Moving Abroad to Retire Early: I Live in One of the Cheap Countries, and the Discount Is Somebody's Salary

A post about moving abroad to retire early came round my feeds again last month. Halfway down it had the table all of these posts have: price index, rent for a one-bedroom, a monthly budget, a FIRE date pulled forward by five years. Czechia was in the table. Recommended.

I read it on a Saturday, with my hands smelling of gutter.

That is the only reason I can write this particular article. I am the destination. The cost-of-living advantage a few thousand people are currently building a twelve-year projection around is just my weekly shop, and I did not optimise my way into it — I was born here. It also came attached to things the table has no column for: a second building that eats Saturdays in ones and twos, an insurer who raises the premium in steps rather than percentages, and a boiler with opinions. Low costs, where I live, come with Saturdays. Never once with a beach.

So here is my position before any arithmetic. Moving somewhere cheaper really does cut your FIRE number, and it is not a discount. It is a local wage level you did not earn, bought with a support network you will have to rebuild from nothing. Decide where you want to live first, then let the money break the tie.

Most of the writing on this optimises the wrong thing. It treats the country as a price and your life as the variable, when it is the other way round.

What moving abroad to retire early actually does to the arithmetic

Let me be fair to the lever before I go near it, because it is the strongest one on the menu and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.

Annual spending does two jobs at once. It's what you subtract from income to get what you save, and it's what you multiply by 25 to get the number you're saving toward. I'll use 25 throughout because it's the round number everyone knows. Worth saying once that the withdrawal research underneath it tests thirty-year retirements, not the forty-five a forty-year-old needs it to cover. Cut annual spending and the target falls while the shovel grows. Nothing else in personal finance pulls both ends of the same rope.

Clean round household, currency-neutral, because the ratios are the point and you don't need my numbers to see them. Net income 100,000 a year, spend 40,000. That's a 60% savings rate, a target of 1,000,000, and at a 5% real return from a standing start, 12.4 years.

Now move somewhere where the whole cost base is 35% cheaper. Spend 26,000, save 74,000, target 650,000. Seven and a half years.

You just took five years off your own life and handed back nothing except a postcode.

Illustration on stated assumptions — net income 100,000/yr, 5% real return, starting from zero, target = 25 × annual spend. Not a forecast and not a sourced statistic.

Except almost nobody gets the 35%, and this is where every page ranking for this question quietly cheats. The discount only applies to the part of your budget priced where you live. Rent, groceries, restaurants, haircuts, the bus: those relocate. These don't: the currency your portfolio is denominated in, fund fees, insurance priced on your nationality or age, flights home, upkeep on anything you left behind, schooling, and every globally priced object you will ever buy again, from a laptop to a car. Say 60% of your spending is locally priced, which is generous, and you cut that part by 35%. Your real cut is 21%. Target 790,000, path 9.3 years. Three of the five years just went back in the drawer.

I ran that split on our own cost base in MFFT rather than guessing at it, and the "follows me anyway" column came out fatter than I expected. Not by a rounding error, but by enough that I stopped taking anyone's country comparison at face value. A move changes what your spending floor costs. It does not change whether you have one.

One condition under all of it gets skipped everywhere. The whole thing runs on a gap between where your income is set and where your prices are set, so take a local job at a local wage and there's no gap at all. This works only for people who keep a foreign income, which is a far smaller and far more fragile group than the genre lets on.

Your discount is somebody's salary

Here are the two numbers that made me want to write this.

In 2025, the price level of household consumption in Portugal was 86.6% of the EU average. Portuguese average net pay, same year, same statistical office, was 71.6%. Prices about 13% below the EU. Pay about 28% below it.

That gap is the entire trick. Not thrift, not clever living, not a country being mysteriously good value. A wage level.

Data: Eurostat tec00120 (price level index) and earn_nt_net (annual net earnings), 2025.

Look at the right-hand side of that chart and the mechanism is embarrassingly simple. On those same 2025 figures a Dutch net salary is worth about 1.9 times a Portuguese one in nominal terms, while Dutch prices are only about 1.33 times Portuguese prices. Carry the Dutch income to Portugal and you keep the 1.9 while paying Portuguese prices. You are not spending less. You are earning more than everybody standing next to you in the queue.

Where that pressure shows up first is housing, because housing is the one line in the budget that cannot be manufactured faster when demand turns up. The median rent on new residential leases in Lisbon municipality was 16.88 euros per square metre in 2025. Put a 70-square-metre flat at that rate and you're at roughly 1,182 euros a month, against a Portuguese average net wage in 2025 of about 1,787 euros a month — two thirds of one ordinary take-home for one ordinary flat. That last comparison is my own arithmetic on two official figures, not something I found stated anywhere.

The market has also learned to tell buyers apart. In Portugal in 2025 the average purchase price was 234,120 euros for a resident, 335,640 for an EU-based non-resident and 470,277 for a non-EU one. Same housing stock. Three price ladders.

If that still reads as an accusation rather than a description, look at what the destination countries put in their own law. Portugal's nomad visa asks, as of 2026, for 3,680 euros a month, so 44,160 a year, against that Portuguese average net wage of 21,449 euros. Thresholds like that get revised and I'm reading it off an aggregator rather than the statute, so treat the exact figure as indicative. The shape of it is the part that matters: roughly double the local average, on purpose. Nobody designed it as an insult; it's simply what the policy is for, and once you've read it you can't unsee what the discount is made of.

Then the politics caught up. Barcelona is phasing out all of its roughly 10,000 tourist-apartment licences by November 2028, and Mexico City's mayor answered three marches in July 2025 with a rental-price index, a tenant ombudsman and short-let rules, naming the neighbourhoods out loud. Agree or disagree with any of it. You still cannot put it in a twelve-year projection.

Cheap countries do not stay cheap. Mine didn't.

This is the part I can only write from inside, and it goes against my own country.

In 2019 Czechia sat at 75.1 on the EU price index. In 2025 it sits at 89.4. Fourteen points of convergence in six years, during which I moved nowhere and did nothing. Portugal went the other way over the same stretch, 87.9 down to 86.6.

Data: Eurostat tec00120, price level index of household final consumption, EU27 = 100.

Which means that as of 2025, Czechia is more expensive than Portugal and pays less. 89.4 against 86.6 on prices; 20,901 euros of average net pay against 21,449. The country on the lists has been quietly overtaken by the country people leave it for.

Sit with that if you were planning to project twelve years of Prague prices. Anyone who ran that projection in 2019 watched a 19% relative cost increase arrive underneath them while they were busy being clever. Portugal moving the other way isn't the counterexample, it's the point: the direction is unpredictable, so you haven't removed a variable from your plan. You've added one, denominated in somebody else's politics.

The best argument against this article has better data than mine

I'd rather put the strongest case against me in my own article than meet it in the comments, and this time the case against me is genuinely good.

Start with the concession I owe. The arithmetic above is correct, and moving is the highest-leverage thing a high earner can do. If my only objection were that it feels unfair, the objection loses. So my claim has to be about size and durability rather than morality, and it is: the discount is smaller than advertised, it does not hold still, and it is paid for in things the calculator has no field for.

Now the harder part. The causal evidence that foreigners move local rents is far more contested than the discourse admits.

Garcia-López and colleagues, in the Journal of Urban Economics, ran the best-identified study I could find on Barcelona and got a real effect: 54 extra Airbnb listings in a neighbourhood raised rents 1.9%, and in the neighbourhoods carrying the most listings the figure reached 7%. That's the honest upper bound and it isn't nothing. But Franco, Santos and Longo, studying Portugal specifically, found effects on house prices and statistically insignificant effects on long-term rents across every specification, and wrote plainly that Airbnb "cannot be solely blamed." Then Díaz-Parra and co-authors published on Málaga this year, a city where two-bedroom rents went from 882 euros in 2019 to 1,207 in 2023, and concluded there is "little evidence of a real impact of digital nomads on this residential market." Three good papers, three different answers.

The national numbers don't help my side either.

Data: Eurostat prc_hicp_aind (actual rentals for housing) and lc_lci_r2_a (wages and salaries), rebased to 2019 = 100.

And then the single fact that hurts most. In 2025, buyers with a tax domicile abroad, which is the count that actually describes the people in this article rather than the wider one that includes foreigners living in Portugal, were about 5% of Portuguese transactions. That number fell 13.3% year on year, the third annual decline in a row, while house prices rose 17.6%. Foreign demand went down as prices went up. The OECD's own 2026 survey of Portugal blames building permits, transaction taxes, a small social-housing stock and decades of under-investment; it mentions foreign demand and never quantifies it.

So I'll narrow the claim to what survives, which is less satisfying and more true. Foreign income is one measurable input among several, concentrated in a few square kilometres per city, in the one market that cannot expand on demand. Not "expats caused it." I'd rather hand you a smaller claim I can defend than a bigger one that falls over in the first reply.

The costs no calculator has a field for

This isn't the moralising part. It's the pricing part.

The support network is the line people write off as soft, and it is the largest number in this article. The 2025 World Happiness Report has the one I keep repeating at people: believing a stranger would return your lost wallet is worth about 0.75 points on a 0 to 10 life-satisfaction scale. More than unemployment. More than doubling your income. So the person who turns up when the boiler goes is not a sentimental consideration you set against a hard number — they are the bigger number.

Rebuilding that takes longer than anyone budgets for. InterNations surveyed 7,786 expats across 31 destinations this year and found 39% say making local friends is easy. Self-selected panel, so weigh it accordingly, but three in five is not a six-month transition cost. It's a standing condition.

Language has a price too, and it's the cleanest figure here. The US Foreign Service Institute puts Spanish and Portuguese at 575 to 600 hours of intensive instruction to working proficiency, and Czech at 1,100 — full-time, with professional teachers. Learning in the evenings after work, treat those as an optimistic floor. Until you have the hours, your work, your friendships and your ability to argue with a landlord all run through somebody else.

Then the finding I went looking for hoping it would say the opposite. The Gallup data behind the 2018 World Happiness Report, roughly 36,000 migrants from 150-plus countries, does show about a 9% life-satisfaction gain from moving. Almost all of it comes from poor-to-rich moves: sub-Saharan Africa to Western Europe is plus 29%. Moves between similarly developed countries are mixed, and moves from Western Europe to Central or Eastern Europe show no statistically significant gain at all.

Movers are happier on average, and the person reading a retire-early-somewhere-cheaper post is standing in the one bucket where that average shows nothing at all.

And people come back, for reasons no cost-of-living index contains. Among registered British residents aged 55 and over in Spain, 10.09% returned to the UK across 2008 to 2013, and 28.7% of one Costa Blanca survey said they intended to within a few years. The drivers, ranked: health decline, bereavement, a pension whose purchasing power the exchange rate had quietly eaten, needing family nearby. A plan that only runs in one country is a single point of failure, the same mistake as holding one stock, and I've already paid tuition on that lesson in a different asset class.

Moving abroad to retire early works in one shape, and five questions test for it

The honest yes exists and I want to be clear about where it lives. It works when the place is the point: you already want the language, the weather, the family who are there, the work you'd do there. Then the lower price level is a tiebreaker, and tiebreakers are allowed to be about money.

Five questions, runnable tonight, in Austin or in Amsterdam.

1. Would I still go if it saved me nothing? If the answer is no, the number is being asked to hold a life together for forty years, and it can't. Czech prices moved fourteen points in six years. When the reason leaves, the plan goes with it.

2. Which of my costs actually relocate, and which follow me regardless? Two columns, real spending, not estimates. The second column is bigger than you think and it's worth about three of the five advertised years. It's also the only item on this list that's a data exercise rather than a conversation, so recompute a 25x target on the revised floor instead of arguing about it. Trips home belong in column one as a standing annual line, every year, for the length of the plan.

3. Who turns up when something breaks, and what does replacing them cost? If the honest answer is "I'd pay somebody," put a number on it and add it to annual spend before you multiply by 25.

4. Does the thing I'm retiring to survive the move? Mine doesn't.

5. What does coming back cost, in money and in years? Price the exit before you need it. One in ten of those British retirees in Spain needed it inside six years.

Then rehearse instead of theorising. Test the place in its worst month, not its best, because every relocation decision on record was made in good weather. A season, not a week: long enough to need a dentist, a plumber and a genuinely bad Tuesday. Same logic as buying one free day a week now rather than waiting twelve years for all of them — a small reversible test beats a large irreversible bet on an untested assumption.

Visas, tax residency and health cover I'm deliberately not touching. They fill the whole first page of search results for this question, and they're also the one part of it that doesn't survive crossing a single border, so an article that pretended otherwise would be wrong for most of the people reading it. Take those to a professional in both jurisdictions.

Why I'm staying, and what that costs me

I should end with the bill on my own side rather than a tidy moral, because pricing loneliness for the mover and nothing for the stayer would just be advocacy with footnotes.

Staying costs me a slower path, and I know roughly how much slower, because I ran the same table you just read. My wife and I know what our year costs, which is the only reason any of this is arithmetic rather than mysticism. It leaves me exposed to one labour market and one currency, with a second building consuming Saturdays in a country whose price level climbed fourteen points underneath me without asking. I did not dodge the convergence by staying. It found me anyway. And there's a life somewhere south of here I'll never test, which has a real option value I'm choosing to write off.

I'm staying because the thing I want the money for is a classroom in a Czech school, teaching maths and physics badly at first, to teenagers who need the explanation in their own language. That does not survive being moved to Lisbon. It was never portable, so the cheaper-country lever was never on the table for me and I stopped costing it years ago. If what I wanted were somewhere else, I'd be writing the opposite article and meaning it just as much.

Which is the whole design principle, and the only advice on moving abroad to retire early I'd actually defend. Pick the week you want first. Pick the people who are ten minutes away. Then the country stops being a lever and goes back to being a place you live.

My hands still smell of gutter. Somebody, somewhere, is putting that on a list.