the Cubans about how the Soviet Union was set up and run, etc. They like that model and think it was a good idea. They are simply following the cookbook. This includes the propaganda that everything bad happening is due to foreign saboteurs, right-wing reactionaries or unfortunate, but soon to be remedied, mistakes. They've got the forced collectivization already to go: https://news.vice.com/article/venezuela-has-a-new-forced-labor-law-that-can-require-people-work-in-fields https://news.vice.com/article/venezuela-has-a-new-forced-lab...
- pipio21 10y agoAs a Spanish native speaker who knows Venezuela pretty well I find disturbing to hear you could live well in Venezuela with USD100. First, unless you are a complete sociopath, just seeing so many people suffering to just buy food(or medicines) is a traumatic experience. For a doctor to operate you, you need to bring the medicines first!! Next, you will risking your life in every corner. In some South American countries life is worth nothing, but in Venezuela it is another level. If you are an outsider you have to be very careful. Venezuelan people have gotten used to it and they know subconsciously what not to do, while a European or (North)American can make mistakes easily, and they have too much money. When Venezuelan people find a robber, they will lynch him, police will come so people do not kill him. The country is near a civil war. Hugo Chavez created a populist law called "Referendum revocatorio" that if the Government did something against the people, the people could remove it from power. The opposition is trying to use this law, but Maduro opposes it. Of course the people in power do not want to go out of power by any means, specially when in Venezuela every good job position is occupied by pro-Chavez people, they are "more equal than others" and will lose everything if they pass the law. Venezuela has a big army, and this army is directly supported by Russia, so given that Venezuela oil reserves are the biggest in the world(albeit bad quality) it is very dangerous as lots of other countries could intervene and create a proxy war.
- srgseg 10y agoIt's staggering how quickly things can change. In 2014, Venezuelans were some of the happiest people in the world, and according to Pew happier than the average American [1] Now it easily tops the Bloomberg misery index for the second year in a row [2] [1] http://www.pewglobal.org/2014/10/30/people-in-emerging-markets-catch-up-to-advanced-economies-in-life-satisfaction/satisfaction-08/ http://www.pewglobal.org/2014/10/30/people-in-emerging-marke... [2] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-02-04/these-are-the-world-s-most-miserable-economies http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-02-04/these-are-...
- gk1 10y agoIf you want to experience living "like a baller" for a low amount of money (for the US), there are many great places to go that are much safer than Venezuela.
- passivepinetree 10y agoDo you have any suggestions? I'm living in the US in an expensive city and it'd be cool to take a vacation somewhere much cheaper.
- slv77 10y agoCurious how people who have family members in Venezula are remitting funds to them? Do they have exchange funds at the official rate or is there ways to send Dollars directly. This has to be a pretty common occurance.
- moo 10y agohttp://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Rich-Eating-Well-in-Venezuela-Basque-Executive-Shows-20160530-0001.html http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Rich-Eating-Well-in-Ve... Rich are blocking food to the poor in attempt to scare them from supporting the Bolivarian Revolution. Youtube videos also show Venezuelan stores hiding food to cause shortage.
- rafaelm 10y agoYes that's the story as told by the government and the state funded media like Telesur, your source. They wouldn't say anything about how the food imports are controlled by the military and the government and how they've stolen more than $50 billion, as admitted by Chavez's former economic minister.
- moo 10y agoA lot more sources than Telesur but you have to look beyond Western news media. I hope the Venezuelan military does take control away from the US backed gusanos who are withholding food from the poor in an economic war to sabotage the Bolivarian Revolution. US orchestrated attacks can also be seen with the USAID fake 'Twitter' in Cuba to destabilize the government. ABC News even reported Peace Corps volunteers and a Fulbright scholar were asked by a U.S. Embassy official in Bolivia "to basically spy" on Cubans and Venezuelans in the country, according to the Peace Corps personnel and the Fulbright scholar involved. US interests can be seen with Brazilian vassel elites tied to US, orchestrating the impeachment of Brazil's Dilma Rousseff after NSA spied on Rousseff and discounting the 54 million-plus Brazilians who reelected her. You can see how the West respects Latin America with how Bolivia's Evo Morales had his government plane force landed and he was detained in Vienna. You can also look at how Venezuela's President Chavez, Honduras' President Zelaya, or Haiti's President Aristide were all kidnapped with Washington's blessings. Former covert agent John Stockwell says U.S. has killed 6 million in covert operations in the Third World. All this information does not come out of Telesur, and if you were half honest you would see a pattern here.
- rafaelm 10y ago
- meira 10y agoWhich country is in a worse situation? Venezuela or Ukraine? It's funny how we see only one been bashed by western media.