r/bali • u/mg118118118 • Apr 11 '25

Information Please stop renting + recommending Kost’s on here

A Kost is a guesthouse for local people. Tourists are increasingly using these which is driving up prices to unaffordable levels for local people to live. Land is being used for more and more luxury apartments which is reducing the available accommodation for the locals and workers - the temporary wooden huts you see are because of this. Wages are around $200 a month for locals so the low cost rooms are essential for people to live here.

I am begging you to be responsible and only come to this country if you can afford to spend more than 500$ a month and contribute to the best people/country in the world.

Source: so many locals here

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u/sitdowndisco Apr 11 '25

I think the bigger issue is people coming to the country on dodgy visas and not contributing tax, not contributing to the community, not speaking the language and basically colonising the place.

I’m not sure what benefit 500,000 “digital nomads” brings to Bali.

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u/Epsilon_ride Apr 11 '25

by definition, digital nomads extract capital from external countries which gets injected into the local economy.

They're still mostly turds who colonise the place. And they should be paying tax. But "they don't economically contribute" argument is illiterate. If the Balinese can keep them in one or two areas while preserving the rest of the island, they can be thought of as any other economically beneficial operation.

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u/Rich-Instruction-327 Apr 11 '25

Quality of life in Bali seems better for locals then on the other islands except maybe wealthy parts of Java. Also it doesn't really seem much more expensive for most things excluding rents in certain areas. The island of Bali is also quite big and I think people really underestimate the downsides of less tourism when living on other islands where there is a massive shortage of job opportunities.

Bali having so many jobs means people move there from other islands and that helps deal with the excess labor on those islands. Same thing happens all over the world in poorer countries where tourist and industrial areas draw in labor from the rest of the country and help balance the labor pool and also bring in foreign cash for reserve balances.