I Lived Like a Baller for a Month in Venezuela on Just £75 (2015)
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Re: I Lived Like a Baller for a Month in Venezuela on Just £75 (2015)
#2This article is nearly a year old. The living situation in Venezuela, a year later, is much more dire now.
Re: I Lived Like a Baller for a Month in Venezuela on Just £75 (2015)
#3In 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.
Re: I Lived Like a Baller for a Month in Venezuela on Just £75 (2015)
#4This 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?
Re: I Lived Like a Baller for a Month in Venezuela on Just £75 (2015)
#5This 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?
There's the minor detail of the neuveau-communist military dictatorship.
The whole problem with the country are self-inflicted wounds.
Re: I Lived Like a Baller for a Month in Venezuela on Just £75 (2015)
#6This 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?
Because they just enacted a law that allows the government and corporations to force employees to go work in the fields due the food shortage.
Re: I Lived Like a Baller for a Month in Venezuela on Just £75 (2015)
#7Things 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/7c0464c1dd404aca99458a8a19930...
Re: I Lived Like a Baller for a Month in Venezuela on Just £75 (2015)
#8Things 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 liv…
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Re: I Lived Like a Baller for a Month in Venezuela on Just £75 (2015)
#9I think getting murdered would be more of a concern than the low cost of living.
Re: I Lived Like a Baller for a Month in Venezuela on Just £75 (2015)
#10This 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?
I 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)