The Money Mustache Community
General Discussion => Welcome and General Discussion => Topic started by: iamlindoro on July 29, 2016, 11:12:49 AM
-
EDIT: The site has launched. https://www.theearthawaits.com/ (https://www.theearthawaits.com/)
Hi All,
So, I am working on a bit of a side project that exists at the intersection of FIRE and world travel. As many who know me or read my blog know, my future wife and I hope to FIRE and spend a good amount of time slow traveling. The series of posts on the blog that have been most popular have been those where I present a collection of places where a very limited monthly FIRE budget would support a comfortable and interesting life.
I had a recent conversation with my future father in law. He was bemoaning the fact that his brothers have all retired, and said something like, "But not me, they'll find me dead at my desk someday." It upset my fiancée, and it upset me too. He is drawing a full maxed-out Social Security, but lives a pretty tough life working full time in a stressful job because we live in a hugely expensive area. It occurred to me that the US (and the world) is full of people who might benefit from hard data showing what kind of life their limited income could buy them if they could consider a move (abroad or at least out of the area).
I'm working on a new way of presenting this information that I'm hopeful will appeal to a huge swath of people, even those not interested in FIRE. What I could use, as I develop the idea, is some help in zeroing in on the most important information to you when considering a retirement, or even just a long stay, somewhere abroad or across your own country.
Consider this list of pieces of information to which I have access. Which are the most important to you? Is there information NOT on this list that is very important to you? Let me know! It would be a huge help to me in making this little project something that is able to help more people. I'll explain more in the coming month or two as I get the tool into a usable state. It works already... but before I make it public, it's important that I get it as polished as possible.
- Monthly cost of living for a variety of lifestyles in each city
- The ability to customize your own budget
- Beautiful images
- Local Internet speed
- Quality of Health Care
- Crime Rate
- Average Hotel cost
- Traffic levels
- Pollution levels
- Local Real Estate Prices
- Local Points of Interest and Activities
- Proximity to specific amenities such as: Beach, Mountains, Forest, International Airport, World Class Hospital
In sincerely appreciate any input. I am hopeful that I'm not unreasonably optimistic, but I feel like what I'm working on could be a great tool for people on the path to FIRE, and might even change the lives of some people who have retirement in their grasp, but just don't know it.
-
--infrastructure: what are the roads like? how often does the electricity go out? is there garbage service?
--daily necessities: what are the stores like? how far do I have to go to buy peanut butter at a reasonable price? how about hair conditioner? tampons? apples?
--language: will I have to be fluent to get by? do local service people speak english?
--weather: is this place comfortable year-round?
-
I love your slow travel / ER abroad series.
Additional things that could be helpful:
Primary Language
Percentage of locals able to speak English
Year-round climate data
What's available to eat and drink (some places ban alcohol. The nerve!)
Your FFIL sounds like a sad man in print, but maybe he wants to work 'til the end? Some people are like that.
You could also consider domestic locations that have a lower cost-of-living. Geographic arbitrage (http://www.physicianonfire.com/geographicarbitrage/) doesn't have to involve exotic locations, or Canada for that matter.
Best,
-PoF
-
Primary Language
Percentage of locals able to speak English
Year-round climate data
What's available to eat and drink (some places ban alcohol. The nerve!)
These are *great*, thank you. Thank you also, Ladystache in Baja! I love your suggestions as well. I'll be somewhat limited by the need to do (or get done) the research for many locations, but anything I can automate or find in one central source of information is fair game.
Your FFIL sounds like a sad man in print, but maybe he wants to work 'til the end? Some people are like that.
Yeah... he doesn't, unfortunately. It makes us really sad for him. It's partly not knowing what else is out there, partly having recently lost his wife, and partly just being terrified to make any change. I don't know if we'll ever convince him to change things up, but I hold out hope.
You could also consider domestic locations that have a lower cost-of-living. Geographic arbitrage (http://www.physicianonfire.com/geographicarbitrage/) doesn't have to involve exotic locations, or Canada for that matter.
Thanks! The "thingie" will have US and Canadian destinations included as well. It'll be a limited set, but it'll hit a lot of the well-known places.
-
I have often thought someone should build an Americanized retirement community in a low cost of living country near an international airport. Wall it off and make it look just like a typical American town with golf courses and all that. Set it up in a place where you can live like a king on a typical SS check. Basically build/copy The Villages in India or someplace.
-
There's a site called Retire Early Lifestyle you ought to take a look at. They address a lot of these issues, and there could be a lot of overlap.
I would add "Local friendliness level, and/or level of tolerance for Americans". In other words, can one make friends with the locals, or are they suspicious and/or intolerant?
Can one learn the local language through local programs or tutors?
-
There's a site called Retire Early Lifestyle you ought to take a look at. They address a lot of these issues, and there could be a lot of overlap.
Retire Early Lifestyle is a blog only, as far as I'm aware. Perhaps I'm at the wrong site or there's an aspect of it that I'm missing? I don't see much overlap there with what I've done/what I'm planning.
-
Thought of another couple I could easily add, feel free to comment on anything suggested as far as how important it is to you. This is something I need so that I can decide where to show which data (ie, what should be obvious at first glance, versus deeper in the article , page, etc).
Population
Level of Women's Rights
Level of LGBT Rights
-
While you mentioned proximity to international airport, travel cost to get there from US could be a major factor.
E.g. if an average round trip ticket to US is $300-400 (say, Caribbean) versus $1500 (some places in Asia or Europe, maybe), that's a big difference not encapsulated by the fact that both places may be close to an International airport.
Good list so far. I'm excited to see where you're going with this!
-
First off I would never recommend moving to another country just because it is cheaper. Expats who do that don't last very long. You need to have a love of travel and adapt to the local culture.
LEARN THE LOCAL LANGUAGE!
Don't buy real estate the first two or three years maybe 5. Rent. Rent. Rent. Most expats come back to the US poorer than when they left because of poor real estate purchases.
-
Let's start off by looking at the US (or insert other rich country) for comparison when judging developing countries. Some of them can be actually ahead on things like LGBT rights, weather, food, knowledge of a foreign language (yes, that's you Mr. They-Need-To-Learn-English), and several other things.
-
While you mentioned proximity to international airport, travel cost to get there from US could be a major factor.
Good call, thanks. This will definitely be included.
I think you will enjoy where this is going, I'd be very interested to see how or whether it helps you guys out as you do exactly what we're hoping to do.
-
How about visa and immigration requirements. Tourist visas are usually only good for 1-3 months.
Great idea. Looking forward to seeing the tool.
-
How about visa and immigration requirements. Tourist visas are usually only good for 1-3 months.
Great idea. Looking forward to seeing the tool.
Good one! Maybe 3 levels for this one:
1) Length of stay with little to no hassle (along with cost(s))
2) Amount of hassle for longer stays
3) Amount of hassle to be able to stay permanently
-
How about visa and immigration requirements. Tourist visas are usually only good for 1-3 months.
Great idea. Looking forward to seeing the tool.
Thanks, added to the list (though for the time being it will probably be limited to "Visa on arrival for Americans: true/false" and "Duration of visa on arrival")!
-
I've been an expat my entire life, and wouldn't have it any other way. When I first met my wife, I was floored to learn that until going to college she had lived in the same house her entire life.
Language has never been important, as it can be learned. I value:
- western values: the rule of law, some degree of equality before it, and some degree of stability (there tends to be a high correlation there)
- access to culture
- a reasonable expectation of being able to integrate
- not unreasonably far the from the rest of the first world (looking at you Hawaii)
Practical matters are a distraction, IMHO. If the place appeals to you, you'll make it work. But then again I typically look to settle somewhere for a minimum of 3-5 years, which means any and all costs have a longer amortization schedule.
-
I suspect that the major reason why many people do not take action has nothing to do with practicalities but more to do with:
a. Inertia - much easier to stay with what you know, irrespective of whether its stressful and / or expensive.
b. Friends and family.
-
- Can I drink the water.
- I second the suggestion re length of stay and associated hassles.
-
Proximity to friends and family.
Willingness of friends and/or family to travel to your new home country (some locations appeal to family more than others).
Friendliness of locals.
One's level of interest in the culture and language of the new country and cost of language lessons once there.
Proximity to other countries or destinations to which one may want to travel.
-
I think this is great... but as a serial expat, I wonder how you're going to form meaningful answers to these questions. In my experience looking at places to live and considering these types of question there are the almanac/factbook answers, the "what everyone tells you" answers, and the actual answers that you develop after you live somewhere for a while. Often, those answers are enormously different from one another -- and differ from person to person.
As an example, we LOVE the country we're currently living in and would stay here forever if we could. We find that the majority of people we interact with are friendly and helpful, the amount of language we need to get around is something we can handle, we can find everything that we want at the shops, and we love the culture and the vibe and energy of our temporary home country. We've just said goodbye to several families who feel the EXACT opposite; they feel like no one speaks English and the local language is insurmountable, the people are surly and it's hard to do business, and they can never find the things they need and were over the moon to see the borders on their way out.
A bit of that is expectation, and a bit of it is family culture -- there are no Gino's Pizza Rolls here, which bothers them because they love them, and doesn't bother me because I don't. Whereas in our last temporary home we couldn't find lemons or mushrooms and it made me crazy. But a lot of it is intangible bits that I generally sum up as "vibe", which is both enormously important and sadly unquantifiable.
-
I think this is great... but as a serial expat, I wonder how you're going to form meaningful answers to these questions.
...
But a lot of it is intangible bits that I generally sum up as "vibe", which is both enormously important and sadly unquantifiable.
Thank you for your input. I won't be making any effort to quantify the unquantifiable. There is enough of an opportunity to collect the concrete information, and as you have said, answering abstract questions like "will I be happy there," "will people like me," and "is the culture compatible with my personal preference" is virtually impossible. Even were I to add a huge amount of editorial content, it would still be entirely subjective. That's not the aim on what I've got cooking, at least not at the moment.
The goal will basically be to get people from "I can't retire/Where would I even live/I don't even know where I could afford" to "Wow, neat, I never thought of that place/Huh, that sounds interesting, I never even considered <city>/I think I could really make this work." It's not to talk people into retiring abroad or relocating, just to open eyes to the plausibility of such a thing and inspire people who already lean in that direction with options.
-
Vaccinations hasn't been mentioned.
Some other things that I have on my list to research for places, which may or may not be quantifiable, are common scams, tipping customs, alcohol and marijuana laws, and bad neighborhoods to avoid.
I've also started looking at historical exchange rates. So while I'm sure that you'll be converting everything to USD (or maybe user's choice currency), I think it's interesting to see that the (current) strong dollar makes place X 30% cheaper than it was 5 years ago whereas place Y is only 5% cheaper. Therefore, maybe I should visit place X now and save Y for later. I thought it was interesting, but I guess I don't know if it's all that relevant. After all, you're paying today's rates no matter what.
-
Vaccinations hasn't been mentioned.
Some other things that I have on my list to research for places, which may or may not be quantifiable, are common scams, tipping customs, alcohol and marijuana laws, and bad neighborhoods to avoid.
I've also started looking at historical exchange rates. So while I'm sure that you'll be converting everything to USD (or maybe user's choice currency), I think it's interesting to see that the (current) strong dollar makes place X 30% cheaper than it was 5 years ago whereas place Y is only 5% cheaper. Therefore, maybe I should visit place X now and save Y for later. I thought it was interesting, but I guess I don't know if it's all that relevant. After all, you're paying today's rates no matter what.
Thanks, Eric! These are excellent things to add- vaccinations, tipping customs, and alcohol and marijuana laws in particular are things that I can (probably) easily parse or include from other sources. Not everything will make the first iteration of what I'm working on, but some of the items mentioned here so far surely will.
-
I love this idea! Your living abroad series is so inspiring to me. I can't wait to see what this looks like.
I don't know if this has already been said or falls under crime, but I think integrity of law enforcement would be a consideration for me. Don't roll your eyes, I'm not discussing the current situation in America - I'm more referring to....are bribes expected by local officials? Also the type of crime would matter to me. Petty theft? Not that big of a deal. Beheadings? Probably not going to risk it.
-
The US has lots of LCOL areas so maybe also concentrate on those also. Then many issues disappear such as language barriers, problems with owning real estate abroad, etc.
-
I love this idea! Your living abroad series is so inspiring to me. I can't wait to see what this looks like.
Thank you! I think it will be a couple of months yet before I have something to show, but I'm optimistic. Bear with me :)
The US has lots of LCOL areas so maybe also concentrate on those also.
Thanks. No doubt this is true, it's just not my personal passion to explore US relocation options. What I'm cooking up does cover some US cities, but it's definitely not the primary thrust (and probably won't ever be). There's a *lot* of information available to those interested in relocating in the US, in our first language. There's less available to match you with the right place abroad (if your interests skew in that direction).
-
As someone who plans to semi-retire (at least initially), I'd be interested in knowing about job options for US citizens in some of these places. Also, would be helpful to know about dual citizenship possibilities for those who plan to live abroad in a specific country but also want to maintain their US citizenship (which is definitely something I'd consider doing).
Thanks for building this resource. Look forward to seeing the finished product.
-
Also, would be helpful to know about dual citizenship possibilities for those who plan to live abroad in a specific country but also want to maintain their US citizenship (which is definitely something I'd consider doing).
Your US citizenship isn't affected by living in another country, even if you become a resident there.
http://www.expatinfodesk.com/expat-guide/nationality-specific-information/americans/american-rights-retained/
http://money.usnews.com/money/blogs/on-retirement/2011/06/13/20-frequently-asked-retire-overseas-questions
-
Your US citizenship isn't affected by living in another country, even if you become a resident there.
Yes, but do other countries always let you concurrently keep your US citizenship if you want to become a citizen there as well? That's really more my concern.
-
Your US citizenship isn't affected by living in another country, even if you become a resident there.
Yes, but do other countries always let you concurrently keep your US citizenship if you want to become a citizen there as well? That's really more my concern.
Why are you wanting to become a citizen?
Becoming a citizen somewhere is usually a long, slow, and expensive process, with not much benefit other than getting to vote (and maybe own land, though often citizenship isn't even required for that, or if it is, there's ways around it).
We'd likely, if we settle somewhere outside the US, look to become residents. Get to stay there indefinitely with much less hassle.
Maybe you have a reason, which is why I'm asking, but to me, becoming a resident of elsewhere seems like the way to go the majority of the time.
-
Why are you wanting to become a citizen?
Becoming a citizen somewhere is usually a long, slow, and expensive process, with not much benefit other than getting to vote (and maybe own land, though often citizenship isn't even required for that, or if it is, there's ways around it).
We'd likely, if we settle somewhere outside the US, look to become residents. Get to stay there indefinitely with much less hassle.
Maybe you have a reason, which is why I'm asking, but to me, becoming a resident of elsewhere seems like the way to go the majority of the time.
I don't know that for sure. I'm just exploring options. Since someone is going through all the trouble to put together a database, just thinking it would be nice to have that info.
-
You might move there, meet somebody, get married, have kids etc. At some point you might then want to get the citizenship?
-
Why are you wanting to become a citizen?
Becoming a citizen somewhere is usually a long, slow, and expensive process, with not much benefit other than getting to vote (and maybe own land, though often citizenship isn't even required for that, or if it is, there's ways around it).
We'd likely, if we settle somewhere outside the US, look to become residents. Get to stay there indefinitely with much less hassle.
Maybe you have a reason, which is why I'm asking, but to me, becoming a resident of elsewhere seems like the way to go the majority of the time.
I don't know that for sure. I'm just exploring options. Since someone is going through all the trouble to put together a database, just thinking it would be nice to have that info.
Makes sense. Citizenship or residency at least--something that makes it easy to stay indefinitely.
-
How about visa and immigration requirements. Tourist visas are usually only good for 1-3 months.
Great idea. Looking forward to seeing the tool.
Thanks, added to the list (though for the time being it will probably be limited to "Visa on arrival for Americans: true/false" and "Duration of visa on arrival")!
this website https://www.visahq.com/visas.php (https://www.visahq.com/visas.php) might be helpful for working out visa requirements. I assume you are only doing it for USA citizens but might be helpful to have a link to a website like this for people from other countries who might want to know the visa requirements
-
Your US citizenship isn't affected by living in another country, even if you become a resident there.
Yes, but do other countries always let you concurrently keep your US citizenship if you want to become a citizen there as well? That's really more my concern.
Why are you wanting to become a citizen?
Becoming a citizen somewhere is usually a long, slow, and expensive process, with not much benefit other than getting to vote (and maybe own land, though often citizenship isn't even required for that, or if it is, there's ways around it).
We'd likely, if we settle somewhere outside the US, look to become residents. Get to stay there indefinitely with much less hassle.
Maybe you have a reason, which is why I'm asking, but to me, becoming a resident of elsewhere seems like the way to go the majority of the time.
Obviously the EU is a subset of countries one could wish to become a citizen of, but one awesome aspect of becoming a citizen of an EU country (save Britain, krkrkrkr), is that it makes moving between EU countries a breeze. Literally pack up and go. We will be pursuing this for my wife at some point. She would be eligible to become a resident anyway by virtue of being married to me, but the bureaucracy that can be avoided makes this worthwhile after moving to EU country #2.
Many countries citizenship requirements are almost entirely time based. If you've been here long enough (and have the literacy of an 8 year old, you qualify.
-
I didn't read all the comments, but the thing that popped into my mind was number of expats in the community. Some propel want to live near other expats and other people want to have a totally immersive experience.
-
Has anybody on here ever had experience living in a major Latin American city? Most people seem to avoid them where possible, but I've really enjoyed the few days I spent on trips in Mexico City and Lima. I'm curious to see what people say that have actually lived in a major Latin American city, though. I am seriously thinking about trying it out post-FIRE, but I have to admit I'm a little nervous.
-
Thank you all so, so much for the input you've all provided here. I've already incorporated so much of the food for thought you've given me. I will leave this little teaser of the work in progress. I'm pumped to share it with you all as soon as I can.
http://imgur.com/a/HyCbB
-
since the title asks about slow travel Ill bring this up too. Has anyone tried to travel to different US cities? Which ones are interesting and have enough activities for a few weeks? I asked a similar question but more in regards to little kids here.
http://forum.mrmoneymustache.com/mini-money-mustaches/month-long-vacations-in-the-us-where-to-go-with-little-ones/
I would like to travel abroad also but it seems like we have so much in North America that you could miss out on a lot of hassle free, inexpensive travel and not seeing a lot of sites and getting different cultural experiences.
-
I have often thought someone should build an Americanized retirement community in a low cost of living country near an international airport. Wall it off and make it look just like a typical American town with golf courses and all that. Set it up in a place where you can live like a king on a typical SS check. Basically build/copy The Villages in India or someplace.
Can you bring Trump with you? - please
-
The attractiveness of the local ladies/gentlemen? 😜
Posting to follow haha.
-
I have often thought someone should build an Americanized retirement community in a low cost of living country near an international airport. Wall it off and make it look just like a typical American town with golf courses and all that. Set it up in a place where you can live like a king on a typical SS check. Basically build/copy The Villages in India or someplace.
I think there are quite a few developments like this in the Cancun/Playa del Carmen area of Mexico.
-
Thank you all so, so much for the input you've all provided here. I've already incorporated so much of the food for thought you've given me. I will leave this little teaser of the work in progress. I'm pumped to share it with you all as soon as I can.
http://imgur.com/a/HyCbB
Looks very cool. I'm looking forward to trying out the final product.
-
There's a similar sight to what's been suggested in this thread, which is Nomad List, a site that lists the best cities in the world for digital nomads. Places can be sort using all sorts of filters such as costs of living, crime-rate, wifi-speed etc.
https://nomadlist.com/
It's a paid service, so I have never tried it to the full extent, but maybe you could get some inspiration browsing the site?
-
There's a similar sight to what's been suggested in this thread, which is Nomad List, a site that lists the best cities in the world for digital nomads. Places can be sort using all sorts of filters such as costs of living, crime-rate, wifi-speed etc.
https://nomadlist.com/
It's a paid service, so I have never tried it to the full extent, but maybe you could get some inspiration browsing the site?
Thanks, I know of NomadList and there will inevitably be comparisons (both kind and unkind). The author of that site is twice the web developer I will probably ever be (I am a developer, but have never worked on a web app before), and his site is perfectly focused on his intended audience. There is one major element to what I'm working on that NomadList lacks that I'm keeping to myself that makes it a tool better suited to early retirees and those looking to live longer than a few weeks at a time in a given place... but I'm going to remain silent on that for right now.
Anyway, I have nothing but respect for what NomadList has done-- it is an awesome site. I just wanted something that worked a little differently and was a little more suited to my own personal interests.
-
I think this is great... but as a serial expat, I wonder how you're going to form meaningful answers to these questions.
...
But a lot of it is intangible bits that I generally sum up as "vibe", which is both enormously important and sadly unquantifiable.
Thank you for your input. I won't be making any effort to quantify the unquantifiable. There is enough of an opportunity to collect the concrete information, and as you have said, answering abstract questions like "will I be happy there," "will people like me," and "is the culture compatible with my personal preference" is virtually impossible. Even were I to add a huge amount of editorial content, it would still be entirely subjective. That's not the aim on what I've got cooking, at least not at the moment.
The goal will basically be to get people from "I can't retire/Where would I even live/I don't even know where I could afford" to "Wow, neat, I never thought of that place/Huh, that sounds interesting, I never even considered <city>/I think I could really make this work." It's not to talk people into retiring abroad or relocating, just to open eyes to the plausibility of such a thing and inspire people who already lean in that direction with options.
Most of the stuff that people really care about is both unquantifiable and heavily dependent on individual actions.
The only use the I can see for a table or database is elimination of bad destinations. Destinations with severe violence problems, lack of rights for women and minorities, extreme corruption, etc.
Beyond that, each person has to look at their preferences and needs, and actually go to visit places.
Also, beware the hidden monster of developing country retirement: inflation. The 4% rule doesn't work if local inflation is 7% while US inflation is 2% -- your income in local terms decreases by 5% per year.
-
Most of the stuff that people really care about is both unquantifiable and heavily dependent on individual actions.
People vary, I think. Personally, the stuff I'm building in is stuff that I really care about, and thanks to the suggestions here, will hopefully be stuff a lot of other people care about, too.
The only use the I can see for a table or database is elimination of bad destinations. Destinations with severe violence problems, lack of rights for women and minorities, extreme corruption, etc.
That's one helpful aspect, but I think that 1) what places are actually out there that meet an individual's minimum standard of living, and 2) what that standard of living in that location would cost, are both extremely valuable to folks. People just don't *know* what options are available to them, at their budget, with their preferences.
Beyond that, each person has to look at their preferences and needs, and actually go to visit places.
Sure. That's why quantifying the unquantifiable in a tool is a fool's errand. I (or any individual) could only attempt to address them according to my own viewpoint. I want to build something that will help, at least in part, anyone who uses it.
Also, beware the hidden monster of developing country retirement: inflation. The 4% rule doesn't work if local inflation is 7% while US inflation is 2% -- your income in local terms decreases by 5% per year.
Personally, I don't think anyone should expect to land someplace and expect that nothing can or will change. Speaking for myself, if we end up someplace based on current conditions (financial, social, or otherwise), and those conditions change, we'll move. Obviously that's not the case with everyone, but things can change in the blink of an eye no matter where you live, developed nation or no. Flexibility is the number two ingredient in FIRE (after a giant stack of money).
-
Also, beware the hidden monster of developing country retirement: inflation. The 4% rule doesn't work if local inflation is 7% while US inflation is 2% -- your income in local terms decreases by 5% per year.
Personally, I don't think anyone should expect to land someplace and expect that nothing can or will change. Speaking for myself, if we end up someplace based on current conditions (financial, social, or otherwise), and those conditions change, we'll move. Obviously that's not the case with everyone, but things can change in the blink of an eye no matter where you live, developed nation or no. Flexibility is the number two ingredient in FIRE (after a giant stack of money).
Hahahaha, yeah that's the truth. I think the beauty of the travel lifestyle is that we'll have way more flexibility in spending than the average FIRE-ee. Well, unless your budget is based on only living in Nicaragua or Cambodia, but I'm guessing most of us also want to spend time in fancier places as well. So budgeting to be able to live in Europe and SE Asia during a year, and then having the option to cut your expenses by half or more if needed will be a wonderful safety net.
-
-Tax laws for expats
I'm planning to eventually live in France for at least a few years. There is a whole treaty between the US and France about how expats pay taxes.
-
It's ready. It'll probably never be "done," but it's ready.
Introducing The Earth Awaits. If you've ever followed my Retire Abroad series, The Earth Awaits in the next level. It'll take *your* inputs, needs, and family into account, generating up-to-the-minute, current budgets for over 500 cities around the world. Every search you do builds budgets dynamically, for you. I think it's the best worldwide exploration and relocation/slow travel tool on the internet. Some sites will give you a general idea of a budget for a place build by someone else, but only at The Earth Awaits can you build your own, edit it, download it, and explore hundreds of amazing places in rich, vibrant color.
Check it out. Blog post to follow, but since so much of the help I got here formed the basis of the site, I wanted to give you guys a tiny head start.
https://www.theearthawaits.com/
-
The blog post, if you'd like to learn how the searches work, where the site came from, and the whole behind-the-scenes story.
http://frugalvagabond.com/2016/09/07/earth-awaits/
-
Oh, and on the off chance anyone wants to help me keep this thing going, here's some help I could use:
1) Submit the site to ProductHunt. I've never used the site, so I don't have posting access-- but if you have and do, it would be amazing.
2) Upvote at HackerNews. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12445835
3) Share on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and anywhere else. This would really help me as the long-term traffic numbers will make or break the site.
4) Use the site! Have fun! You can share specific cities using the social media links at the top of every page! Here's an example, of Barcelona (Shared with an ample budget and a family of three):
https://www.theearthawaits.com/?city_id=33&apartment_desired=apartment1bedcitycenter&household=3&lifestyle_desired=ample
I'd welcome any and all feedback, here or via the contact form (or via email, contact @ the earth awaits dot com).
Thanks!
-
I checked it! I think it looks pretty neat, although still needs a little debugging imo (no offense!)
I'll share when I get home, hope you get lots of traffic :)
-
I checked it! I think it looks pretty neat, although still needs a little debugging imo (no offense!)
I'll share when I get home, hope you get lots of traffic :)
Drop me a line with any bugs you run into, I'm happy to work them! I'm not aware of any showstoppers at the moment-- there are a number of small or cosmetic things for sure, but it's what you don't know that usually gets you :)
-
Ok wow. I'm still going through the new site but it is totally awesome. Major kudos for all the work you put into it. Since I'm just now seeing this thread on MMM ... I wanted to add a couple of suggestions myself.
Would it be possible to add information about the likelihood of a natural disaster such as a hurricane or monsoon or earthquake or tsunami or flooding, etc.? Maybe based on historical frequency (last 100 years) ... or at least whether an area is known to be "at risk" for such events? EDIT: And maybe, in addition to temperatures, info about general weather patterns such as light/heavy snow or if there is a really long rainy season or if it tends to be really dry/humid ... and what to expect along those lines?
Also I realize that I could uncheck the continents to look at them one-by-one, but I would love the ability to multi-sort by Continent > Country > City (just like you can do in Excel). :)
Oh and it would be amazing if I could customize my budget items in the Filters section of the advanced search rather than manual input on each individual country ... so that way my changes will apply across-the-board and it's easy to compare apples-to-apples and I won't have to re-enter the same thing separately on each.
-
Ok wow. I'm still going through the new site but it is totally awesome. Major kudos for all the work you put into it. Since I'm just now seeing this thread on MMM ... I wanted to add a couple of suggestions myself.
Thanks, suggestions welcome! Though I'm a software developer, it's actually my first-ever web app, so sometimes I'm constrained by my experience with this medium... but I'm doing my best!
Would it be possible to add information about the likelihood of a natural disaster such as a hurricane or monsoon or earthquake or tsunami or flooding, etc.? Maybe based on historical frequency (last 100 years) ... or at least whether an area is known to be "at risk" for such events? EDIT: And maybe, in addition to temperatures, info about general weather patterns such as light/heavy snow or if there is a really long rainy season or if it tends to be really dry/humid ... and what to expect along those lines?
Definitely. The weather tab is definitely one of the most ripe for expansion. I *almost* excluded it entirely, but left it in on a whim. More is coming here as things settle out.
Also I realize that I could uncheck the continents to look at them one-by-one, but I would love the ability to multi-sort by Continent > Country > City (just like you can do in Excel). :)
You're definitely a power searcher! I have the dual goals of powerful and easy to use, which are sometimes in conflict. Let me think about this one some more/see how things develop over time.
Oh and it would be amazing if I could customize my budget items in the Filters section of the advanced search rather than manual input on each individual country ... so that way my changes will apply across-the-board and it's easy to compare apples-to-apples and I won't have to re-enter the same thing separately on each.
This is coming, though in what form is a little TBD. Step one will be allowing the creation of accounts and saving of favorites, then the customization and storing of budgets. I really want the site to sustain itself, so I need to see how or whether it manages to make any money over the next few months... whether that's from sponsorship or clicking of affiliate links. If it's doing well through those avenues, it'll all be free. If it's still costing me as much as it is (the data license and servers are the expensive part) then I might see about some super-nominal annual fee ($30? $40?) for access to those features, and perhaps a superset of cities (3-4x as many, maybe).
That's all TBD, just where my mind is heading right now. Thanks so much for the feedback!
-
This site is amazing and incredibly useful to me. Thanks so much!
-
Has anybody on here ever had experience living in a major Latin American city? Most people seem to avoid them where possible, but I've really enjoyed the few days I spent on trips in Mexico City and Lima. I'm curious to see what people say that have actually lived in a major Latin American city, though. I am seriously thinking about trying it out post-FIRE, but I have to admit I'm a little nervous.
Yes I lived in Santiago Chile for a total of about a year. Rented an apartment and went to language school full time while living with my boyfriend who was Chilean and spending time socializing with his friends and family. Santiago is a very safe (save for petty crime) orderly and modern city. It's easy to live in if ou have money. It's not cheap but about half as expensive as MYC where I normally live. That said, Chilean Spanish is almost incomprehensible and it's a small island like culture that's hard to break into. But it has good public transportation and banking. It's too Catholic for my taste. Divorce was only made legal in the somewhat recent past. I also found it boring. I adore Burnos Aires and would prefer to live in Argentina.
-
I'm a fan of Numbeo so I think the calculation tool is quite cool, especially as it's customisable. Would you consider adding other currencies options to save converting to and from GBP?
-
Wow. This is your first web app? that's damn impressive.
I really like how easy you've made it to easy and pleasant to discover places we would never think of in a million years.
-
Looks great! I'd be interested in two more things:
Can you drink wine in the park?
How good is the public transportation network?
-
I'm a fan of Numbeo so I think the calculation tool is quite cool, especially as it's customisable. Would you consider adding other currencies options to save converting to and from GBP?
Thanks! Definitely. This is one of the highest priorities for the next version, so keep stopping by. Best case a few weeks, worst case a month or two.
-
Wow. This is your first web app? that's damn impressive.
I really like how easy you've made it to easy and pleasant to discover places we would never think of in a million years.
Thanks! That's one of the major goals-- just to get people thinking about options they never knew they had.
-
Just stopping in to say I love the new site. I got the email, checked it out and posted it to a couple of FB groups and it has had some great response in the comments there. I hope you get lots of traffic!
-
Just stopping in to say I love the new site. I got the email, checked it out and posted it to a couple of FB groups and it has had some great response in the comments there. I hope you get lots of traffic!
Thank you! I am so, so grateful for the sharing. The launch wasn't quite the big splash I had dreamed of, but Rome wasn't built in a day!
I added two new search options (both under Advanced Search) today. Minimum Quality of Life and a text Exclude filter. You can exclude a comma-separated list of countries like this:
India,Greece,Spain
Keep the feedback and suggestions coming, and if you don't want to post here, the contact form on the site is a good way to find me.
-
Very nice!!!
-
Found this yesterday from your blog and loved it, then found my way here... Great job, and yeah the only issue I had was its focused on Americans. Adding other currencies and visa reqs would be nice, but it's pretty amazing right now already! Very very useful.
-
It's ready. It'll probably never be "done," but it's ready.
Introducing The Earth Awaits. If you've ever followed my Retire Abroad series, The Earth Awaits in the next level. It'll take *your* inputs, needs, and family into account, generating up-to-the-minute, current budgets for over 500 cities around the world. Every search you do builds budgets dynamically, for you. I think it's the best worldwide exploration and relocation/slow travel tool on the internet. Some sites will give you a general idea of a budget for a place build by someone else, but only at The Earth Awaits can you build your own, edit it, download it, and explore hundreds of amazing places in rich, vibrant color.
Check it out. Blog post to follow, but since so much of the help I got here formed the basis of the site, I wanted to give you guys a tiny head start.
https://www.theearthawaits.com/
Briefly checked this out, it looks useful! Will look in more detail later.
-
Found this yesterday from your blog and loved it, then found my way here... Great job, and yeah the only issue I had was its focused on Americans. Adding other currencies and visa reqs would be nice, but it's pretty amazing right now already! Very very useful.
Thanks, Adram! I hope to have currency conversion in a few weeks. That and tags/tag searching are my next two tasks.
-
It's ready. It'll probably never be "done," but it's ready.
Introducing The Earth Awaits. If you've ever followed my Retire Abroad series, The Earth Awaits in the next level. It'll take *your* inputs, needs, and family into account, generating up-to-the-minute, current budgets for over 500 cities around the world. Every search you do builds budgets dynamically, for you. I think it's the best worldwide exploration and relocation/slow travel tool on the internet. Some sites will give you a general idea of a budget for a place build by someone else, but only at The Earth Awaits can you build your own, edit it, download it, and explore hundreds of amazing places in rich, vibrant color.
Check it out. Blog post to follow, but since so much of the help I got here formed the basis of the site, I wanted to give you guys a tiny head start.
https://www.theearthawaits.com/
Nice web site. It has a polished, inviting look and a clean UI. I have just started looking at it but the first question that comes to mind is how you intend to make it "sticky".
Fun fact. I plugged in a few basic parameters that fit our FIRE plan and Fort Collins CO came up. I already live there! :D
Edit: I am not sure where you are getting your statistics but your rental prices are way low for my town. Roughly 40-50% low. Vacancy rates are hovering around 1% and rental prices are going up accordingly. On the other hand your grocery prices seemed moderately high. They looked more like Whole Foods prices.
-
Nice web site. It has a polished, inviting look and a clean UI. I have just started looking at it but the first question that comes to mind is how you intend to make it "sticky".
Hey, Threshkin, thanks for the feedback! What do you mean by "sticky?"
Fun fact. I plugged in a few basic parameters that fit our FIRE plan and Fort Collins CO came up. I already live there! :D
Edit: I am not sure where you are getting your statistics but your rental prices are way low for my town. Roughly 40-50% low. Vacancy rates are hovering around 1% and rental prices are going up accordingly. On the other hand your grocery prices seemed moderately high. They looked more like Whole Foods prices.
Thanks for this feedback also. The data is licensed from Numbeo, which is sort of the only game in town that has broad and deep enough data for worldwide locations. There are low, high, and average values for each data point for each city, and I use the average value for my site. You can go and submit updated numbers for Fort Collins here:
http://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/city_result.jsp?country=United+States&city=Fort+Collins%2C+CO
This item of feedback is one that I anticipated being one of the loudest, which is why I opted to make the budgets both editable and downloadable. You can modify budgets up by editing quantities, or the lifestyle modifier for each section to suit your needs/beliefs/research. It's tough to get every city 100% accurate for 100% of people, but my aim was to give everyone a decent jumping-off point.
Thanks again.
ETA: Not a refutation, just an observation-- I notice that Craigslist 1BR rentals in Fort Collins aren't too far off from the $1,066/mo that the site currently shows. Probably there is some variability in what different folks consider "city center," and in desired/expected apartment quality. https://fortcollins.craigslist.org/search/apa?query=1br
-
Nice web site. It has a polished, inviting look and a clean UI. I have just started looking at it but the first question that comes to mind is how you intend to make it "sticky".
Hey, Threshkin, thanks for the feedback! What do you mean by "sticky?"
By sticky I mean how long someone spends on your site. This is an important metric for advertisers. For example Facebook is very sticky, people tend to spend a long time there.
Another important usage statistic is return visits. You do not want to be a "one and done" site.
Fun fact. I plugged in a few basic parameters that fit our FIRE plan and Fort Collins CO came up. I already live there! :D
Edit: I am not sure where you are getting your statistics but your rental prices are way low for my town. Roughly 40-50% low. Vacancy rates are hovering around 1% and rental prices are going up accordingly. On the other hand your grocery prices seemed moderately high. They looked more like Whole Foods prices.
Thanks for this feedback also. The data is licensed from Numbeo, which is sort of the only game in town that has broad and deep enough data for worldwide locations. There are low, high, and average values for each data point for each city, and I use the average value for my site. You can go and submit updated numbers for Fort Collins here:
http://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/city_result.jsp?country=United+States&city=Fort+Collins%2C+CO
This item of feedback is one that I anticipated being one of the loudest, which is why I opted to make the budgets both editable and downloadable. You can modify budgets up by editing quantities, or the lifestyle modifier for each section to suit your needs/beliefs/research. It's tough to get every city 100% accurate for 100% of people, but my aim was to give everyone a decent jumping-off point.
Thanks again.
Thanks for the info on Numbeo. I suspected you were using a data aggregator. Do you get information on when the data was last updated from them? It might help to list that if you do. Particularly for volatile big ticket items like rent.
It is good that the budget numbers are editable. That was not obvious on the site.
Overall it is a very interesting reference site. It provides a good (quick) starting point for additional research.
-
Nice web site. It has a polished, inviting look and a clean UI. I have just started looking at it but the first question that comes to mind is how you intend to make it "sticky".
Hey, Threshkin, thanks for the feedback! What do you mean by "sticky?"
By sticky I mean how long someone spends on your site. This is an important metric for advertisers. For example Facebook is very sticky, people tend to spend a long time there.
Another important usage statistic is return visits. You do not want to be a "one and done" site.
Thanks again for the feedback. I am indeed tracking these metrics, and have employed analytics events somewhat liberally throughout the site to track usage patterns, sharing, searches, popularity of content, and a number of other things that should hopefully be relevant when advertisers come calling.
Truthfully, I am not sure what I could do to make the site more appealing to return visits than to make the content and experience as compelling as possible. At the moment the average user spends about eight minutes on the site, and performs three searches per session. They drill down into 2-3 cities per session on average.
Though software development is not new to me, running a site of this nature, and attempting to make it profitable (or at least not cost me thousands as it has so far) is. I'm a work in progress :)
-
Hey,
I'm curious to ask how accurate you feel these numbers are. I was looking through a lot of the places and was surprised to find many big cities on there, such as Athens and Bangkok. Both of these cities had about a $1500-1600/month budget on an opulent lifestyle. When I do retire, I don't plan on living an opulent lifestyle, but more of something modest and these numbers were not what I expected. I understand it's just an estimate, and you could easily go above that through frivolous spending, but it still feels very low. I played around with the numbers in excel and still ended up with value around $2300-2500/month, which is still low to me. I was expecting around a $3000-$3200/month for the bigger cities. Am I just ignorant to how cheap cities abroad can be? Haha, I hope I am because a lot of these places look like prime retirement spots.
Side note: The site is still awesome and it's extremely user-friendly as well as being easy on the eyes. It's an eyesore going through Numbeo at times so thank you for creating this!
-
Hey,
I'm curious to ask how accurate you feel these numbers are. I was looking through a lot of the places and was surprised to find many big cities on there, such as Athens and Bangkok. Both of these cities had about a $1500-1600/month budget on an opulent lifestyle. When I do retire, I don't plan on living an opulent lifestyle, but more of something modest and these numbers were not what I expected. I understand it's just an estimate, and you could easily go above that through frivolous spending, but it still feels very low. I played around with the numbers in excel and still ended up with value around $2300-2500/month, which is still low to me. I was expecting around a $3000-$3200/month for the bigger cities. Am I just ignorant to how cheap cities abroad can be? Haha, I hope I am because a lot of these places look like prime retirement spots.
Side note: The site is still awesome and it's extremely user-friendly as well as being easy on the eyes. It's an eyesore going through Numbeo at times so thank you for creating this!
Thanks! Also, good question. Let's take Bangkok as an example because I've spent a good amount of time there. For one or two people sharing a single, nice, one-bedroom apartment, $1,500-1,600/mo as baseline spending is absolutely doable, and you'd be living a sweet lifestyle (IMO). The textual names for the multipliers are something assigned to them by me, but in the case of opulent, it's 75% over the average local spending on each item.
By the by, the site currently gives $1814 for Bangkok + 1 Person + Opulent + 1 Bedroom City Center. That's about right, and the apartment numbers are about right ($594 for a 1 Bedroom apartment + 75% modifier = $1,039 would give you a very nice apartment in Bangkok).
That's all a long way of saying that I believe that the numbers and methodology are, by and large, doable and plausible. There are going to be exceptions because the data is crowdsourced and what's acceptable (or even opulent) to one person may not be at all to the next.
Here's a quick example of a nice apartment in the Sukhumvit area in Bangkok that would set you back about $700:
http://www.mrroomfinder.com/detail.php?id=1695
There are a LOT of places out there in the world that you can live a kickass lifestyle for a fraction of what you think-- this exact line of thinking is what inspired me to build the site in the first place!
-
Very cool website. I definitely think about where we could live right now with about $1k/mo passive income. We have a kid and due to that I will need to search for a 3 bedroom "ample" lifestyle to account for the extra costs.
One thing I didn't notice (and apologize if this has already been covered) is healthcare. I understand that healthcare is cheaper in most of these places than it is in the U.S., but most reasonable people in this community would definitely budget for this even if they are "self insured". I get that it isn't a traditional monthly expense, however, I think that it should be included as the 3rd biggest part of the expat budget behind housing and food. Stuff does happen and even though healthcare might be zero one month, it could also be $500 the next month, so having a yearly budget split into monthly amounts is very important to include.
I do see where you can add International/Expat insurance under other, however my suggestion would be to include this as part of the default calculation along with housing and food.
-
Very cool website. I definitely think about where we could live right now with about $1k/mo passive income. We have a kid and due to that I will need to search for a 3 bedroom "ample" lifestyle to account for the extra costs.
One thing I didn't notice (and apologize if this has already been covered) is healthcare. I understand that healthcare is cheaper in most of these places than it is in the U.S., but most reasonable people in this community would definitely budget for this even if they are "self insured". I get that it isn't a traditional monthly expense, however, I think that it should be included as the 3rd biggest part of the expat budget behind housing and food. Stuff does happen and even though healthcare might be zero one month, it could also be $500 the next month, so having a yearly budget split into monthly amounts is very important to include.
I do see where you can add International/Expat insurance under other, however my suggestion would be to include this as part of the default calculation along with housing and food.
Hi Jacquespluto,
I don't disagree that health care is a critically important expense. As you mentioned, that's why I provide the International/Expat insurance option (and why it's the only item whose price can be edited on the site). To understand why a more automated insurance calculation isn't there already, you'd need to consider the scope of the data (573 cities in 119 countries) and manpower available (just me, aside from any small tasks I can farm out on a very cheap basis such as tracking down public domain images for the cities). Each of those 119 countries, and sometimes even regions within them, have different and complicated health systems. Sometimes the private system is the only one an expat would dare to use (Morocco), while other times the public system is world class (France). Without a good way to refine those systems to an equation or table, I have to rely on the user to do their own research in that regard, and the closest thing I've got to a "universal" solution is to provide a link to a couple links to get quotes for international health insurance.
As the site goes forward, if I can get it to make a little money, there are a lot of places where I'd like to invest money to perform research on more subjective topics, health care among them. As it stands, the monetization strategy/potential of the site is a little murky. As things clear up, I would love it if the site made enough money to allow me to be more featureful in this regard.
Thanks for the feedback and for checking it out!
-
https://www.theearthawaits.com/
Bumping this thread, cause this is pretty amazing, and I can't believe no one has commented yet. Hopefully more people will see it now. :)
-
I was super excited to see this posted on reddit today. You should be getting tons of hits and insightful comments!
I subscribed to the mailchimp thingy. Please make me drool once a month with a featured destination or something.
-
I was super excited to see this posted on reddit today. You should be getting tons of hits and insightful comments!
I subscribed to the mailchimp thingy. Please make me drool once a month with a featured destination or something.
Thank you very much! Good feedback, some insightful, some less so, some needlessly harsh, but that's Reddit for you :)
Great idea on the featured destination! I hadn't even thought of that!
-
I was super excited to see this posted on reddit today.
Link?
-
I was super excited to see this posted on reddit today.
Link?
https://www.reddit.com/r/financialindependence/comments/52f8fx/a_really_cool_website_for_comparing_potential_re/
-
Nice. Some good feedback and reception there. Hope it continues to spread. :)
-
Nice. Some good feedback and reception there. Hope it continues to spread. :)
Definitely better than the reception at /r/digitalnomad, that's for sure!
https://www.reddit.com/r/digitalnomad/comments/52gn5o/cool_new_website_that_suggests_places_to_live/
Truthfully, I am not completely the best at taking non-constructive criticism, so I have been trying to constantly remind myself to just take the useful feedback and disregard the useless stuff. So far, so good :)
-
I will offer you an alternative view of criticism...if you aren't getting it you aren't doing anything.
-
I will offer you an alternative view of criticism...if you aren't getting it you aren't doing anything.
Totally true! I have managed to stay pretty positive and open to the feedback so far, so I'm happy. I'm getting lots of things to chew on, think about, and have started to develop an action plan for the next few months to make it even better.
-
As always you amaze me! Awesome site! I want to spend more time on it but a couple of things come to mind. When selecting the categories such as pollution, crime, lifestyle, the categories are maximum values, right? Like a maximum pollution level of "low", includes the "very low" ones as well? This could be clarified somehow.
And is there a way to account for something like political unrest or number of terrorist attacks? Certain places might have low crime rates but other factors which may make them feel less safe.
-
Also the ability to sort the results would be good (especially by cost of living).
-
As always you amaze me! Awesome site! I want to spend more time on it but a couple of things come to mind. When selecting the categories such as pollution, crime, lifestyle, the categories are maximum values, right? Like a maximum pollution level of "low", includes the "very low" ones as well? This could be clarified somehow.
Yes, they're inclusive of the lower values. I'll think about how to clarify ("Maximum pollution" and "Maximum Crime" feel awkward, and a full sentence will look terrible on mobile, so I will probably need a tooltip).
And is there a way to account for something like political unrest or number of terrorist attacks? Certain places might have low crime rates but other factors which may make them feel less safe.
There's surely a way to show it, the bigger question is where to get the data in a reliable fashion. I'm not opposed to adding it if there's an open and parseable source that is objective and the data is actually meaningful.
-
A couple usability laundry list of things I noticed while playing with it today:
- there is at least one city with pollution of 101/100 (Accra in Ghana).
- it's a little weird that the crime rate and pollution follow a "lower is better" approach. I typically view scores as higher is better.
- the url remains the same, so there's no easy way to send links with pre-filled searches.
- put big arrows over the banner image when viewing a destination to view images. Even better, let me use my arrow keys to navigate the slideshow instead of individually select the pictures below.
- maybe have a embedded map to quickly see where the cities are located. You're targeting Americans after all!
- there's no need for the internet access data to take up two whole rows in the quick fact section. Condense it somehow. Likewise, all the LGBT-related stuff could probably be reduced to a smaller infographic (maybe an icon for each right that's colored or grayed out depending on the availability of said right).
-
...snip...
- it's a little weird that the crime rate and pollution follow a "lower is better" approach. I typically view scores as higher is better.
...snip
I usually prefer low pollution and low crime but to each his own.......:D
-
VERY cool site!! Nice work
-
Thanks for the feedback! Point-by-point:
- there is at least one city with pollution of 101/100 (Accra in Ghana).
This seems to be a source data error-- values are supposed to be constrained 0-100, but I can add some logic to do it on my end.
- it's a little weird that the crime rate and pollution follow a "lower is better" approach. I typically view scores as higher is better.
I don't know, I think low crime and pollution seem more intuitively "good" than higher values.
- the url remains the same, so there's no easy way to send links with pre-filled searches.
Yeah, nothing like this yet. You *can* get a URL to share/direct someone to a specific city with your budget/household/housing settings. I'm not sure if I'll add anything like this, I'll need to give it a little thought.
- put big arrows over the banner image when viewing a destination to view images. Even better, let me use my arrow keys to navigate the slideshow instead of individually select the pictures below.
I'll see what I can do.
- maybe have a embedded map to quickly see where the cities are located. You're targeting Americans after all!
Definitely coming.
- there's no need for the internet access data to take up two whole rows in the quick fact section. Condense it somehow. Likewise, all the LGBT-related stuff could probably be reduced to a smaller infographic (maybe an icon for each right that's colored or grayed out depending on the availability of said right).
Good idea on the rights section, that would be more attractive. Thanks!
-
Wow. Your site is very cool. I might show it to DH to get him to realize that it's possible to live abroad. Just planting seeds right now, but someday it might bear fruit.
-
I think the lifestyle selection / associated multiplier should be explained in the FAQ. Going in, I assumed "modest" would be the baseline with no penalty (larger multiplier) to the budget only to see it was assigned 1.25 and "lean" was actually 1.0.
Also, if the data exists (no idea if it does), including a bike/walk score of the cities would be a great addition. For example, the US has this: http://blog.walkscore.com/tag/bike-score/#.V9iZP1srKmw
Gotta give major kudos here - that's a hell of a site. Apparently I'm already FI for quite a few cities (I figured this was true for a bunch of less developed parts of the world but had no idea it was the case for a number of places in effing Europe and Canada).
-
Ok wow. I'm still going through the new site but it is totally awesome. Major kudos for all the work you put into it. Since I'm just now seeing this thread on MMM ... I wanted to add a couple of suggestions myself.
Would it be possible to add information about the likelihood of a natural disaster such as a hurricane or monsoon or earthquake or tsunami or flooding, etc.? Maybe based on historical frequency (last 100 years) ... or at least whether an area is known to be "at risk" for such events? EDIT: And maybe, in addition to temperatures, info about general weather patterns such as light/heavy snow or if there is a really long rainy season or if it tends to be really dry/humid ... and what to expect along those lines?
Also I realize that I could uncheck the continents to look at them one-by-one, but I would love the ability to multi-sort by Continent > Country > City (just like you can do in Excel). :)
Oh and it would be amazing if I could customize my budget items in the Filters section of the advanced search rather than manual input on each individual country ... so that way my changes will apply across-the-board and it's easy to compare apples-to-apples and I won't have to re-enter the same thing separately on each.
Would it be possible to add a filter for weather, say to put in minimum or maximum temperatures you would be willing to live in? As that could be useful
-
Forgot to add, the website is really well done :) I am still having a look around but I could see if being useful in the future
-
I like the website a lot!
I do wish there were a way to filter by population.
And possibly related to that, is this site limited to cities of a minimum size?
Thanks!
-
You should keep a changelog page on the site so people can see new features.
-
Thanks all for the feedback and comments!
You should keep a changelog page on the site so people can see new features.
In theory that's what the News page is for, but an actual changelog might be good better.
I do wish there were a way to filter by population.
And possibly related to that, is this site limited to cities of a minimum size?
I am trying to figure out just how granular I am willing to let search get before it starts to feel like it's compromising ease of use. I've gotten so many suggestions, all of them valid and reasonable, but I haven't quite worked out in my head how I would make all of them work without things getting cluttered and difficult to use. We will have to see how it goes :)
Would it be possible to add a filter for weather, say to put in minimum or maximum temperatures you would be willing to live in? As that could be useful
There will surely be a search/filter for weather of some sort, but I'm not quite sure what form it will take yet. Max/min temps feels a bit like a rule editor, which I'm desperate for this not to become :)
Wow. Your site is very cool. I might show it to DH to get him to realize that it's possible to live abroad. Just planting seeds right now, but someday it might bear fruit.
I love it! I hope that it does!
I think the lifestyle selection / associated multiplier should be explained in the FAQ. Going in, I assumed "modest" would be the baseline with no penalty (larger multiplier) to the budget only to see it was assigned 1.25 and "lean" was actually 1.0.
The reason the default/middle option of Modest is 125% of the budget total is that the budget is, necessarily, representative rather than exhaustive. That is to say, we don't have data for every last thing anyone might need, so my experience while building the site and comparing a huge number of cities to reported budgets all over the world is that this "fudge factor" makes it line up across a huge number of locations for a basic budget. It basically gives you some overhead for all the stuff I don't have prices for.
Thanks for all the feedback, and please share with friends to help me keep it going!
-
Thanks all for the feedback and comments!
Would it be possible to add a filter for weather, say to put in minimum or maximum temperatures you would be willing to live in? As that could be useful
There will surely be a search/filter for weather of some sort, but I'm not quite sure what form it will take yet. Max/min temps feels a bit like a rule editor, which I'm desperate for this not to become :)
Thanks for all the feedback, and please share with friends to help me keep it going!
maybe somehow have weather as options, like snow, extreme heat, moderate or something so that people can eliminate. Though I understand different people consider different things as too hot or too cold
-
You should keep a changelog page on the site so people can see new features.
Changelog now present in the footer. I would mention the changelog in the changelog, but I'm worried about wiping out the universe accidentally.
https://www.theearthawaits.com/changelog/
-
Sorry I am replying late. And in case I it wasn't evident in my previous post, this is definitely meant to come across constructive as I really like your site!
Back to health insurance and healthcare, I guess my main point is that it would be good to at least include a baseline amount in the initial budget that comes up for each city. Even if the baseline amount is a lower range per person amount that is the same for every city, at least it's included and not zero. That way the amounts that are flashing without digging into the budget tab are more in line with reality. It's easy to get excited when you see $1,500/mo for a cool city, but then you realize that is only a portion of your budget and doesn't include health insurance / healthcare which for a lot of us is a material amount. The problem is that some people might miss this if they don't dig into the details behind the budget tab to see what is included and what isn't.
I think your site will get a lot of traffic and generate some fun articles and dreams of retiring abroad. Good luck!
-
Safety/crime is number one for my wife, she's too scared for us to go really. Buying real estate laws, customs and "traps" are all important. Number of flights to the u.s. is good too. Best of luck with the site.
-
Safety/crime is number one for my wife, she's too scared for us to go really. Buying real estate laws, customs and "traps" are all important. Number of flights to the u.s. is good too. Best of luck with the site.
Better not live in the US then. It's way more dangerous in many parts of the States than it is outside of it! :)
-
Additional things that could be helpful:
Primary Language
Though a flat list of languages spoken was there for the start, I reworked it to be able to identify primary language, and to search by primary language. You can now select, for example, "Spanish" as your language under advanced search options to limit results to countries where Spanish is the primary language.
A quick update to non-Americans that currency conversion is coming soon.
-
The Earth Awaits: The Internet's Best and Only Custom Budget-building Tool for World-Travelers
You're not aware of nomadlist.com?
-
The Earth Awaits: The Internet's Best and Only Custom Budget-building Tool for World-Travelers
You're not aware of nomadlist.com?
Well aware. It's an awesome site. It's not a budget-building tool, though. The monthly cost of living amounts on NomadList are a fixed value that doesn't differ based on your input, lifestyle, housing, or anything else. It's also not clear how those numbers are derived. The Earth Awaits builds the budgets dynamically for you (based on your lifestyle, family size, housing needs, etc), allows you to see all the line items that went into them, and edit them to suit your tastes.
So, to summarize, it's not intended to compete with or replace NomadList, because NomadList doesn't do the same things.
-
Additional things that could be helpful:
Primary Language
Though a flat list of languages spoken was there for the start, I reworked it to be able to identify primary language, and to search by primary language. You can now select, for example, "Spanish" as your language under advanced search options to limit results to countries where Spanish is the primary language.
A quick update to non-Americans that currency conversion is coming soon.
You are amazing!
-
You are amazing!
Ha, thanks! Not sure I deserve it, but I am super pumped that people seem to be enjoying it so far. I am also really excited about the stuff I'm planning to add in the next few months that I hope will make it an even more useful and fun tool for people. Please keep checking back, and share with friends-- that's the best way to help me out!
-
Posting to follow. While living outside the US permanently isn't my goal at this time, I do plan to slow travel by living in various places thru out the world. Currently in North America and then overseas once dog is gone.
I sympathize with needing to be flexible around the pups. We've got two- 9 and 5. I figure at least one will still be with us (though I would love it if it were both). We'll probably still go abroad, but then try to minimize the distance between slow travel destinations (ie, move within Europe for a few years) to make it easy on our old girl if she's still with us.
-
I met someone last night who is "world schooling" her preschool aged child for the next year, spending a month (more or less) in one place and then moving again. I told her about your site and she wrote it down. So, that's one more visitor for you. :)
-
That's awesome, thank you! Every visit counts :)
MMM himself was also super kind and tweeted a link to the site:
https://twitter.com/mrmoneymustache/status/778582089486655488
That is definitely a huge high point for me. I have had some amazing help from PF bloggers, Redditors, etc., and it is very humbling and difficult to explain the gratitude. It all started with your help, feedback, and suggestions here, before the site was even "a thing." Thank you!
-
I love the site and plan on spending a lot more time playing with it over the next days, months and hopefully years. Sent it a couple friends and family members, too. The first several results are places I had considered for slow traveling.
Only feedback I have so far is for the basic drop boxes on the home page for Crime Rate and Population. I think they catch whatever you input, and "lower" results. This is fine with crime (I assume if you okay with some, lower crime would still be okay), but some people might not want to consider lower population places if they input High for the desired population.
Great work.
-
Only feedback I have so far is for the basic drop boxes on the home page for Crime Rate and Population. I think they catch whatever you input, and "lower" results. This is fine with crime (I assume if you okay with some, lower crime would still be okay), but some people might not want to consider lower population places if they input High for the desired population.
Thanks for the feedback, and thank you so much for sharing! You are correct that those two are the selected value or lower. Note, though that the second dropdown you're talking about is *pollution*, not population. Most people want less of that :)
I'm adding tooltips in the next couple of weeks so that I can explain the nuances without cluttering up the UI. The "or lower" aspect will definitely be on there!
-
First of all, I have to say I love, love, love your site. Awesome! Seriously. Our plan is in OMY to buy a small campervan and travel around with our pup abroad. This is the type of site that helps me dream about all of the fun places we can visit, but also have a better idea of what our RE budget should be.
A couple of suggestions for things for inclusion:
1. Someone mentioned "stickyness" before. What I would love to do is be able to right click and open some of these in new tabs. That way I can look at them side by side with the other places, save some of the places, share the link with my husband, etc. That would also help with stickiness I suspect.
2. Along the same lines as the first one, how about a compare button? Be able to pick one or two places and look at them side by side.
3. Since pets came into the subject, what about pets import rules? Even if you just linked to the page to one of the pet importers that listed the requirements, that would be an easy start.
A couple of other suggestions - these are constructive, so hopefully you don't take offense:
1. Suggest on the home page, in the header image, maybe an image that is more appealing - having it scroll through some amazing travel destination and have the monthly price shown in the corner or something like that. As someone who doesn't have children, while I think the image is really cute, it doesn't capture my travelers attention, it makes me think this is a site about kids adventures.
2. Along the same lines as above, under all of the search stuff, maybe have a few pre-populated suggestions to capture people's attention? I love the uncluttered look right now, but having some more visual teasers might grab people's attention.
Hope you don't mind the suggestions, I love the site, and think you have done an amazing job. I definitely will use to help plan some fun adventures in the future! Thanks again, and good luck with it!
-
First of all, I have to say I love, love, love your site. Awesome! Seriously. Our plan is in OMY to buy a small campervan and travel around with our pup abroad. This is the type of site that helps me dream about all of the fun places we can visit, but also have a better idea of what our RE budget should be.
A couple of suggestions for things for inclusion:
1. Someone mentioned "stickyness" before. What I would love to do is be able to right click and open some of these in new tabs. That way I can look at them side by side with the other places, save some of the places, share the link with my husband, etc. That would also help with stickiness I suspect.
2. Along the same lines as the first one, how about a compare button? Be able to pick one or two places and look at them side by side.
3. Since pets came into the subject, what about pets import rules? Even if you just linked to the page to one of the pet importers that listed the requirements, that would be an easy start.
A couple of other suggestions - these are constructive, so hopefully you don't take offense:
1. Suggest on the home page, in the header image, maybe an image that is more appealing - having it scroll through some amazing travel destination and have the monthly price shown in the corner or something like that. As someone who doesn't have children, while I think the image is really cute, it doesn't capture my travelers attention, it makes me think this is a site about kids adventures.
2. Along the same lines as above, under all of the search stuff, maybe have a few pre-populated suggestions to capture people's attention? I love the uncluttered look right now, but having some more visual teasers might grab people's attention.
Hope you don't mind the suggestions, I love the site, and think you have done an amazing job. I definitely will use to help plan some fun adventures in the future! Thanks again, and good luck with it!
Thanks for all the feedback and the kind words! I don't take any offense-- believe me, there has been some nasty stuff in at least one place I can think of, so your constructive feedback is extremely pleasant by comparison!
Suggestions:
1) This may be possible, but it'll probably have to be done with a slightly non-standard way of doing it since the cities open in a modal dialog, rather than on a completely new page. That said, for the moment if you open a city, you can copy and paste the url there and paste it into a new tab, which will load the full site and open the appropriate city in a modal. Not perfect, but a stopgap for now.
2) Compare is something I've definitely got on the to-do list, but it will be a little bit further down the road-- probably late this year at the earliest, because my high priority tasks (multi-currency support, user accounts, favorites, stored budgets) have to come first, and that will eat up the next couple of months. I have some ideas on how to implement it, though, so keep checking back!
3) Maybe a little further down the road, but a definite possibility. I made myself a bit of a promise that I wouldn't try to add *too* much more data for every city/country until I tackled the features mentioned above.
Suggestions Part II:
1) I kind of like the current photo, and I don't have kids :) I think a slider with prices would make the site look a little too much like I'm selling something. I would be open to a photo change, but I don't think the slider/prices is the way I want to go.
2) I think I differ a bit on this one too. It doesn't take much effort to get actual results (really, at a minimum you can just click search with the defaults and see some awesome stuff) but it's something to think about.
Thanks! thanks also for thinking about coming back when you have adventures to plan in the future. With any luck, it will have even more to offer by the time you're ready.
-
Lifehacker this morning, yay!
http://twocents.lifehacker.com/the-earth-awaits-builds-a-custom-budget-based-on-your-c-1786958185
-
Lifehacker this morning, yay!
http://twocents.lifehacker.com/the-earth-awaits-builds-a-custom-budget-based-on-your-c-1786958185
Nice, congrats! :)
-
Congrats on Lifehacker! Sounds like things are moving in a really positive direction!
Thanks for your tip on how to open them in new tabs, I will definitely use that.
Regarding my previous suggestions below:
Suggestions Part II:
1) I kind of like the current photo, and I don't have kids :) I think a slider with prices would make the site look a little too much like I'm selling something. I would be open to a photo change, but I don't think the slider/prices is the way I want to go.
I do agree with you about the prices, good point, it will look like a real estate site....so maybe just some pictures to immediately grab people's attention.
2) I think I differ a bit on this one too. It doesn't take much effort to get actual results (really, at a minimum you can just click search with the defaults and see some awesome stuff) but it's something to think about.
I just took a look at the nomadlist site, and if you added what I was suggesting, it would look way too much like what they have done, so I agree stick with what you have, nice and clean...
Anyways, just wanted to say great job, definitely will keep an eye on it! Good luck!
-
Congrats on Lifehacker! Sounds like things are moving in a really positive direction!
Thanks for your tip on how to open them in new tabs, I will definitely use that.
Thanks for being flexible up to this point-- tonight I added some code to handle the right-click event on the Details button for each city so that you can open them directly in a new tab. Enjoy, this one's for you :)
Also recently added population sort, and if you're a non-USA-person, currency conversion is hopefully going to be done early next week sometime.
-
Super, super amazing site, which has already set off several light-bulb moments for me.
One thought for revenue generation: partner with some other site to provide links to housing options. This will serve to confirm the claimed budget numbers, give users a way to see what kind of housing they can get for that budget, and probably attract more return visits.
Can't wait to dig in more deeply! Well done!
-
I love the current photo! While I do have kids, my first thought was actually of the kid in all of us who loves adventures rather than of traveling with my own kids.
That might say something about me as a parent . . .
-
I shared your site with a colleague. Now he wants to quit his job and move to Cuenca--like this week. I am his boss (department chair), so I am telling him that he must at least teach the rest of the semester before he moves!! :)
-
I shared your site with a colleague. Now he wants to quit his job and move to Cuenca--like this week. I am his boss (department chair), so I am telling him that he must at least teach the rest of the semester before he moves!! :)
Ha, I love it! Thank you for sharing, and apologies in advance for all the bosses I hope to inconvenience in the future ;)
One thought for revenue generation: partner with some other site to provide links to housing options. This will serve to confirm the claimed budget numbers, give users a way to see what kind of housing they can get for that budget, and probably attract more return visits.
Thanks! I'd like to add this as well. The tasks ahead to add data points are roughly split into "can be aggregated automatically" and "require human research/interaction." Having links to housing, communications, health care, etc. are in the latter basket, but I really hope to get the site self-sustaining so that I can start to add that kind of thing.
-
Safety/crime is number one for my wife, she's too scared for us to go really. Buying real estate laws, customs and "traps" are all important. Number of flights to the u.s. is good too. Best of luck with the site.
Better not live in the US then. It's way more dangerous in many parts of the States than it is outside of it! :)
That is so true. I think for many people it is familiarity. Parts of your city may be dangerous but you know where they are and what to do. In a foreign country that requires some adaptation. People are probably also afraid of being ripped off. You know, the gringo prices!
The other difference is petty crime. You have to really watch your belongings in many places. We are not used to that. Watching all your stuff constantly, while another reason to be minimalist, can be quite tiring. Simply leave the jewelry at home and don't bring anything you cannot afford to lose. Then again, losing something from your backpack is less serious than losing your life in a drive by shooting in Chicago.
-
Man. I just stumbled upon this thread, and am posting to follow and bookmarking this website. Awesome project! Thanks for doing it!
-
Man. I just stumbled upon this thread, and am posting to follow and bookmarking this website. Awesome project! Thanks for doing it!
Awesome, thank you for checking it out!
This is a shot in the dark, but I have a request: does anyone reading this have submit/voting access over at Product Hunt? I really want to get the site on there to get more eyes on it/hopefully get it upvoted, but I don't know anyone who has product submission access. If you are reading this, have the ability to submit products at Product Hunt, and might be willing to do it, please reach out to me.
-
Awesome site, love the photos by each city. So I guess we could move to Ukraine and even some parts of Germany now.
In terms of calculating trips from the US to Europe (not sure if this applies to any of the site) don't forget to factor in Wow or Norwegian air flights to many parts of Europe from the US. They are bringing costs down in a big way.
-
Awesome site, love the photos by each city. So I guess we could move to Ukraine and even some parts of Germany now.
In terms of calculating trips from the US to Europe (not sure if this applies to any of the site) don't forget to factor in Wow or Norwegian air flights to many parts of Europe from the US. They are bringing costs down in a big way.
I don't do the flight cost calculation directly, but when you open a city, I determine your approximate city by your IP address, and query SkyScanner for the cheapest flight costs they have seen from the nearest airports to you to that city's airports. They're not definitively the cheapest flights available (for that, you have to click through to SkyScanner and do a "real" search, the values I get are cached) but they should be pretty close, and should take into account Norwegian/WOW and others.
-
Sounds good. Also, just noticed the photo for Sumy Ukraine (Europe's low cost leader) is probably some Greek island.
-
Sounds good. Also, just noticed the photo for Sumy Ukraine (Europe's low cost leader) is probably some Greek island.
Thanks! Will fix.
-
Something else I would consider is ease of travel to and from this location. If I were to RE to the location (or stay for a long while), I would want my family/ friends to be able to come see me. Does it take 3 days of travel on donkeys to get there? Does it take 6 months to get a visa? I certainly wouldn't go anywhere for an extended time if my parents couldn't make it out to see me.
-
Good news for non-US folks: You can use the site in the following currencies: USD, CHF, EUR, GBP, AUD, CAD. Just select the currency you want in the upper right of the menu bar. Currency units are also reflected in the budget slider and elsewhere.
More currencies to come, but these required the least layout changes. Have fun :)
-
Really awesome site!
I'm having fun exploring it!
-
Could there be an option to convert all of the temperatures to Fahrenheit for those of us who aren't accustomed to reading # degrees in Celsius? Maybe allow a "default" setting just like with the currency?
-
Could there be an option to convert all of the temperatures to Fahrenheit for those of us who aren't accustomed to reading # degrees in Celsius? Maybe allow a "default" setting just like with the currency?
Try it now-- easier this way than having a new setting for everything, I think.
ETA: You're gonna have to live with kilos in the budget for a little while, though :D
-
Thanks for being flexible up to this point-- tonight I added some code to handle the right-click event on the Details button for each city so that you can open them directly in a new tab. Enjoy, this one's for you :)
Brilliant, thank you! I see you got the currency conversion in there, nice job!
-
Sweet site! Following.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
-
Would be nice to see an option to specify a home city to be invluded in the results for comparison purposes.
-
I'm going down a few rabbit holes here. Is there a way to create a profile and save favorite cities (including customized budgets), or a plan to build this functionality? I think if you're looking to make the site more sticky, that could help.
For now I'm bookmarking Cordoba, Bergamo, and Heidelberg.
-
I'm going down a few rabbit holes here. Is there a way to create a profile and save favorite cities (including customized budgets), or a plan to build this functionality? I think if you're looking to make the site more sticky, that could help.
Yes, this is the biggest piece of functionality I plan to add in the next few months. Hopefully it will all be in before the end of the year, but it's a large undertaking so it will take a little time. Believe me, I definitely want this in there worse than anyone!
-
MoneyBoss -- JD Roth. He will be a natural fan. MMM knows him.
The Art of Non-Conformity -- will overlap well with Chris G's big international travel following. MMM was a keynote speaker at WDS and may be able to facilitate an intro
...
Those are just some off the top of the head suggestions. I think you will find this picks up steam quickly. Good luck!
Thank you, these are great suggestions! I had reached out to about half of these folks, and your suggestions got me to reach out to the other half (well, I still need to hit up Nords). No responses yet (I started about 4-5 days ago with Farnoosh, Paula, and a bunch of others). It's tough because I don't feel like I have a right to ask MMM to reach out to any of these guys on my behalf. On the other hand, I am sure all of these folks get a mountain of unsolicited contacts, and in their shoes I would probably just round-file most of them too.
I'm persistent, though, so if I don't get any response, I might see if I can find someone to do an intro. I'm excited about the site, and it's not often something truly new comes to the FIRE community, so I'm hopeful if people will just check it out, they'll feel like it's something special too.
Thank you for your help! I hope I start to see some responses soon.
-
I love this site! I would use it for finding places to live, but also places to go on a long vacation.
The interface is pleasing. I like how it has the very simple search and then you can dial it down a bit further from there. Beyond weather, I wouldn't need too many more options for granularity because it would be overwhelming. After you have a list of 10 or so destinations, you can look for all the other random things you are interested in. I did like how some places (perhaps more of the popular destinations?) have descriptions about the city's culture and life. I don't know if you wrote these yourself or if they are pulled from Wikipedia or another site, but it made it much more enjoyable to think about what it would be like to live there.
I would also use a feature that linked to real estate and rentals in the selected city.
-
Would be great to see a sub-section for military retirees. You could include countries/cities where Tricare is accepted for health insurance, places where space-A flights go. What are your thoughts?
-
I love this site! I would use it for finding places to live, but also places to go on a long vacation.
The interface is pleasing. I like how it has the very simple search and then you can dial it down a bit further from there. Beyond weather, I wouldn't need too many more options for granularity because it would be overwhelming. After you have a list of 10 or so destinations, you can look for all the other random things you are interested in. I did like how some places (perhaps more of the popular destinations?) have descriptions about the city's culture and life. I don't know if you wrote these yourself or if they are pulled from Wikipedia or another site, but it made it much more enjoyable to think about what it would be like to live there.
I would also use a feature that linked to real estate and rentals in the selected city.
Thanks! The editorial articles are written by me. There are probably about 30 so far, so it's relatively low coverage yet, but I'd like to expand to as many as possible. In my wild, crazy fantasy where the site is ridiculously successful, I'd love to hire a small group of freelance writers to write blurbs for all the cities.
Real estate/rental links are almost definitely coming, though I don't have a firm timeline on that just yet.
-
Would be great to see a sub-section for military retirees. You could include countries/cities where Tricare is accepted for health insurance, places where space-A flights go. What are your thoughts?
Interesting idea, and one I hadn't thought of before. It's something I could consider in the future for sure. I've added it to the list of things to investigate.
-
MoneyBoss -- JD Roth. He will be a natural fan. MMM knows him.
The Art of Non-Conformity -- will overlap well with Chris G's big international travel following. MMM was a keynote speaker at WDS and may be able to facilitate an intro
...
Those are just some off the top of the head suggestions. I think you will find this picks up steam quickly. Good luck!
Thank you, these are great suggestions! I had reached out to about half of these folks, and your suggestions got me to reach out to the other half (well, I still need to hit up Nords). No responses yet (I started about 4-5 days ago with Farnoosh, Paula, and a bunch of others). It's tough because I don't feel like I have a right to ask MMM to reach out to any of these guys on my behalf. On the other hand, I am sure all of these folks get a mountain of unsolicited contacts, and in their shoes I would probably just round-file most of them too.
I'm persistent, though, so if I don't get any response, I might see if I can find someone to do an intro. I'm excited about the site, and it's not often something truly new comes to the FIRE community, so I'm hopeful if people will just check it out, they'll feel like it's something special too.
Thank you for your help! I hope I start to see some responses soon.
I heard my name!
Your site looks good, and I suspect that a lot of personal-finance bloggers would love to give it a workout. I can tweet about it and post about it to a couple of FB groups. I have a big backlog on my editorial calendar but I can add a paragraph of TheEarthAwaits to my next post on "slow travel lessons learned". Well, I can do that as soon as I write that post.
You absolutely should reach out to Billy & Akaisha Kaderli. (TheGuide@RetireEarlyLifestyle.com) They get a ton of questions about their expenses and how to live overseas on Social Security. The reason their site parties like it's 1999 is because its rugged simplicity is extremely low-bandwidth and highly reliable for the places where they're lucky to be able to use an Internet cafe (remember those?) or even tether a cell phone. They update their landing page once in a while but they also send out frequent e-mails to their list. They'll also be able to quickly validate (or critique) just about every town in Mexico, Latin America, and Southeast Asia.
Most of the people you've contacted are probably still recovering from FinCon (especially Joshua & JD), with the usual followup flurry of social media and freelancing and corporate talks. I'm a week behind yet I'm not dealing with anywhere near the volume that those folks get.
Rumor is that Paula is in Asia for at least a few weeks. I'm pretty sure that MadFIentist and his spouse are starting their global round trip any minute now. Farnoosh has been busy with TV appearances and her other column gigs (as well as growing her daughter) but as far as I can tell she responds to every e-mail. If you don't hear from people in the next 2-3 weeks then I could do a round of e-mail introductions.
Would be great to see a sub-section for military retirees. You could include countries/cities where Tricare is accepted for health insurance, places where space-A flights go. What are your thoughts?
http://www.tricare-overseas.com/ , sure, but keep in mind that many routine doctor visits (and even some surgeries) are cheaper out of pocket than with U.S. insurance.
SpaceA.net is my preferred site for looking up rules and breaking news. Most of the Air Force passenger terminals (and some Navy terminals) are on Facebook. There's also the Take-A-Hop MilSpaceA app-- definitely for Apple mobile devices and perhaps for Android too. It automates the process of signing up by e-mail, and that alone justifies its existence. It's also a treasure trove of information on bases, including not just flight info but also ground accommodations, local transportation, and nearby commercial airports. I hardly ever pay for an app but I shoveled out the $8 for this one. It's saved us hours of research (and hundreds of dollars) on travel logistics.
-
I heard my name!
Your site looks good, and I suspect that a lot of personal-finance bloggers would love to give it a workout. I can tweet about it and post about it to a couple of FB groups. I have a big backlog on my editorial calendar but I can add a paragraph of TheEarthAwaits to my next post on "slow travel lessons learned". Well, I can do that as soon as I write that post.
Nords! Thanks for turning up, and thanks for the offer to share it. However you feel comfortable doing it, I would sincerely appreciate it. If you tweet, the site's Twitter is @theearthawaits and I can make sure to retweet from there and my blog's Twitter.
You absolutely should reach out to Billy & Akaisha Kaderli. (TheGuide@RetireEarlyLifestyle.com) They get a ton of questions about their expenses and how to live overseas on Social Security. The reason their site parties like it's 1999 is because its rugged simplicity is extremely low-bandwidth and highly reliable for the places where they're lucky to be able to use an Internet cafe (remember those?) or even tether a cell phone. They update their landing page once in a while but they also send out frequent e-mails to their list. They'll also be able to quickly validate (or critique) just about every town in Mexico, Latin America, and Southeast Asia.
I reached out, and got a response from Akaisha, who mentioned that she would add the site to their resource page. She had some issues viewing the site that may have been related to using a pretty old browser, so I'm trying to make sure I at least warn people properly when they're using a browser that the site shouldn't be expected to work on. That was helpful feedback!
Most of the people you've contacted are probably still recovering from FinCon (especially Joshua & JD), with the usual followup flurry of social media and freelancing and corporate talks. I'm a week behind yet I'm not dealing with anywhere near the volume that those folks get.
Rumor is that Paula is in Asia for at least a few weeks. I'm pretty sure that MadFIentist and his spouse are starting their global round trip any minute now. Farnoosh has been busy with TV appearances and her other column gigs (as well as growing her daughter) but as far as I can tell she responds to every e-mail. If you don't hear from people in the next 2-3 weeks then I could do a round of e-mail introductions.
Thanks! I am sure you're right. I don't want to presume I deserve a response from anyone, but I still want to be appropriately persistent. :) If I haven't heard from anyone in a few weeks, I'll definitely reach out.
I really, sincerely appreciate the feedback and especially the guidance on how to promote it-- the self-promotion is not something I've had to do much of before, so it's a bit of a black art to me (not to mention feeling more than a little uncomfortable).
-
Excellent site! I'm having fun looking at it. And, of course, learning things.
Are Caribbean/Central American locales included in North America? I didn't see many show up in my searches (just Puerto Rico, that I can recall)... If there were places in, say, Panama, they would be in the North America section?
Is there a world map showing all the cities that are included on the site?
-
Excellent site! I'm having fun looking at it. And, of course, learning things.
Are Caribbean/Central American locales included in North America? I didn't see many show up in my searches (just Puerto Rico, that I can recall)... If there were places in, say, Panama, they would be in the North America section?
Is there a world map showing all the cities that are included on the site?
Hi! Thanks!
The Caribbean locations (as well as the Central American ones) get sorted into North America. So both of your examples would indeed be in there, though they may get filtered out by your other criteria. Hamilton, Bermuda, for example, which is the most expensive city in the whole database, might get filtered out on budget. Here is the easiest way to see all the cities in North America that are *not* Canada, United States, or Mexico:
1) Set the max budget to 20,000 (or if you're using CAD/another currency, just max it out to whatever the slider maxes out at)
2) Unselect all the continents except for North America
3) Open the Advanced search options
4) Put this into the exclude filter: Canada, United States, Mexico
The map view is definitely coming, and is on my "next several months" to-do list. I'm presently finishing up the rest of the currency options (the rest require some layout changes but I want to make sure everyone is covered) and doing a few other small items. After that I'll move on to user account creation, profile, saving favorites, storing custom budgets, and the stuff that goes with that. That will honestly take a few months. After that, Map view is the next item on the list. I have a pretty good idea of how I want it to work, and it's *possible* (but not certain) that I will get frustrated working on something else and bang it out in a few feverish days, so keep trying back!
I'm so happy you're having fun and learning from it, thank you very much!
ETA: By the by, I know I could use some more Caribbean cities. If you have some that you would like added, please reach out to me either here or using the contact email/form on the site. If I can collect high quality data for the cities, I'm happy to add them.
-
Thanks for the quick and helpful response, iamlindoro!
I will think about possible Caribbean and Central American cities that would be of interest and get back to you with any ideas I might have.
-
The most awesome thing just happened. My wife just told me about this site. :D
Apparently she found it linked Facebook from lhamo! lol. :)
As a cool plus, I got live feedback from someone not knowing they were testing the site.
Two things to fix:
1) My wife got frustrated when she clicked "details" on a city to learn more, then couldn't scroll. Down arrow didn't do anything, and clicking over on the scroll bar closed the popup details. I had to show her to click on the picture to give it focus, then down arrow would work.
I imagine others hit this frustration, too. Can you make the popup get focus automatically, so arrow keys work? Or can you make the popup have it's own scroll bar? Cause otherwise the popup is useless, just showing pictures (which is what she thought).
2) Also, she didn't find the advanced. I'd put it up above the continents, and/or make it bigger. You have a giant continents thing, and then a giant search button, and it's sandwiched in between them, easily ignored.
:)
I was laughing though, it was pretty awesome having her "show" me this site.
She did wish it had more options like proximity to nature, and maybe suburbs ("outside city center" wasn't clear to her what that meant) options on the housing cost. I explained the limitations around your data grabbing.
A city size limiter would be good too, e.g. a slider on population level similar to the budget one.. "I want at least 10k people, but not more than 100k" or "Between 100k and 500k people" or whatever. Population should be easily grabbable automatically via data sources, I'd think.
-
I just spent a little time browsing the site finally. Definitely fun to look around.
A couple of suggestions/minor annoyances: the "continents" is an easy way to break things down, but doesn't really match match up with how I (or I think most people) think of the world. When I search Asia, and the top spots are taken by places like Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Cyprus. In Asia, but not what I was looking for. Maybe have smaller categories like middle-east, southeast asia, south asia, etc. in addition to continents.
I don't know how realistic it is to find data on this, but size of the ex-pat population is very important to me when choosing a place. Looking at Bali and Bandung in Indonesia, they have very similar "numbers" and they're in the same country, but one has an enormous (or more accurately, several enormous) ex-pat populations, and the other does not. If you can find data on this, it would be a hugely useful stat.
-
Maybe have smaller categories like middle-east, southeast asia, south asia, etc. in addition to continents.
I was thinking this exact same thing earlier today (and almost posted it, but didn't) when reading the discussion a few posts up about the Caribbean/Central America.
Having to put in "North America" and then filter out Canada, US, and Mexico is not intuitive at all for most people. Sub-categories would be.
-
The most awesome thing just happened. My wife just told me about this site. :D
Apparently she found it linked Facebook from lhamo! lol. :)
As a cool plus, I got live feedback from someone not knowing they were testing the site.
Ha, nice!
1) My wife got frustrated when she clicked "details" on a city to learn more, then couldn't scroll. Down arrow didn't do anything, and clicking over on the scroll bar closed the popup details. I had to show her to click on the picture to give it focus, then down arrow would work.
I imagine others hit this frustration, too. Can you make the popup get focus automatically, so arrow keys work? Or can you make the popup have it's own scroll bar? Cause otherwise the popup is useless, just showing pictures (which is what she thought).
Thanks for the heads up, the modal should now focus automatically and work with arrow keys (I use scroll wheel/finger swipe, which always worked, it never even occurred to me to test the arrow keys). Adding a scroll bar to the modal would require that the modal content area itself be restricted in size to the screen, and I've tried it-- it was pretty terrible looking. I like it a lot better this way... but at least now you can scroll without clicking :)
2) Also, she didn't find the advanced. I'd put it up above the continents, and/or make it bigger. You have a giant continents thing, and then a giant search button, and it's sandwiched in between them, easily ignored.
Let me give this some more thought. I'm sure it can be made more obvious.
A city size limiter would be good too, e.g. a slider on population level similar to the budget one.. "I want at least 10k people, but not more than 100k" or "Between 100k and 500k people" or whatever. Population should be easily grabbable automatically via data sources, I'd think.
It's a hard tightrope to walk-- I want it to be powerful enough for everyone, but also not to take on so many switches, buttons, and widgets that the whole thing starts to feel too wonky to use. Population is already there (bottom left of the grid view, top left of list view), and adding a slider is easy, I just need to think about which additional filters are an absolute necessity.
Tag-based searching ("surfing," "lots of wifi," "close to mountains," etc.) is coming, and I even already wrote all the database schema/search code for it. The limiting factors are designing the UI and completing the code to actually scrape/parse that information from the available sources.
-
More options is better, maybe with a way to toggle them off/on, persistent with cookies?
-
I just spent a little time browsing the site finally. Definitely fun to look around.
A couple of suggestions/minor annoyances: the "continents" is an easy way to break things down, but doesn't really match match up with how I (or I think most people) think of the world. When I search Asia, and the top spots are taken by places like Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Cyprus. In Asia, but not what I was looking for. Maybe have smaller categories like middle-east, southeast asia, south asia, etc. in addition to continents.
I don't know how realistic it is to find data on this, but size of the ex-pat population is very important to me when choosing a place. Looking at Bali and Bandung in Indonesia, they have very similar "numbers" and they're in the same country, but one has an enormous (or more accurately, several enormous) ex-pat populations, and the other does not. If you can find data on this, it would be a hugely useful stat.
Thanks for the feedback and for checking it out!
The subcontinent filter is a possibility, but being completely transparent, it would probably be a little while. I am getting a lot of good polish suggestions that I could implement, but each one keeps me from working on some high-priority additional functionality that I feel like I need to make the site really successful. I have added it to the list of things to investigate, though.
I'm not sure anyone tracks the expat population sizes worldwide, but if I happen upon that information, I'd be happy to add it.
-
I'm not sure anyone tracks the expat population sizes worldwide, but if I happen upon that information, I'd be happy to add it.
LOL, good luck with getting any reliable information. Embassies can't even get a good grip on the number of their own citizens living in the country, let alone other countries' citizens. Even in countries like the US where they "supposedly" track everyone who enters, they can't give you an answer as to who's a tourist, who's a resident, who's staying illegally, etc. I put "supposedly" in quotes because my own I-94 travel history shows that I have entered the US 3 times more than I have left, and doesn't have my latest entry.
The European Union and other jurisdictions with porous borders make this exercise damn near impossible. Based on the embassy guesswork from voter registration and hocus pocus inference, there's something like 200-500k French people in London alone. Nobody knows for sure.
-
I'm not sure anyone tracks the expat population sizes worldwide, but if I happen upon that information, I'd be happy to add it.
LOL, good luck with getting any reliable information.
I agree, I don't think it's likely that a trustworthy source of this info exists... but I wanted to be open to the suggestion if it appears at some point :)
-
More options is better, maybe with a way to toggle them off/on, persistent with cookies?
A definite possibility (probably don't even need the cookies). My backlog is starting to get really long, so I will do my best :)
-
Do you have a place to note where consulates are located? That can sometimes be a proxy for identifying larger expat populations And having a consulate in town can make expat administrative issues much simpler -- we were able to renew our kids passports when we lived in a smaller city in China without too much hassle because it happened to have a consulate, for example -- people who lived elsewhere had to make a trip at their own cost.
I don't have this yet-- my guess is that I would add this to the "points of interest" map view that I hope to add in the next couple phases of the project. You'll be able to toggle on/off things like parks, hotels, train stations, consulates, etc. (at least that's the plan).
-
So, today's new hotness is automatic detection of the user's location, and displaying the correct visa pair information when viewing a city's country information. That is to say, if you're in Canada, and you pull up Saudi Arabia, it'll show you the visa information for Canadians traveling to Saudi Arabia.
There's one pretty obvious problem with this approach-- namely, you might be in Canada, but not travel on a Canadian passport. Still, it's way better than the US-only approach before, and I'll add a "default country" setting sometime soon to fix that.
This also allows me to add a filter in the coming days for visa requirements, i.e., "filter on countries where I can travel visa free."
Tested against the following countries of origin: US, Canada, Mexico, Russia, France, Vatican City
-
So, today's new hotness is automatic detection of the user's location, and displaying the correct visa pair information when viewing a city's country information. That is to say, if you're in Canada, and you pull up Saudi Arabia, it'll show you the visa information for Canadians traveling to Saudi Arabia.
There's one pretty obvious problem with this approach-- namely, you might be in Canada, but not travel on a Canadian passport.
Yes, that's one problem (I'm searching from Cambodia right now, for example).
The other: often my location doesn't match with the country I'm from, not due to travel, but due to Internet. Proxies, VPNs, etc. Even if I'm from the US, and in the US, my location may not show me as in the US.
But it's a neat idea for a lot of people, and being able to change it (hopefully persistently) will be nice. :)
-
So, today's new hotness is automatic detection of the user's location, and displaying the correct visa pair information when viewing a city's country information. That is to say, if you're in Canada, and you pull up Saudi Arabia, it'll show you the visa information for Canadians traveling to Saudi Arabia.
There's one pretty obvious problem with this approach-- namely, you might be in Canada, but not travel on a Canadian passport.
Yes, that's one problem (I'm searching from Cambodia right now, for example).
The other: often my location doesn't match with the country I'm from, not due to travel, but due to Internet. Proxies, VPNs, etc. Even if I'm from the US, and in the US, my location may not show me as in the US.
But it's a neat idea for a lot of people, and being able to change it (hopefully persistently) will be nice. :)
Setting going in tonight, under currency. Shouldn't have pushed it without that. It'll do it dynamically until someone sets it, then it will persist with a cookie :)
EDIT: Setting is now in. This should make it work nicely for everyone!
-
😂 Please also note that the North Korean passport suuuuuuuucks.
-
Just posting to say the site is amazing and gets better every time I look at it. I'm planning on setting off on the slow travel life in 3 or 4 years and its already giving me ideas and inspiration.
The things I want to see added have already been mentioned as in the works! i.e. the ability to save profiles or group a number of places and give them a name and save them. And a map search function. Thanks!
-
Just posting to say the site is amazing and gets better every time I look at it. I'm planning on setting off on the slow travel life in 3 or 4 years and its already giving me ideas and inspiration.
The things I want to see added have already been mentioned as in the works! i.e. the ability to save profiles or group a number of places and give them a name and save them. And a map search function. Thanks!
Thank you, Bloodbuzz! I hope that I can continue to improve it at this pace. It may slow down a bit through the holidays, as the big tasks you're waiting for (and which I'm eager to get out!) will take some time to get right. Still, I'm hoping to have much of that done by the end of the year. Thank you again for the compliment and encouragement!
-
Tonight, I added the much-requested map view for search results. It's a little rudimentary, but it works pretty well and doesn't seem to slow down the site too badly. There are a few bugs to fix, but it's a nice start. Have fun!
-
Tonight, I added the much-requested map view for search results. It's a little rudimentary, but it works pretty well and doesn't seem to slow down the site too badly. There are a few bugs to fix, but it's a nice start. Have fun!
Very nice! The really adds value to the site. (For visual people like me at least.)
-
I love how many amazing features have been added. I am really enjoying daydreaming!
-
I love how many amazing features have been added. I am really enjoying daydreaming!
Awesome! Th pace of updates may slow a teensy bit now, since I need to stop doing low-hanging fruit and start really working on user accounts, but I hope that it won't take too terribly long to add them. Hopefully now there's a nice basic feature set that covers most people... and of course, I'll continue to add cities and smaller things here and there to keep things interesting :)
-
Well, this is definitely going to take some explanation, but it's now possible to filter results by the racial bias of a country (or at least a proxy for it). Basically the site now has aggregated results for the World Value Survey of the past 20 years, which quizzes a large number of people worldwide on a whole bunch of topics. One of those topics is particular groups they would not want as neighbors. This is the proxy for racial bias-- if a different racial group is mentioned in the response.
Inspired by this article (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/05/15/a-fascinating-map-of-the-worlds-most-and-least-racially-tolerant-countries/) from the Washington Post. That article notes some data errors in the way that map was built that I corrected in my own aggregation of the data.
ETA: Here's a post about it if you're interested in the specifics: http://frugalvagabond.com/2016/10/10/racism-sexism-stuff-clueless/
-
Alright, friends-- big favor to ask you. The Earth Awaits got posted to Product Hunt today. This could be a big deal for the site if I can get some attention from the site at large. If you are on Product Hunt (or are willing to be), please stop by and share your opinion. Thanks.
https://www.producthunt.com/tech/the-earth-awaits
-
Have to vent a bit- really, really frustrating day. Submitted the site to Reddit last night (/r/dataisbeautiful) and woke up to nearly 600 simultaneous users on the site. I had over 10,000 visitors by 6 AM, and the post on Reddit was being upvoted so fast that it was virtually sure to end up on the Reddit front page. The site crumpled under the load at one point, but I worked with my host to devote more resources to it (not cheap) and I was back in business.
Then, like that, the traffic went to near-zero. The mods of the subreddit killed the post, because they felt the site didn't contain visualized data.
Reasoning that I had nothing to lose, I argued a bit, but I just got a somewhat flip response that I could buy ads with Reddit if the promotion was important to me. One other mod suggested /r/internetisbeautiful, but I've actually tried to submit the site to that subreddit before, and it was immediately killed as "not unique."
I remain optimistic about the site in general if I can get people to look at it-- the kind of response I was seeing was massive. I'm just a little frustrated this evening because I seem to keep hitting brick walls every time things look promising. This building something nobody's ever done before thing is not for the faint of heart. The traffic is back to 3-4 people at any given moment.
I'm be positive again tomorrow, I'm just bitching and moaning for now :)
-
Quality wins out over time. Organic growth. Be patient. It's coming. :)
-
Quality wins out over time. Organic growth. Be patient. It's coming. :)
Thanks :) I hope so. The last week or two has felt hard. The site is really expensive to run, and I would be so happy just to not have to worry about it costing me too much to keep it running. I have to admit to being a little envious when I read stories about similar sorts of side hustle projects taking off for others.
-
How much is expensive?
-
How much is expensive?
About five hundred bucks a month to run. Thats averaging in some of the fixed costs that I incurred getting the site started, and the Numbeo API access license. That's for this first 12 months assuming no further non-hosting costs and that I don't hit the level of traffic I had this morning again and need to upgrade the amount of resources on my server again.
I know it may not sound like that much, it's just way more than I spend on any non-necessity :)
-
How much traffic do you need to break even (counting the fact that as traffic grows, so will server costs--like calculating a rocket launch, where the fuel weight ups the amount of fuel you need)?
-
How much traffic do you need to break even (counting the fact that as traffic grows, so will server costs--like calculating a rocket launch, where the fuel weight ups the amount of fuel you need)?
It's honestly a tough question. Google ads aren't ever going to be able to sustain it, so I actually removed them. Even with a million hits and 15K visitors today, the site made $15. So, for now I'm going to count on building enough traffic that I can attract partners who might be interested in advertising specifically to the site's audience (my aim would be to interpolate the ads in the search results, probably). That means operating at a loss for a while, but it makes bringing in quality traffic and treating visitors well the primary concern.
That's a long way of saying I'm not sure :)
-
How much traffic do you need to break even (counting the fact that as traffic grows, so will server costs--like calculating a rocket launch, where the fuel weight ups the amount of fuel you need)?
It's honestly a tough question. Google ads aren't ever going to be able to sustain it, so I actually removed them. Even with a million hits and 15K visitors today, the site made $15. So, for now I'm going to count on building enough traffic that I can attract partners who might be interested in advertising specifically to the site's audience (my aim would be to interpolate the ads in the search results, probably). That means operating at a loss for a while, but it makes bringing in quality traffic and treating visitors well the primary concern.
That's a long way of saying I'm not sure :)
Gotcha.
Or until you get bought out, as another exit strategy, perhaps by a big travel site. :)
-
thats awful. could reddit just move it to some other place? it was nice to see that bump in interest but doesn't sound like it is financially stable anyways. maybe try to find better advertisers first that will generate more income then try to expand the viewership.
right now their there is an ad for 2017 acura mdx at the bottom of my screen (yes on the forums) before I have noticed ads for Charter cable...television!
edit; on a programming note, when i up my spending and lifestyle level and i notice the same cities with different amounts beside them. Wouldn't this stay the same? not sure what is going on here; why does this change?
I realize if you are living opulently then you are spending more but this is optional, not sure why is anything so specific? I understand why if you are on the bottom rung then spending on housing food is fixed. Does this make sense?
-
Wow- that's a ton of money to be spending on a side project. Numbeo is one pricey API. Maybe you could reach out to them and see if they will give you a break on pricing?
What's your stack like? Any chance you could self-host on a beefy dedicated machine?
-
Wow- that's a ton of money to be spending on a side project. Numbeo is one pricey API. Maybe you could reach out to them and see if they will give you a break on pricing?
What's your stack like? Any chance you could self-host on a beefy dedicated machine?
lol, yeah, servers aren't that much. pay for itself in a few months.
-
Well, we were on the reddit frontpage this morning. I spoke with the mods from /r/InternetIsBeautiful and they agreed to let me resubmit. Got upvoted there within an hour to the frontpage, and melted my server. Had to hide the post to allow my host to recover. We maxed out our entire Amazon instance from the traffic.
Also, The Next Web picked up the reddit post when it hit the front page, so that was awesome:
http://thenextweb.com/apps/2016/10/12/digital-nomad-budget-tool/
Anyway, probably longer term I'll need to move my hosting to my own Amazon instances rather than using an intermediary. I really like this host, though. So, all in all, today so far is as good as yesterday was bad. Sorry for exposing you guys to my ups and downs :)
-
Well, we were on the reddit frontpage this morning. I spoke with the mods from /r/InternetIsBeautiful and they agreed to let me resubmit. Got upvoted there within an hour to the frontpage, and melted my server. Had to hide the post to allow my host to recover. We maxed out our entire Amazon instance from the traffic.
Also, The Next Web picked up the reddit post when it hit the front page, so that was awesome:
http://thenextweb.com/apps/2016/10/12/digital-nomad-budget-tool/
Anyway, probably longer term I'll need to move my hosting to my own Amazon instances rather than using an intermediary. I really like this host, though. So, all in all, today so far is as good as yesterday was bad. Sorry for exposing you guys to my ups and downs :)
Congrats! :)
-
One question I couldn't find answers to on the site.
1. How is 'quality of life' measured. You can sort results by quality of life, but I don't understand what that means... A bit of a write up on that would be nice. Where does the data come from and how does it relate to budget (if at all)?
-
Thanks all for the enthusiasm and encouragement. Lhamo, I think you are very right. I was just talking to my wife tonight about how it feels like I'm approaching a time where targeting useful, non-spammy advertisers for the site might be a possibility.
I made some big changes to how the site is served tonight, moving all the big city images to an amazon S3 storage bucket. This should take a HUGE portion of the load off my host, which should hopefully allow me to restore the Reddit post tomorrow and see how we fare.
The Quality of life index is calculated based on the following metrics:
Purchasing Power Index
Housing Price Index
Cost of Living Index
Safety Index
Health Care Index
Traffic Index
Pollution Index
Climate Index
It comes straight from Numbeo. You can see the canonical explanation here: https://www.numbeo.com/quality-of-life/indices_explained.jsp
So, to answer your question, it is obliquely related to budget, in that it is related to the cost of living index, but that's a small part of the calculation.
-
By the way, the cost of housing in Puerto Vallarta seemed like it had a bug (all types listed as $1).
Your site has me wanting to check out Mangalore.
-
By the way, the cost of housing in Puerto Vallarta seemed like it had a bug (all types listed as $1).
Your site has me wanting to check out Mangalore.
Thanks so much for this- I have set PV to invisible until the data gets fixed upstream. Actually, I'm kind of confused what happened here, I'm guessing I might have been in the middle of updating the data when my server got crushed or something. Regardless, I will get it fixed!
-
So, the whole week has been an awesome flood of feedback, suggestions, and insight as to how people will use the site in the real world. I completed a few of the most common requests tonight and pushed them to the site. You can now filter on internet speed, weather (unfortunately my weather coverage is only about 80% of cities, going to try to improve this tomorrow), and quality of health care.
I'm pretty happy with how far the site has come over the past month, and it's so neat to see people post things like "I think we're 2 years closer to retirement than we thought we were." So neat, and exactly what I had hoped for.
Probably going to slow the pace of changes a little bit as I try to bring some more traffic to the site. I'll still be making improvements, but will probably push a few out at a time rather than whenever something is done to avoid disruptions to the increasing traffic.
Thanks as always, everyone!
-
I'm surprised I'm not finding any results for Belize...any particular reason?
-
I'm surprised I'm not finding any results for Belize...any particular reason?
There aren't any cities in Belize with a full set of data on Numbeo, unfortunately, which means I can't add them to The Earth Awaits. For me to add a city, I need it to have a price for all data points there. If you happen to have friends in Belize in one of the cities, you can encourage them to add data on Numbeo, and hopefully I will be able to add them in the future.
-
Darn, I wish I did know someone in Belize...I suppose I could put a request for data on the Belize Forums.
-
Darn, I wish I did know someone in Belize...I suppose I could put a request for data on the Belize Forums.
That would be awesome! If you happen to do this and get a response, drop me a line once one of the cities has a full data set and I'm happy to add it. It would be nice to have more Latin American/Caribbean cities.
-
OK, will do! Are you are ok with me linking to your site to show people an example of why the data is so very useful?
-
OK, will do! Are you are ok with me linking to your site to show people an example of why the data is so very useful?
Of course, in fact, I'm grateful for any shares!
-
Tonight, I added the much-requested map view for search results. It's a little rudimentary, but it works pretty well and doesn't seem to slow down the site too badly. There are a few bugs to fix, but it's a nice start. Have fun!
I'm not seeing any maps anywhere...can someone help?
-
I'm not seeing any maps anywhere...can someone help?
Perform a search, Maps are a toggle in the upper right of the results-- you can toggle the view between Grid, Map, and List.
-
My wife and I are very interested in this - we have considered Penang (Malaysia), Koh Samui (Thailand) and Nha Trang (Vietnam) as possible places, but the cost of schooling always throws us off.
-
OK, will do! Are you are ok with me linking to your site to show people an example of why the data is so very useful?
Of course, in fact, I'm grateful for any shares!
Heh-- Facebook is telling me that we're supposed to buy Facebook ads.
I'm not sure why they recommend targeting Californians.
-
I'm not sure why they recommend targeting Californians.
Because we all want to escape ASAP. Thanks, Nords!!
-
I added my little town. Any idea how many people have to add a town/city before it will show up in the results?
-
I added my little town. Any idea how many people have to add a town/city before it will show up in the results?
I'm not sure I follow you-- adding a city to the site is a manual process that I do. What did you add your town to?
-
Sorry, I was reading the stuff about Belize and got in my own mind's world.
I meant I added my town to Numbeo. It still has not shown up.
-
Sorry, I was reading the stuff about Belize and got in my own mind's world.
I meant I added my town to Numbeo. It still has not shown up.
Ah, I see now, thanks. Since each city slightly affects the overall site performance, my general guideline is to accept cities with: a population greater than 50,000, 10+ contributors in the past 18 months at Numbeo, and data for all line items. If this happens to include your city (or does in the future), drop me a line and I'll do my best to add it to TEA too :)
-
Random possibly-useless feature of the day: I wrote a Facebook messenger chat bot last night. You can go to the site's Facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/theearthawaits/
And message the page. Ask it anything you like. Here are some queries that I know work:
* "What's the budget for Paris?"
* "What's the budget for two people with an ample lifestyle in a one bedroom apartment outside the city center in Lisbon?"
* "How much does it cost for five people to live in Madrid?"
Warning: Natural language parsing is really hard. You may not get expected results with some queries, but I'm working to improve it all the time! A couple of hints: Just use the city name, not the country. Requesting a three bedroom apartment needs some work, hopefully I'll have that sorted out soon.
-
I suggest you take a look at another new site being discussed on MMM. Your two sites appear to be very complementary with very little duplication.
Here is the site: https://www.trackfi.com/
Here is the thread: http://forum.mrmoneymustache.com/welcome-to-the-forum/i-just-launched-trackfi-com-i-would-love-your-feedback!/
-
I suggest you take a look at another new site being discussed on MMM. Your two sites appear to be very complementary with very little duplication.
Here is the site: https://www.trackfi.com/
Here is the thread: http://forum.mrmoneymustache.com/welcome-to-the-forum/i-just-launched-trackfi-com-i-would-love-your-feedback!/
Yeah, I saw it! Looks great! I commented on the thread yesterday. There might be some neat opportunities to enhance the Inspiration/Where can you live portion with data from TEA.
-
I suggest you take a look at another new site being discussed on MMM. Your two sites appear to be very complementary with very little duplication.
Here is the site: https://www.trackfi.com/
Here is the thread: http://forum.mrmoneymustache.com/welcome-to-the-forum/i-just-launched-trackfi-com-i-would-love-your-feedback!/
Yeah, I saw it! Looks great! I commented on the thread yesterday. There might be some neat opportunities to enhance the Inspiration/Where can you live portion with data from TEA.
Yup. Exactly.
-
I added a pretty neat guided tour (three tours, actually-- searching, results, and city details) of all the basics at The Earth Awaits tonight. It's very lightly tested on three browsers, so if anyone wants to check it out and pretend (or not pretend) to be seeing the site with fresh eyes, that would be amazing!
Just go to the site, the tour should pop up the first time you visit since it was added.
-
I added estimated two bedroom apartment values to the site tonight. They're the average of the one and three bedroom prices for each city. This has been a big request :)
-
I've been finetuning the budget according to my needs in the Details tab of each city. For example, I eat more meat than the default, I adjusted the frequency of restaurant visits, taxis, etc.
I wish those details were transferred to other cities, as they are specifc to ME regardless of the city. It would be nice to set those things BEFORE the search so that the budget limit (like $3000/month) could take those numbers into account.
The thing is, the site advertises itself as "custom budget building" but from the main search box on the front page you can only set 2-3 generic boxes, like total spending and lifestyle factor. As a new visitor, I'd have liked to see full budget tweaking (maybe hidden under a clickable "details" button) right from the start. Otherwise, it looks exactly like nomadlist and I'd just leave unless I'm bored on a Saturday night. But that's just me.
-
I've been finetuning the budget according to my needs in the Details tab of each city. For example, I eat more meat than the default, I adjusted the frequency of restaurant visits, taxis, etc.
I wish those details were transferred to other cities, as they are specifc to ME regardless of the city. It would be nice to set those things BEFORE the search so that the budget limit (like $3000/month) could take those numbers into account.
The thing is, the site advertises itself as "custom budget building" but from the main search box on the front page you can only set 2-3 generic boxes, like total spending and lifestyle factor. As a new visitor, I'd have liked to see full budget tweaking (maybe hidden under a clickable "details" button) right from the start. Otherwise, it looks exactly like nomadlist and I'd just leave unless I'm bored on a Saturday night. But that's just me.
There will ultimately be stored custom budgets which can be used in the search-- it's just going to take a little more time, probably a couple months. Maybe it will be more helpful to you at that point. At the moment, it's the only place that I know of on the internet that takes into account your family size, lifestyle, and housing needs-- even if it's not quite as granular or customized as I would like it to be yet, at least it does a decent job by default, and allows you the flexibility to go beyond that-- it'll be more convenient to do so soon, I promise!
-
Added a new little trick today: You can now embed any city on your own site, and it will track the cost of living for the parameters you set it up with. FIRE or travel blogger? Your articles about cost of living can now always have real-time cost of living without updating them!
https://www.theearthawaits.com/embed/
-
Just curious, what frameworks did you use for the client and server? Do you host on AWS?
-
Just curious, what frameworks did you use for the client and server? Do you host on AWS?
The backend is Django/Python. The user interface is just plain HTML/JS/CSS using Bootstrap, JQuery, and various small other JS libraries as needed. The site is indirectly hosted on AWS, as PythonAnywhere, my host, uses their infrastructure.
-
I've just pushed the most major update to the site since I first released it four months ago-- The Earth Awaits 2.0!
Some stuff Mustachians may love:
* There's a city browse mode (https://www.theearthawaits.com/browse/)! View all the cities and pick the ones you're interested in, rather than having to find it using the search!
* Registered users can create a custom lifestyle for use in calculating your cost of living all around the world! Previously, only default lifestyles were available.
* Mark cities as favorites and view them all in one place!
* Watch up to five data points (city budgets or individual line item prices) and receive notifications when they change-- on a schedule, by a percentage, or by a fixed amount!
There are some premium features if you become a subscriber ($4-6 per month depending on monthly vs annual membership):
* Historical pricing information for every city (using your own custom lifestyle, if you like-- find out what your lifestyle would have cost a week ago, a month ago, or (eventually, data is still growing) a year ago!)
* Carefully researched contact, school level, academic program, and tuition information for 900 international schools all around the world!
* Create as many custom lifestyles as you like!
* Watch up to 100 data points!
* Monitor safety alerts for every country in our database. Receive notifications when the US, UK, or Canadian governments issue travel alerts or advice!
... And of course, there's a fancy killer feature...
TRAVEL HACKING TOOLS! (https://www.theearthawaits.com/award-search/)
Every article about travel hacking starts with "Pick a destination." The site now goes one step further and shows you all the ways you can redeem points to get there, and how to earn them fast! Click the "Travel" tab (https://www.theearthawaits.com/award-search/) at the top of the site, then enter your origin and destination airports, select from a list of 18 airline award charts (or leave it set to "All" to see them all), and see exactly how many points you'll need to get there! Even better, you'll see a curated list of credit cards that you can use to quickly acquire those points through churning! You'll also see which transferable points programs (from Chase, Citi, Amex, and SPG) apply to each airline chart.
PRO TIP: If you're trying to get to continental Europe, I highly recommend looking at the Air France/KLM Chart. Every transferable rewards program transfers to this program, and they're amongst the cheapest to fly from the US to Europe.
The cards shown are ordered to maximize the signup bonus and minimize your additional spending. The top cards aren't the ones that will make me the most money (I'm an affiliate), they're the ones that leave you with the most points while spending the minimum. There are some card names that I can't specifically mention on my site (because of compliance stuff with the credit card companies), so some of them are referred to as "Transferable Rewards Card" until you click through. The links always lead you to a page where you can find the card I describe, though.
PRO TIP: Click the gear in the top left and set your home airport. Then the travel hacking tools will always default to your home airport as the origin.
Even better, there's a Miles and Points tab in every city's details that shows you the travel hacking options to get to that city!
The travel hacking portions are my attempt to get the site to break-even while still providing a service that is of value. I earn money if you use my affiliate links to do your card churning, and you get the use what I hope is or will become the best travel hacking tool on the internet totally for free! If travel hacking/churning isn't your thing, but some of the premium features interest you, you can be a member for about the cost of a coffee per month. I would be sincerely grateful if you did your travel hacking with my links, as it will help me to devote more time in the future to making the site even better. Every dollar made is going back into the site right now (still operating at a loss).
Feedback welcome! I'm so excited to share all the new features! If you encounter any issues, especially when it comes to signup or the new features, please reach out and I will absolutely resolve them immediately for you. Please share with friends, on social media, and with any press or bloggers you know!
-
Congrats on the launch! :)
I'm looking forward to the "side gig posts" on your blog getting silly numbers where people accuse you of making it up. ;)
-
Congrats on the launch! :)
I'm looking forward to the "side gig posts" on your blog getting silly numbers where people accuse you of making it up. ;)
Ha, I should be so lucky! I'll be deliriously happy if I can get to break-even sometime in the near future!
-
Congrats on the launch! :)
I'm looking forward to the "side gig posts" on your blog getting silly numbers where people accuse you of making it up. ;)
Ha, I should be so lucky! I'll be deliriously happy if I can get to break-even sometime in the near future!
I'm sure your expectations will be exceeded! The site is so great, and keeps getting better.
-
I'm sure your expectations will be exceeded! The site is so great, and keeps getting better.
Thanks, I really hope you are right! I spent the last four months ignoring the press momentum I had, because I had to finish all this work-- now I have to go back to reaching out to them. I'm not sure which is more tiring :)
-
Why can't we set the lifestyle factors before search?
Is it just a way to get people to register? It's not a site I'd typically register for.
-
Why can't we set the lifestyle factors before search?
Is it just a way to get people to register? It's not a site I'd typically register for.
It just doesn't make sense from a usability perspective to force people to plow through a list of budget line items when the majority of users don't care that much about customizing the lifestyles and will use the system default ones. You can use the custom lifestyles in search once you've created a login and added one, in case anyone was wondering about the context.
There's no nefarious motive here, and it will always be possible to create at least one customized lifestyle with a totally free account. Is it technically possible to store customized budgets client-side? Sure, probably. But it makes way, way more sense to store them on the server side, because it allows me to upgrade schemas and functionality for all users at once without worrying about whether I'd break it on the client side.
Yes, I'd love it if people would spend the $4-6 per month to support the site (or did their churning signups there), but I'm not locking the core functionality behind a paywall. I'm setting something of value loose in the world, mostly for free, and hoping that that turns out to be the right call. Anyone who reads my blog knows that I am intent on being absolutely crystal-clear transparent about this site. You are very welcome to check those posts out if you want a deep insight as to the financial realities of running a site like this.
You had some stern words about the site months ago without the ability to store your own lifestyle. Now it's there. I hope it's of use to you, but I recognize that I won't be able to satisfy everyone.
-
Sorry about the stern words, that's a nice site overall :)
I was imagining the lifestyle could go under an optional expandable "advanced" settings somewhere, but yeah that'd probably complicate things if you need to keep that config server side.
-
Sorry about the stern words, that's a nice site overall :)
I was imagining the lifestyle could go under an optional expandable "advanced" settings somewhere, but yeah that'd probably complicate things if you need to keep that config server side.
No worries :) I hope the site has more of what you were looking for now!
-
Very interesting points travel search.
I did a test search from MEL to SGN. It seems a bit incomplete, not listing the local Australian airlines.
Also it shows United as an option as well as the United partners. The partners bit is right but showing united themselves is incorrect as they don't fly the route.
-
Very interesting points travel search.
I did a test search from MEL to SGN. It seems a bit incomplete, not listing the local Australian airlines.
Also it shows United as an option as well as the United partners. The partners bit is right but showing united themselves is incorrect as they don't fly the route.
The travel hacking search is predominantly aimed at a North American audience-- each award chart is a massive amount of data entry/normalization, so the first 18 charts were picked based on the ability to get them standardized, their transfer partners, and their relevance to an NA audience. I expect the list of charts to increase in the future, though.
You may not have seen it, but at the top of the search results you'll see that region based charts (this is most of them) are calculated from country to country, not from airport to airport, and that may require a repositioning flight at the origin and/or destination. This is because the charts themselves usually only get a specific as the countries included in the regions. A filter to limit it only to charts with routes between the specific airport pairs is definitely coming, which should give you the result you're looking for. I completely acknowledge that this could be better, though, and will continue to work to improve it!
-
I love the travel hacking info - I think it is a super functional way to organize it and motivate people to do it.
The site looks great. Every couple of weeks I get back on it to fantasize...
-
I love the travel hacking info - I think it is a super functional way to organize it and motivate people to do it.
The site looks great. Every couple of weeks I get back on it to fantasize...
Thank you!! I am really excited for the travel hacking portion's potential. I have so many ideas for how to make it more useful and powerful, but just like when I originally released the site, it was time to get something out and then improve slowly in the coming months :)
-
Added some nice new additions to the travel hacking search today: Filter card offer types (All, Consumer Only, Business Only), by class of service (All, Economy, Business, First Class), and filter results (show all award charts, or just the single best result).
By popular demand, the origin and destination airports are now combo boxes and you can type in the name of the airport instead of having to scroll through the mega-list.
https://www.theearthawaits.com/award-search/
-
Added some nice new additions to the travel hacking search today: Filter card offer types (All, Consumer Only, Business Only), by class of service (All, Economy, Business, First Class), and filter results (show all award charts, or just the single best result).
By popular demand, the origin and destination airports are now combo boxes and you can type in the name of the airport instead of having to scroll through the mega-list.
https://www.theearthawaits.com/award-search/
It would be nice if the budget included visa runs and/or the cost of getting and keeping a visa. These can add up in places like Thailand where you have to do a visa run every 3 months unless you have a long term visa which could also cost quite a bit.
I would also make it clear that the budget excludes health insurance which should be added manually.
Also, just based on my experience visiting some of the places (mainly in Asia), cost of accommodation may be accurate, but miscellaneous expenses are understated. That doesn't mean the budgets are wrong, though, because as a single guy I tend to spend less on housing and more on drinks/bars/taxis/etc. If your target audience are retirees, particularly couples, then what you have is probably more accurate.
-
It would be nice if the budget included visa runs and/or the cost of getting and keeping a visa. These can add up in places like Thailand where you have to do a visa run every 3 months unless you have a long term visa which could also cost quite a bit.
The site really only aims to cover the everyday expenses. I don't see this as something that I am likely to add, to be honest. If you really want to live somewhere long-term, you should arrange an appropriate visa. If you're skirting the edges of the immigration system, that's not something I see myself being able to realistically estimate or address.
Also, just based on my experience visiting some of the places (mainly in Asia), cost of accommodation may be accurate, but miscellaneous expenses are understated. That doesn't mean the budgets are wrong, though, because as a single guy I tend to spend less on housing and more on drinks/bars/taxis/etc. If your target audience are retirees, particularly couples, then what you have is probably more accurate.
Remember that you can create an account and create your own custom lifestyle (or subscribe and create as many as you like!). If the default lifestyles don't suit your needs, create one!
-
Thanks, great website btw, I'll give it a try.
-
Thanks, great website btw, I'll give it a try.
Thanks! Have fun :)
-
I am new to this forum and was doing a search today and stumbled across this thread. I followed the link to your site and was very impressed. I've registered and shared a link with several of my friends. However, I wasn't able to find the city I am considering for retirement. In fact, I wasn't able to find any cities in that region of that country, which was a little surprising since it is considered to be one of the top retirement spots by several of the "where to retire" publications. Maybe this was user error on my part. But if not, per your FAQ I would like to request a specific city. I am looking at the Algarve region of Portugal (Specifically Lagos, but any city in that region would probably give me similar results - The largest cities in that region are Faro and Portimao). Would it be possible to add a city in the Algarve region of Portugal? I'll probably ask the same question on the site once I figure out the proper place to ask (you might see it quicker there). Thanks in advance.
-
Thanks for the nice feedback! Of the three you mentioned, only Faro has good enough cost of living data for me to be able to add it. Check back in the next few days and it should be there. I'll try to sneak it in tonight but if not, surely by the end of the weekend.
-
Thanks for the nice feedback! Of the three you mentioned, only Faro has good enough cost of living data for me to be able to add it. Check back in the next few days and it should be there. I'll try to sneak it in tonight but if not, surely by the end of the weekend.
That was a really quick response. Thanks
-
Thanks for the nice feedback! Of the three you mentioned, only Faro has good enough cost of living data for me to be able to add it. Check back in the next few days and it should be there. I'll try to sneak it in tonight but if not, surely by the end of the weekend.
That was a really quick response. Thanks
No problem! Faro is added, enjoy!
https://www.theearthawaits.com/cost-of-living/in/faro/