The Nasi Lemak Index: How many packets of nasi lemak to buy a house?

With the average cost of living increasing, it’s getting really hard to budget 🙁 But have you wondered how much we spend on food like nasi lemak or nasi goreng? And wonder how many of those would it take to buy a house?

So, using the average prices, we did the calculations. (Ya, very Asian, we know.)

Average price of a packet of nasi lemak:	RM2.50
Average price of a house in Malaysia (according to CEIC 2018):	RM408,774
	= 163,509 packets of nasi lemak ?

Wah! 160,000+ packets of nasi lemak to buy a house! Like that can supply dunno how many families already… Last for years… But then, what about deposit leh?

Deposit – 10% of House Price: RM40,877.40

= 16,351 packets of nasi lemak

Still a lot of nasi lemak there… can throw a nasi lemak festival already.

But then right, we wondered (really too curious for our own good leh) even more. We asked ourselves:

“How many packets of nasi lemak for houses in KL, Penang and all ah?”

And that was it. We were gone.

This is what we found:

Average House Price: Johor RM331,4­­17 132,567 packets of nasi lemak	Average House Price: Kuala Lumpur RM800,8­­93 320,357 packets of nasi lemak
Average House Price: Penang RM431,2­­25 172,490 packets of nasi lemak	Average House Price: Selangor RM473,3­­70 189,348 packets of nasi lemak

But we had to stop there, because too much already. Later dream of nasi lemak and houses.

We’ve put it in a chart for you also 😀

Don’t forget to check out our shiny website for new listings ya. If it’s your first time, don’t worry. We let you rent with No Deposit and provide rental protection up to RM26k for you landlords 😀