The cost of living for the expat lifestyle

If you\’ve ever had the dream of trading in a life of abject slavery and 40-hour work weeks for one of continual travel where the world is your home, there is no time like the present to explore the lifestyle of the digital nomad. While most people will only ever see or experience the world through the television or a copy of National Geographic, location independent expats are out there in the world, using their Western salaries to enjoy a life of continual travel and adventure that sees them actually living the excitement that most people only ever watch on The Travel Channel.

The expat lifestyle is not anything new; it has existed for thousands of years in the form of people choosing to live in other countries. However, it is easier now in the 21st century than it has ever been before simply because the Internet has allowed for globalization on a level that was never previously available. When you can work via the Internet you can take your job anywhere you want to go, which means you can very literally be working while sipping mojitos on the beach in Mexico just as easily as you can be stuffed into a tiny cubicle while wearing a restrictive suit in a New York City office.

One of the best parts about living as a digital nomad is how accessible it is to everyone. You don\’t need a million dollars to enjoy a life of continual travel and early retirement. All you need is the tenacity to trade in your life of wage slavery for one of absolute freedom. Forget spending 40 years of your life in a cubicle environment where you are working for someone else\’s benefit. Instead, realize that the entire world is ripe with possibilities, and by choosing to explore them through a life of continual travel you will obtain the greatest levels of freedom available.

Consider this for a moment: the cost of living in New York City is around $30,000 a year for the average individual. This amount assumes a minimum level of creature comforts and amenities; in other words, you are living at the poverty level without any extra money to spend per month. If you look at Mexico City in comparison, expats are enjoying an upper middle-class lifestyle on merely $10,000 a year. That means they not only have more creature comforts than a person living in poverty in NYC, but they also have plenty of money every month to spend gratuitously.

The power of the digital nomad lifestyle is in the simple math. The median salary for American citizens is $36,000 a year before taxes, or around $30,000 a year after tax. If you live in a median cost of living city in the United States of America you can expect to spend your full $30,000 a year on the cost of living, which means you are never getting ahead and never putting any money in the savings. But when you choose to live in another city such as Mexico City like other expats around the world, you can actually put the lion\’s share of profit back into your bank account and see returns that are a minimum of $15,000 a year.

Food poisoning is something to watch out for on the digital nomad adventure. While you can generally enjoy the expat lifestyle without hazards, there are always exceptions to the rule.

The cost of living for the expat lifestyle

The way of life for an expat abroad

Traveling abroad as an expat leads to a life of continual adventure and excitement, but it has to be tempered with at least some measure of responsibility, because unless you are someone who is independently wealthy from winning the lottery or having rich parents, you\’ll have to have some way of bringing in income that you can continue to fund your nomadic lifestyle. Professional expats are those individuals who have set up a variety of online businesses that bring them residual income on a monthly basis so that they can continue to travel around the world without spending their life savings like a retiree.

Part of the joy of traveling abroad as an expat is the simple fact that you can immerse yourself in environments that other people would never think of, and because you can experience these cultures first-hand with your feet in the sand and your hands in the mud, you will experience a richness of life that no one can take away from you. Your ability to appreciate and understand cultures on a multinational level will only be expanded as you include musical diversity to your list of cultural aspects that you have managed to tuck away in the recesses of your mind.

If you want to avoid being labeled as a typical American when you are traveling abroad, where most people are making the assumption that you have tens of thousands of dollars to spare and are thus continually being bombarded by beggars, you have to blend in with the locals. If you ask any long-term expat who has been on the ground for a sustained period of time, they will tell you the same thing: if you want to blend in and avoid being hassled for spare change, you have to be able to look like the locals, speak like the locals, and act like the locals if you want to be treated like a local.

The other thing to think about is that when you are back home and you need to go grocery shopping, you don\’t end up going to the store with a video camera and a digital camera and a knapsack/backpack and hiking shoes. Instead, you are usually in casual attire with nothing more than your car keys and your wallet/purse. You aren\’t on a site-seeing trip when you are living in suburbia, so don\’t treat your time on the ground as a digital nomad as a site-seeing trip.

Traveling around the world and looking for international investments is just one small aspect of living the expat lifestyle. When you can pick and choose your destination based upon market values on a global basis, you can control your income to a greater degree in comparison to your home country where if you were to invest like one of the generic mass public who leave their money in the banks and trust in a broken system that robs them blind you would end up broke in a few short months.

Numerous benefits await the adventurous travelers living abroad. The life of continual adventure and excitement is what makes the cultural lifestyle so appealing.

The way of life for an expat abroad

Early retirement as an expat

The concept of an early retirement before the age of 65 is nothing more than pipe dream for most people. They would never even consider it to be a reality given the fact that it\’s just not the way things are done…at least not traditionally. The traditional way is to graduate high school and then spend your entire adult life working for someone else\’s benefit, working your way up a corporate ladder rung by rung over 40 years of your life, paying off school loans, car loans and a mortgage payment. The cold facts are that most adults in the U.S. won\’t see retirement until after 65 years of age because that\’s the way the system is designed to work.

But in the modern era there are more and more people beginning to wake up to the reality that waiting until you are 65 years or older to retire is nothing more than brainwashing. Not only can you have an early retirement, but you can enjoy it for a lot less than $500,000 or more, which is the amount most people think they need to have before they can comfortably stop working. As long as you are willing to trade a life of indentured servitude for one of international exploration as an expat you could retire early on as little as $35,000 in a variety of countries around the world.

It sounds like a myth to most people, but it\’s a reality that more and more expats are choosing to explore every year. A perfect example of such a place is Bulgaria, which joined the European Union in 2008. A quiet country on the eastern borders of Europe, the country has a low cost of living coupled with a rising medical tourism industry, several major cities and thousands of years of culture and history behind her. And while most Americans look at the country as something inferior, the reality is that Bulgaria is one of dozens of places you can choose for your early retirement.

The cost of living for most expats is around $8,000 a year for an upper middle-class type of life in countries like Bulgaria. And that doesn\’t just cover your basic needs; that includes your entertainment costs as well. And houses in these other countries only cost around $35,000 to $50,000 on average in most of the major cities, which means you can pay off your home in cash in just a few short years of working. Assuming you receive a Western salary of $35,000 a year against a cost of living that is less than $10,000, you can save $25,000 a year and come up with 50k in just two years. No 40+ years of mortgage payments; just a quick and easy early retirement.

This is the beauty of the expat existence, and it\’s the reason so many expats are choosing it rather than let their lives be defined by governments who want them to spend 40+ years working as a slave. When you can use the Internet to travel abroad and live anywhere you want you can see yourself retiring at a far younger age and at a far lesser cost than the $500,000 and 65 years of age that tradition tells you that you need.

The truth of the immersion travel lifestyle is that you can go anywhere and do anything. There are no limits to being a full time traveler when you can go anywhere in the world that you want and do anything that you want to do.

Early retirement as an expat