If you want to live like royalty on a pauper’s budget, you need to change your address.
“I’ve never been a budget traveler and I’ve never paid top dollar,” my friend Steve said to me last week while we sipped a few cold ones in a thatched-roof Mexican bar. “I prefer to do luxury at a bargain price.”
That’s why he was on vacation in Mexico, and why he ended up buying a house there a few years ago. After hiring the best architect in town to restore and update an old colonial, he ended up with a fabulous place that cost about one-fourth of what it would in the US. His property taxes are $22 a year—with 10% off for early payment. A weekly maid visit costs about 15% of what he pays in the US. And a set lunch at the restaurant on his corner costs less than $3, including a soda.
His family gets all their dental work done in Mexico, where a US-trained dentist performs excellent work at a fraction of the price. One woman I met there had flown down for a week to get some bridge and crown work done. After airfare and a week’s hotel stay, the tab was still far less than it would have cost her at home.
Expats living in cheap countries abroad know this formula well. Whether they do it full time or just part of the year, what would be meager amount of money at home allows them to live in relative luxury abroad. I used Mexico as an example, but there are certainly cheaper places than that, including most of the rest of Latin America. In at least a dozen countries in Central and South America, US$2,000 a month would allow a couple to live like a king and queen.
If your needs are more modest, you could live pretty well on half that amount. You could rent a nice house or apartment for a few hundred bucks and have plenty left for food and frolicking.
The same formula applies to travel as well. Living in Germany or Austria is expensive. Travel in Germany or Austria is very expensive. In the Czech Republic, wedged between the two, living expenses and travel expenses are both cheap.
To find out where the travel bargains are, get a copy of The World’s Cheapest Destinations . Residency issues aside, you could live in these places for cheap as well. For a regular e-mail about bargain property abroad, subscibe to Offshore Real Estate , a newsletter sponsored by EscapeArtist.com.
