Ryan landed in the Philippines with a plan.

Turn off the work brain. Turn on the retirement brain. Kick his feet up, watch the sunsets, and finally get the peace of mind he had spent his whole career working toward.

He was a month into that plan when he called us. By then he was down $7,000.

Watch Ryan's full story here

Why He Thought He Could Do It Alone

Ryan was not like most of our clients. Most reach out before they ever get on the plane. Ryan was already here, already a month into his new life, when things started going wrong.

His reasoning made sense on paper. He figured that since he was already in the Philippines, already meeting realtors and landlords in person, already looking at real units with his own eyes, he had an advantage the other expats calling us from the States did not have. He thought he was already a step ahead.

He was not.

The First Unit

Ryan found a condo in BGC he liked right away. He signed. He moved in.

Within days the place revealed what it actually was. It smelled like a sewer. Mold was spreading through the unit, and the landlord who had promised to send a specialist never followed up. The smell of rotting wood came through the AC ducts. The furniture was filthy enough that he was scratching bug bites on his back within the first week.

He lasted seven days. Then he hired a lawyer just to try to get his four-month deposit back and started the search over from scratch.

The Second Unit

A few days later he found another place. This one looked clean at the first viewing.

He put down another four-month deposit. Then he found the roach infestation. Countertops, floors, and everywhere in between. He described it as feeling less like his own home and more like he was the one intruding on the cockroaches' territory.

Two units. Two four-month deposits. Two months of trying to handle it alone.

$7,000 gone.

What He Actually Got Wrong

Ryan did not get scammed because he was careless. He got scammed because he underestimated two things that are genuinely invisible until you have already been burned by them.

The first was communication. English is spoken here, but that does not mean what you ask a realtor for lands the way you mean it. When Ryan described the quality of home he wanted from a Western frame of reference, the realtors he was talking to had no equivalent reference point. Their only comparison was the units they already had on their books.

The second was trust. Not every landlord and realtor in the Philippines is dishonest, but the ones who are tend to be very good at seeming otherwise. Most leases here are structured to favor the landlord by default. Ryan found that out only after he had already signed twice.

How Close He Came to Leaving

By the time Ryan called us he was not just out $7,000. He was done.

He told us he was one plane ticket away from giving up on the entire retirement he had spent his career working toward. Not because the Philippines was wrong for him. Because two bad decisions in a row, made without anyone in his corner to catch them, had convinced him it was.

That is the part of this story that matters most. Ryan was not failed by the Philippines. He was failed by trying to navigate it completely alone in a system he had no way of fully understanding from the outside, no matter how many YouTube videos he had watched beforehand.

What Happened Next

That first call was the turning point. From there our team got to work finding him a real place — the kind of unit that gets properly checked before a deposit ever changes hands, with a landlord who has already been vetted through months of doing this with other clients.

We have now helped over 170+ Americans make this exact move, and the two mistakes that cost Ryan $7,000 are the same two mistakes we specifically built our process to catch before they ever happen to someone else. Every unit gets inspected. Every landlord gets checked. Every lease gets read by someone who knows exactly what favors the landlord and what does not.

Ryan's story is not rare. It is common enough that we built an entire process around preventing it.

Click here to start your move to the Philippines the right way.

Travel Well,
Evan Lorezca
The Savvy Expat