I'm Sazan. I'm from Queensland, Australia, and I live in Bangkok with my partner and our child. We both work online. We took a pay cut to do this — that's the part most "move abroad" writing leaves out — and we decided the trade was worth it.
Five years in, Bangkok is home rather than a posting. Our child goes to an international school here, we rent a townhouse in Bang Na, and the family budget on this site is the one we actually run rather than a reconstruction of it.
Nomad Budget Guide started as notes to myself. It became a site because the budget information that ranks well is usually written by people who either haven't been, or went years ago and never updated the numbers. "Street food costs about $2" is not useful when you're trying to work out whether 500 baht will get you through a day.
What I actually do differently
Every price on this site is one I paid, in the currency I paid, with the month and year attached. That constraint is inconvenient and it's the point. It means a page can't be padded out with numbers I found somewhere else, and it means you can judge how stale a figure is before you trust it.
Where I haven't been somewhere, or haven't been in a particular season, the page says so rather than filling the gap. A guide that admits a hole is more useful than one that hides it.
How a page gets checked
- First-hand layer. What I paid, where I stayed, and what went wrong. This can't be outsourced and it doesn't get skipped.
- Facts that change. Visas, fees, laws, transport schedules and festival dates are checked against the official source, and the date is recorded on the page.
- Sources listed. Every page with volatile facts links to where those facts came from, so you can check them yourself.
- Corrections are dated. When something turns out to be wrong, the page is fixed and the update date at the top changes with it. Not silently edited.
What this site won't do
- Invent people. No fabricated testimonials, no "reader stories" from people who don't exist.
- Pretend to have been somewhere. If I haven't, the page says so.
- Publish prices without dates. An undated number is a guess.
- Chase volume. A small number of pages that are actually right beats a hundred that are roughly right.
About the affiliate links
Some links to booking sites may earn a commission, and where that's the case it will be labelled. It won't change what gets recommended: if somewhere was bad value, it says so, whether or not there's a link to it. If you ever spot a recommendation that looks like it was written for the commission rather than the traveller, tell me and I'll change it.
Get in touch
Corrections, disagreements and questions are all welcome. Email sazan@nomadbudgetguide.com. If you're reporting something specific, tell me the page, what you saw, and roughly when.
Last updated 20 October 2026.