Hi,
I just stumbled across this post.
I share the assumptions made about cost of living in advance:
To calculate the cost of a comfortable retirement for an American in every country and U.S. state, we pulled living costs from Numbeo and applied the following calculations:
The retirement calculations were based on the average American retirement age of 61 years, according to Gallup, and the average American life expectancy of 76.15 years, according to the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics.
There are 181.8 months between the average retirement age and average life expectancy. So the monthly living costs in a country or state were multiplied by 181.8 to determine the retirement cost.
The monthly cost of living figures we calculated using the following assumptions:
Members of your household = one
Eating lunch or dinner in restaurants = 15%, Choosing inexpensive restaurants = 70%
Drinking coffee outside your home = moderate
Going out = once per week
Smoking = no, Alcoholic beverages = moderate
At home, we are eating = Western
Driving car = moderate, Taking taxi = no
Public transport = two round trips weekly
Sports memberships = all household members
Vacation and travel = two per year
Buying clothes and shoes = moderate
Rent = apartment (one bedroom) in city center
No children
All currencies are USD. The data was collected in October 2022.
I personally think it’s quite interesting to compare the different countries, even though most people here probably want to retire before the age of 61.
Just realized this:
76 years is the US life expectancy at birth. But once you are 61 years old, it should be well over 80 years.
So IMHO those calculated numbers are far too low.
Find it very hard to believe that Singapore would cost more to retire in than Switzerland. Although, I guess Switzerland in their assumptions includes some cheaper rural areas while Singapore is all city.
Is Vietnam more expensive Poland? Possibly for western food.
Then again, is Japan cheaper than Uruguay or about the same (only 2% more) as Portugal or Iran!?
I was ready to bash numbeo, but I checked their swiss numbers and they don’t seem that bad. They seems to be on the cheap side, at least for the totals.
I’m sure somewhere they mention how they calculated those totals. I suppose it’s missing the compulsory health insurance.
Thing is that in those countries you have basically 2 parallel societies. You can spend as much for food and clothing in India than in cheap western european countries, but you can also spend only 20% of those costs, you just need to know where.
And having experienced it myself, the basic expat is rather going for the high end part (not necessarly in quality, but in price - the best food I had in India was mostly of the cheaper nature).
Appartments are very expensive in Singapore and often targeted to expats. Many locals rely on state-subsidized housing. Day-to-day live is cheaper.
Propably they define US standards or basket of goods you would expect such shifts. There was or still is a cost comparison by Mercer and besides the international business hubs there cities in Nigeria or Angola amongst the most expensive one.
Probably - and I was also aware of the high cost of „expat live“ in African countries. That said, I can’t wrap my head around these examples, particularly Japan. Whether we discount Tokyo/Kyoto metropolitan area cost of living or not…
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