Hello everyone. I need your advice. I am a US citizen, 34 years old, married, and live abroad in East Asia with my wife who is a native of my current country. Living abroad is fun but a huge hassle when trying to follow MMM advice because of the differences in laws and my status as US citizen/other country resident. I am trying to decide whether I should move back to the US or not and I want you to help me decide. Here are the facts:
My spending abroad, thanks to how cheap the cost of living is, is right at about $1,000 USD per month. I'll keep everything in US dollars to make it easy.
I can also save about $1200 per month. So I am saving over 50% of my income.
I do not have a Vanguard account because they don't allow you to open one if you are a non US resident. I'm wondering if I can open a joint account my with father, who lives in the United States.
Every time I transfer money to the United States, I'm losing money because of transfer fees. I could limit my transfers to one or two big ones per year. I might be able to work out a deal with my father where he puts in the amount I have saved each month on my behalf and I pay him back once or twice a year to clear what I owe him. (He has enough money to advance me this)
Big obstacle: I'm renting the place I stay in this country, the rent will go up a bit every few years, and because of the housing market in this country, it is actually cheaper to rent than to buy. Because of how cheap rent is and how tiny apartments are, and because of government corruption, real estate investment is not an option. No AirBnB, no buying a house and paying the mortgage with renters, etc. My wife would have to deal with all this and she has no head for business. For me the language barrier and legal-understanding barrier is too great to grapple with this stuff. Again, government corruptions means you can't bank on this, as any day they might say "Oh no you can't do that, pay up." (Americans have no idea how comparatively ethical business is in America to the rest of the world, which runs on bribes and uncertainty about what fees are coming down the pipe. Contracts are meaningless here.)
My goal, and this is important, is to be receiving $1,500~2,000 per month from investments. That is enough for me to retire in the country I want to retire in.
To recap:
Monthly spending: $1,000
Monthly saving: $1,200 minus transfer fees to the US
Problems: Vanguard difficult to get into, I'm a renter with no housing investment opportunities
Goal: $1,500~$2,000/month in income to retire on
Also: I have about $15,000 in savings and no debt at all.
If I move back to the United States, I will likely need to spend a year or two going back to school and lose $8-10k in savings to pay for school, which means not enough to open a Vanguard account (as I won't have 10k cash ready to start).
Also, this means I won't be working for a year or two. I have no idea how I would get health insurance. The plan would be:
1. get a job (I estimate I can make 35k starting out in the new career, so if my wife works even for minimum wage, we'll together have around 50k. Later my pay will increase as the average wage is 50k in that field)
2. buy a house, pay it off super quickly by renting all but one room to roommates. Hopefully I would be living for free or nearly free and paying it down lightning fast.
3. when the house is paid off, move abroad and live on less than the rental income, investing the rest. If the rental income isn't high enough, I could go back to working abroad except live off the rental income and invest my entire salary. I would use a property manager since I would be living abroad while renting the house. Eventually, when old, if my health declines, I would have a paid-off home to return to in America should I need to return for medical reasons, etc.
Other problems: returning to America entails the awful headache of helping my wife with immigration, getting health insurance, and dealing with more commuting (by "America" I mean where my family is, which is a good real estate market but means more commuting than where I live now).
A final problem. The country I live in now, though insanely corrupt, is extremely safe for women compared to the United States. To put it plainly, my wife is insanely hot and not used to paying attention to her safety. Her obvious lack of fluent English marks her as more vulnerable. Taking her to the US scares me. If anything happened to her I could not survive it either.
So am I better off staying in Asia or making the jump to America with the plan of building up wealth and then leaving again once I've got it (with a house to return to when I'm in the States)?
Can someone help me crunch the numbers? All sound advice is highly, highly, HIGHLY appreciated.