who says I'm offering advice on market rates? The thread basically asks how much people spend per month, and I said HK$3000 a week tops, which is for roughly for 3-4 girls..... I don't think that is too outrageous, given that a lot of the bros here spend over HK$10k a month according to the poll...

besides, since people seem to be reminiscing, I thought I throw in a snippet of one of the dumb things I had done in the past as well..... besides, the GBP was so much lower in those days.... unlike now...

I was referring to your "HK hotel girls should charge more" thread.

I wish I could reminisce on weeks when I spent 10K pounds on girls bro - that must have been a very eventful 7 days!

bro Mar. 1995-97 100k a week was standard if one wanted creme de la creme. these girls use to make 400k a month!! those were stupid times. really stupid time. FS sauna didnt really exsist then either and u paid current FS for HJ!

Friend sybian, are these figures from your own personal experience?  And what do you mean by 100K/wk? You do realize that k = 1000, don't you? I have very clear memories of being alive in 1995-97, and certainly never had to spend even one-tenth of that for as much sex as I wanted..

Saunas didn't exist back in the late nineties?!  

Perhaps by 'creme de la creme' you are referring to HK movie starlets?

These figures just don't make sense. If the 'standard' punter was spending $400,000/mth and the gals are making $400,000/month,
that would mean the ratio of punters to WGs was 1:1. Impossible.

And how many guys in HK could afford to spend $400,000/mth on WGs? Not many; only the super-rich.

Maybe a misprint for 10K a week.

Mars, sybian ment FS saunas didn't exist in those days ... at least not in the medium to higher class saunas.

In the pre 1997 days, it was easy to make money and also spend it !
I spent CRAZY money on sauna and night club girls during 1991 - 1994 ... typical spending per night went like this :

2 hour session veggie sauna - $800 to sauna & $400 - $500 to girl for tips ... if its with HJ then additional $400 for tips.

Night club - about 3 hours at the NC with drinks and time spent with girls $4000 to $5000 ... take girl out for late
night snack to a usually fancy place that still open at 3am $1500 ... go and find a motel that's not full and nail the
girl for an hour or two $2000 - $3000.

Typical expenses for ONE NIGHT is about $9,000 to $11,000 (per person) !!!

When things were going well and one had clients to take out, one would be at the night clubs atleast 3-4 times a week !
With a party of 4-5 people in these top NCs the bill from just the club itself would be $20,000 - $30,000 !

Yes it was CRAZY spending IN THOSE DAYS and spending 100K a week (per person) is not unusual !
AND almost each and every girl were local and beautiful !!!

2/wk, the average HK guy didn't make 400K/mth in 95 - many don't make that now. The figures you quote are for all sorts of non-sex related expenses. You could invite a 141 girl out to an exclusive restaurant now and order a 150K bottle of 80-yr-old French wine if you wanted to, but no-one would consider that an expense necessary to have sex. You could also buy a girl a condo and a BMW, but I wouldn't budget that into my sex expense account. By your own figures, those misc. expenses came to 300k/mth - if you did that every night of the mth - but the actual sex only cost a fraction of that total.

Are you saying the average guy never got laid in 95-97 because he couldn't afford it? Even if FS Saunas weren't around in those days, there were still plenty of cheap alternatives. The 141 girls used to advertise in newspapers and magazines.  Mongkok has had cheap brothels for ever. So saying that spending that kind of money was common back then is a load of shit. I got laid in HK many times in the nineties by taking a girl out of one of the TST bars - total damage was less than 2k, and I could have done it much cheaper if I'd been more familiar with HK.

The sums you quote relate to a mid-nineties, expense-account life style enjoyed by a very limited set of affluent punters. Those kinds of people still exist, but they don't represent now, and didn't then, the actual real-world cost of getting laid.

In those days the lowest end white collar worker would earn $5000 but his take home income could be atleast
3X that amount because of the amount of work on the side he can do. Same goes for almost everyone !

It was easy to make a living way above one's normal salary. Now, I'm not saying everyone spent hundreds of thousands
on whoring a month but there were many who did !

Yes there were places like Mongkok and SSP where one would find brothels but they were mainly for the blue
collar workers. Going to night clubs and OK clubs where there were PR service were the norm ... of course there
were different grades of night clubs and OK clubs with different prices but the ordinary monger did go to these places.

What I described in a typcal night out and what you described as miscellaneous expenses had everything to do with sex ..
and wine were not the flavour of the month then, it was XO brandy ! One had to spend on these, and midnight dinner
in the lead up to sex !

If one went to a NC and ordered the minium and spent the minium, I can honestly say that person would not be
welcomed there the next time.

If one kept a woman on the side the cost would be a lot more then what has been stated.

But like I said, those were the old days, crazy spending, crazy mongering not likely to happen here again ... but believe
me, it did happen and in a very big way !

The point here is spend what you can afford.

Try not to spend more than your allowable monthly budget....else u screwed up with your other living expenses.

Especially where places that allow Credit Card, that;s when we get screwed.

To have proper control on your available cash flow, I always pay in cash.

What currency is this? If you're saying that the average white-collar worker in the mid nineties was taking home at least US $15,000/mth with all his side jobs, then sorry I can't buy that. All those bank clerks, insurance raters, fast-food restaurant managers, sales clerks, low-level government employees, and other low-wage professions who make up 90% of the white-collar work force were never taking home US$ 200,000 a year; in fact, the average white-collar base salary was never as high as US$ 5000/mth.  But even if I accepted those figures, the HK$ 400K/mth outlay for sex quoted in the previous posts equals US$ 51,000 - a figure 3 times that already fictitious monthly salary. In fact, just that 100K (US$ 13K) expense for one week would virtually eat up the guy's entire monthly salary. And how the fuck was the guy supposed to earn all of this money on the side when he was out whoring until dawn every day of the week for a mth, which he would have to do, according to your own calculations, to rack up a HK$ 400K bill?

If your figures are HK$, then how could a guy making HK$ 15K/mth spend HK$ 400K/mth just on sex?

I don't think you actually realize who comprises the white-collar work force bro, and you obviously haven't done the math. HK$ 400K = US$ 51K = US$ 615,000/yr.

[ Last edited by  Marsupial at 22-4-2008 22:22 ]

Everything I mentioned is in HK$ !!!

I am not saying all the average Joes wase spending HK$400,000 / month on girls, I'm  just gaving you some insight
on how much things cost and how easy one spends during that time. In those days even the average Joes went to
clubs and not brothels so their spending would be far greater at that time then it is now (TG for 141 now !)

When times are good there are many ways to make money other then from one's salary ... many !!!
I'm not saying a clerk would be getting this nor spending this but mid-management up ... oh yeah, definately
spending ... and the amount spent depends on which clubs one went to.

The $400K spent on girls are probably for the ones in top management going to the top clubs, and there were PLENTY
of them in those days !
I myself never spent that much, but probably close to half of that each month.

I'd like to ask other bros in this forum who had experience of those days gone by, to make some comments on
how it was ... so that our bro Mars could have insight from others and understand more.

And those guys are probably still spending huge sums on women, but they don't represent real-world punters. It probably costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to fly those guys around the world in company jets, but no one would use those figures as an accurate estimation of an average guy's travel expenses. And regardless of whether you're sitting all alone in the company jet or crammed into tourist class, you still get there at about the same time.

Look 2/wk, I've no doubt that there was a lot of money floating around HK in pre-Aisan-currency-crises 98, and lots of guys might have thought it cool to have their names written on over-priced bottles of French brandy in clubs that over charged high-earning guys to flatter their sense of self-worth, but so what. It wasn't necessary to spend that kind of money, just like it isn't necessary to own a Rolls Royce to go cross harbor. And as you yourself point out, the average white-collar worker was making 5-15K/mth, so just how plentiful were those high flyers. It's one thing to say that a guy might occasionally visit a club and spend 10K in the course of one night, it's another thing altogether to think that he did it every night and ran up monthly tabs of 400K. This 400K figure is something from those Life Styles of the Rich and Famous magazines that rich guy wannabes drool over.

Bro Mar, pre 97 people made alot of money and spent alot. it was what i called spend now cause post 97 we will all be wearing PJ and riding bicycle syndrome. 99% of the people didnt make 400k a month but let me tell you enough people made 100k a month and not from salaries. in the old days people who made the big money was more than willing to spend it with friends, so the people who made the 400k actually shared their wealth unlike nowadays. i was one of those people. it is no fun to go to monger by yourself. the amount of people that went mongering is out of this world. i remember the days when one had to stand at the door at places like BBoss or China City just to get a table. forget the avaliability of girls. Tea time mongering was also a big thing. Everyone use to go to what is now the River Nile Sauna.

Anyway its ok not to believe Brother Twice or I but we experienced it. and the number 400k a month. where did you get that (apologies if i used that number as I thought I used it to tell you how much some WG's were earning not how much day to day people were earning)

Yes I do dream of the 90s! i guess its like people in their 90s remembering the early days in shanghai haha

I only get to visit HK about 1 or 2 times a year. But I also visit other places too. I would average myself spending about 3k to 6k a day when I am in any town and WG's are available. I like to make the best of my mongering when I get the oppertunity.

So less, most likely far less, than 1% of guys were even capable of spending those huge sums on the club scene, which means that the life style you and 2/wk describe only concerned a very tiny number of high-earners. Look, I've never denied that there were (still are) high rollers who spend lavish sums in exclusive night clubs - my point is that they don't represent anything particularly useful - not then, not now. Seems like the only reason the two of you repeat these stories of the Good Old Days is out of nostalgia for HK's lost Golden Age.

In Tokyo, in the late eighties, there were posh Ginza clubs that charged astronomical sums for pastries sprinkled with flakes of gold. All the foreign papers were publishing articles on the high-spending Japanese; but it meant nothing to most people because you could still get excellent cheese cake for 500 yen in an ordinary cafe. The same was true of whoring in HK in 95-97.

The 400K/mth figure comes from multiplying 100K times 4 (the number of weeks in a month).

No mars, you're missing the point ... It was a select few but that 'few' are a lot more then you think ... a lot lot more ...
I can't say exactly mow many but definately more then 10% of the white collar male working population.
The problem is you're trying to equate the earning power to the spending power ... it didn't work like that !

I don't know how to explain it properly ... but I can say I was not super rich or even rich for that matter, not a high
income earner ... my earnings were just a bit higher then mid-high management lavel thats all.

You're right that what we're talking about was way in the past and represents nothing useful now days ... but
sometimes us old mongers would like to talk about the past ...

Maybe one day we'll sit having a drink and I'll try to explain it to you

The idea that more than 10% of the white-collar male working population of HK was spending US$ 50,000 each month in the clubs is absurd. 2/wk, you really have no idea who white-collar workers are and what they make. I suspect your definition of 'white-collar worker' is some guy working in management for Sun Hung Kai, Goldman Sachs or Lehman Bros - yes, maybe 10% of those guys did drop that kind of money in the clubs.

Mars, you are not hearing me !    but it doesn't matter as those days are long gone ...

Myabe some other experienced monger from those days will be kind enough to write something
about what the mid management ordinary Joe did in those days.

I hear you bro, but you're not talking sense.


A few minutes with Google provided the following stats:

In 1997, HK's GNP (that is, the total of all economic activity in HK) was 164 billion US dollars

HK's population in 1997 was 6.6 million (so HK's 1997 GDP was about US$ 25,000)

I can't find the figures for HK, but in 1998, 60% of all workers in the USA were white collar employees; about 60% of those white-collar workers were men, and lets say approx half of all men were employed (leaving out children and the old). That means that 18% of the total 1998 US population were white-collar working men; but let's say just 15% because in HK's case, it gives an easier figure to work with. 15% of the 1997 HK population was 1 million.

You say 10% of HK's white-collar male workers, or 100,000 guys,  were spending those huge sums of money in HK's clubs. Let's do the math:
if each of those 100K guys spent that US$ 50K/mth in clubs, that would equal US$ 5 billion each month or US$ 60 billion per year. So according to you, in 1997, 36% of HK's total GNP would have derived from guys sipping brandy and playing grab ass with teenage girls in night clubs!

I would be surprised if the club scene formed even 1% of HK's total GNP, which means that your assumptions are off by a factor of 36.

(The above supposes that HK and the US have a similar percentage of their workers in white-collar jobs, which seems reasonable seeing that HK is a service economy without the larger farming and manufacturing industries that form an important part of the US economy.)

Back in the day Hong Kong was doing very well for those of us who did business in Hong Kong.  It was a different time and twice is right about side jobs.  Money flowed in Hong Kong very much like water and this included white and blue collared workers.  I remember in the summer of 95 going to Hong Kong while interning with the a company associated very much with Hong Kong.  This was my first lounge/kareoke scene and at 20 years old, it was totally incredible.  Lots of singing, touching, kissing, and even some BJs from these bitches.  Take out was 1200-2500 (one shot) depending on the place but they were charging like $4000 per bottle of remy XO.  I was shit drunk the first time and ended up at the hotel room for the night with no poon.  Second time we went was the week after and I made sure that I was very sober.  I saw the bill, my fucking eyes bulged at the 70k+ bill (company's expense of course).  Took out a girl who was roughly the same age as me for $1500, she stayed the night anyways and we chatted till like 6am.  


It was the norm at that time to take business clients, partners, etc... to these sort of places as a social matter.  Sort of like a brotherhood.

I remember one of my managers who was a Christian.  He used to go too, he was forced to go and even took girls for the night.  I have no idea if he fucked them but he used to always preach about how bad it was.

His exact words ring true till this day:

"mm tung ngor dup beet D ar?"  = Am I special/different?
"gor gor hui, ngor mm hui?" =  Everyone goes and I don't go?
"mo bahn faht la" = No other solution
"jo sahng yee hai gum ga la, SAI GOY" =  Business is like this, LITTLE BOY (He was Toisanese)

I believe he never fucked the girls, he always sat there smiling while girls hung onto him while everyone else was groping and playing drinking games.  But I was very impressed with the money that was spent at these establishments.  I guess it is sort of like "Scores" a strip club in NYC, but many US companies will not let you write it off as a business expense, in Hong Kong though, it was a "MUST" business expense.  The biggest one I ever saw was $240+k that accumulated over 9 hours of drunkeness and absolute chaos at a club.  You don't see those anymore, money doesn't flow as much and if anyone has noticed, there are a lot less ferarris, porsches and rolls royces compared to yesteryears.