Dear Student,
You know how much money you have to work with, both as a lump sum and as a monthly overseas-living budget.
Now let’s begin to consider how much life overseas your monthly nut will buy you.
As we discussed yesterday, your cost of living anywhere is highly controllable. It depends not only on where you live but also (and perhaps more so) on how you live.
Choosing where to live isn’t as easy as picking a country. Life in Panama City is nothing like life in Las Tablas on this country’s Pacific coast or in Boquete in Panama’s highlands. Living in Paris bears little resemblance, in terms of cost or most anything else, to living in France’s rural southwest. Ambergris Caye isn’t the Cayo. Chiang Mai isn’t Bangkok. Etc.
To decide whether you can afford to live in XYZ overseas haven, you need to thin-slice your options, as I refer to it. We’ll talk about this more later in the program. Today, the focus is country budgets. In that context, I want to make the point that a budget for living in Uruguay, Malaysia, or Portugal is only a starting point. You’ll need to refine the budget depending on the city or region within the country where you’re interested in settling. Some costs can be comparable countrywide (the cost of cable, for example, or phone service). However, other costs (most notably rent and transportation), costs that will amount to the lion’s share of your overall monthly expenses, can differ dramatically.
It will cost you US$1,000 to US$1,500 to rent a nice two-bedroom apartment in a good neighborhood of Panama City. Meantime, you could rent a two-bedroom house within a few minutes’ walk of the beach on the Pacific coast near Las Tablas for US$300 to US$500 per month or a two-bedroom house on the Pacific coast of Panama’s Veraguas Province for US$250 per month. These are all current actual costs and illustrate my point. Your cost of housing in Veraguas could be one-tenth your cost of housing in Panama City.
Likewise expenses for food, entertainment, and travel. These can vary dramatically one region of a country to another. Your entertainment budget in Paris could be 10 times that of your entertainment budget living in a small French country town. Your weekly visit to the local farmer’s market in Otavalo, Ecuador, could yield you a cornucopia of interesting, healthy, tasty foods for, again, a fraction the cost of a trip to the supermarket in Quito.
You can take the local Metrobus bus from one end of Panama City to the other for 25 cents… or a taxi across town for US$10. The bus ride from Boquete to Panama City costs under US$20; the one-way plane fare is US$96.
It’s a balancing act between how you want to live and what standard of living your monthly nut will afford you. You began addressing these issues when you answered the questions in my “Know Yourself Questionnaire” on Day 1. Now you’re beginning to see how the answers to those questions (How do you like to spend your time? Can you live without your favorite comfort foods? Are you willing to learn a new language?) have practical implications for every aspect of your go-overseas adventure, including, and importantly, your budget.
In this phase of your go-overseas planning, I’m going to help you either to focus your attention geographically or, if you already know where you want to relocate, to understand what it’s going to cost you to live there.
Tomorrow, we’ll compare and contrast (in terms of climate, taxes, health care, infrastructure, etc.) the world’s top havens that I want to bring to your attention. Today, we’re going to look closely at the cost of residing in each one.
Here are itemized budgets for the world’s top overseas havens (Exact figures may vary according to exchange rate. Click on budget figure for local currency value.):
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| Latin America |
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| Asia & Oceana |
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These are sample budgets. I don’t imagine (and you shouldn’t either) that it’s going to cost you exactly as many dollars and cents per month as I’ve outlined here. Your cost of living in any of these places could vary dramatically from the figures I show here, but these budgets (for which I make many assumptions that may make sense for you… or not) give you a starting point.
These budgets are bare bones… these are the basic budget points everyone will need to consider. From here, you can customize your budget, adding your own personal line items per month.
You could rent someplace less central and less nice. You could spend less (even nothing) on entertainment. You could reduce the in-country travel budget, even to zero, if you had to.
My point is that, while you could spend more living in any of the places I feature for you here, you could also spend considerably less, in some cases half as much as I represent here. Again, these are sample budgets, meant to give you a baseline and to prompt your thinking.
My budgets include generous allowances for rent (assuming a one- or two-bedroom apartment in a central location and a reasonably appointed building), entertainment, and in-country travel (you’re relocating overseas, at least in part, I imagine, because you’d like to see a little of the world—so you’ll want, if possible, to include some kind of travel cost in your budget).
If you’re making your move on a strict and fixed budget of less than US$1,500 per month, my budgets show that you should focus your attention on the following destinations. In every case, except perhaps in Asia, you’ll need to pare back the entertainment and travel budgets. But you’d still be looking at a comfortable, interesting life… on a very modest nest egg…
- Argentina
- Belize
- Cambodia
- Dominican Republic
- Monción
- Samaná
- Santo Domingo
- Ecuador
- France
- Carcassonne
- Pau
- Saint-Chinian
- Ireland
- Italy
- Malaysia
- George Town
- Ipoh
- Johor Bahru
- Kota Kinabalu
- Kuala Lumpur
- Kuching
- Kundasang
- Mexico
- Puerto Vallarta
- San Miguel de Allende
- Nicaragua
- Panama
- Boquete
- El Valle
- Las Tablas
- Pedasí
- Philippines
- Cebu
- Dumaguete
- Olango Island
- Tagaytay
- Slovenia
- Thailand
- Chiang Mai
- Hua Hin
- Pai
- Phuket
- Turkey
- Vietnam
- Uruguay
If your total monthly nut amounts to US$1,500 to US$2,500, you could live in any of the above destinations, as well as any of the following:
- Argentina
- Belize
- Colombia
- Dominican Republic
- Honduras
- France
- Indonesia
- Ireland
- Kilkenny and the Barrow Region
- Waterford and the Copper Coast
- Mexico
- Bahía de Navidad
- Guanajuato
- San Miguel de Allende
- Panama
- City Beaches and Coronado
- Panama City (El Cangrejo)
- Portugal
- Spain
If your total monthly nut amounts to more than US$2,500, you could live comfortably in any of the destinations on this list.
Note that the most expensive budget I include is for Paris, France. The cost of living in this interesting, cosmopolitan city is high according to my figurings because my rent assumes you’re locating yourself in one of the chicest neighborhoods in the city. You could reduce this by half by living at a less central, less posh address.
