About Viva Filipino
For Filipinos, family has always meant more than living under the same roof.
It means looking after our parents as they grow older. Helping brothers, sisters, children, and relatives when they need us. Sending support home. Checking in. Showing up. And carrying a sense of responsibility for family even when thousands of miles separate us.
Living abroad makes those responsibilities complicated. How do you care for aging parents when you can't be there every day? How do you know when they really need help, when every phone call ends with "okay lang kami"? How do you handle healthcare, money, property, paperwork, emergencies — and the possibility of one day coming home?
Viva Filipino is about helping Filipino families stay connected, informed, and supported wherever life takes them.
Here you'll find practical information, honest numbers, and resources for Filipino families dealing with caregiving, money, property, retirement, travel, and the many decisions that come with building a life abroad while your heart — and often much of your family — remains in the Philippines.
Because distance may change how we care for our families. It doesn't change why we do it.
What you'll find here
- Guides to the four problems that follow every Fil-Am family: caring for aging parents, sending money home, property across an ocean, and coming home.
- Calculators that do the real arithmetic — caregiver pay with the mandatory benefits included, remittance fees at today's rates, US and Philippine care costs side by side, a retirement budget in pesos.
- Peso Watch — the exchange rate, Philippine inflation, and whether the padala you set two years ago still buys what it did. Updated automatically.
- Rentals — homes offered by Filipino owners abroad. We make the introduction; you deal with the owner. No fees, no payments held.
- Dear Viva — readers' questions, answered in the open — plus community events and a consular outreach tracker for when the consulate comes closer to you.
- Printable checklists for the days that don't wait: the 3 a.m. hospital sheet, caregiver interview questions, the SPA checklist, and the family document locator.
- A glossary of the words one side of the family uses daily and the other has never heard — SPA, TCT, amilyar, eCAR, I-864 — each linked to the guide that does the real work.
- A monthly digest of what actually changed — the peso, PhilHealth and SSS rules, the visa queue — so you don't have to track it all.
Talk to us
A real person reads every message. Ask a question, write to Dear Viva, list a home, or tell us about an event. And if we got something wrong, say so — corrections are how this site earns its keep: contact form or hello@vivafilipino.com.
Use what's here
Run a parish group, an association, a clinic, a community page? You may link to any page and reprint the printable checklists for free — no need to ask. The reuse page has the short version, the logo files, and a paragraph you can paste.