Author Topic: Mustachians Interested in Retiring Abroad (or Slow Travel)  (Read 51769 times)

iamlindoro

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Re: Mustachians Interested in Retiring Abroad (or Slow Travel)
« Reply #150 on: October 01, 2016, 08:01:13 PM »
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.
« Last Edit: October 01, 2016, 08:06:53 PM by iamlindoro »

Dee

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Re: Mustachians Interested in Retiring Abroad (or Slow Travel)
« Reply #151 on: October 01, 2016, 08:16:56 PM »
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.

arebelspy

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Re: Mustachians Interested in Retiring Abroad (or Slow Travel)
« Reply #152 on: October 02, 2016, 03:47:42 AM »
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.
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StetsTerhune

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Re: Mustachians Interested in Retiring Abroad (or Slow Travel)
« Reply #153 on: October 02, 2016, 04:29:11 AM »
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.

arebelspy

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Re: Mustachians Interested in Retiring Abroad (or Slow Travel)
« Reply #154 on: October 02, 2016, 04:33:33 AM »
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.
I am a former teacher who accumulated a bunch of real estate, retired at 29, spent some time traveling the world full time and am now settled with three kids.
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iamlindoro

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Re: Mustachians Interested in Retiring Abroad (or Slow Travel)
« Reply #155 on: October 02, 2016, 09:50:20 AM »
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.

arebelspy

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Re: Mustachians Interested in Retiring Abroad (or Slow Travel)
« Reply #156 on: October 02, 2016, 09:52:26 AM »
More options is better, maybe with a way to toggle them off/on, persistent with cookies?
I am a former teacher who accumulated a bunch of real estate, retired at 29, spent some time traveling the world full time and am now settled with three kids.
If you want to know more about me, this Business Insider profile tells the story pretty well.
I (rarely) blog at AdventuringAlong.com. Check out the Now page to see what I'm up to currently.

iamlindoro

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Re: Mustachians Interested in Retiring Abroad (or Slow Travel)
« Reply #157 on: October 02, 2016, 10:01:22 AM »
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.

Paul der Krake

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Re: Mustachians Interested in Retiring Abroad (or Slow Travel)
« Reply #158 on: October 02, 2016, 10:17:26 AM »
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.

iamlindoro

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Re: Mustachians Interested in Retiring Abroad (or Slow Travel)
« Reply #159 on: October 02, 2016, 10:22:56 AM »
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 :)

iamlindoro

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Re: Mustachians Interested in Retiring Abroad (or Slow Travel)
« Reply #160 on: October 02, 2016, 10:34:04 AM »
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 :)

iamlindoro

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Re: Mustachians Interested in Retiring Abroad (or Slow Travel)
« Reply #161 on: October 02, 2016, 10:37:36 AM »
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).

iamlindoro

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Re: Mustachians Interested in Retiring Abroad (or Slow Travel)
« Reply #162 on: October 02, 2016, 08:57:36 PM »
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

arebelspy

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Re: Mustachians Interested in Retiring Abroad (or Slow Travel)
« Reply #163 on: October 02, 2016, 09:08:30 PM »
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.  :)
I am a former teacher who accumulated a bunch of real estate, retired at 29, spent some time traveling the world full time and am now settled with three kids.
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iamlindoro

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Re: Mustachians Interested in Retiring Abroad (or Slow Travel)
« Reply #164 on: October 02, 2016, 09:22:33 PM »
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!
« Last Edit: October 02, 2016, 09:24:04 PM by iamlindoro »

iamlindoro

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Re: Mustachians Interested in Retiring Abroad (or Slow Travel)
« Reply #165 on: October 02, 2016, 09:27:17 PM »
😂 Please also note that the North Korean passport suuuuuuuucks.


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Re: Mustachians Interested in Retiring Abroad (or Slow Travel)
« Reply #166 on: October 04, 2016, 09:46:30 AM »
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!

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Re: Mustachians Interested in Retiring Abroad (or Slow Travel)
« Reply #167 on: October 04, 2016, 11:23:54 AM »
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!

iamlindoro

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Re: Mustachians Interested in Retiring Abroad (or Slow Travel)
« Reply #168 on: October 04, 2016, 10:30:06 PM »
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!

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Re: Mustachians Interested in Retiring Abroad (or Slow Travel)
« Reply #169 on: October 05, 2016, 09:50:28 AM »
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.)

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Re: Mustachians Interested in Retiring Abroad (or Slow Travel)
« Reply #170 on: October 06, 2016, 02:10:10 PM »
I love how many amazing features have been added. I am really enjoying daydreaming!

iamlindoro

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Re: Mustachians Interested in Retiring Abroad (or Slow Travel)
« Reply #171 on: October 06, 2016, 02:43:13 PM »
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 :)

iamlindoro

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Re: Mustachians Interested in Retiring Abroad (or Slow Travel)
« Reply #172 on: October 10, 2016, 12:11:55 AM »
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 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/
« Last Edit: October 10, 2016, 10:15:05 AM by iamlindoro »

iamlindoro

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Re: Mustachians Interested in Retiring Abroad (or Slow Travel)
« Reply #173 on: October 10, 2016, 04:04:18 PM »
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

iamlindoro

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Re: Mustachians Interested in Retiring Abroad (or Slow Travel)
« Reply #174 on: October 11, 2016, 05:01:59 PM »
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 :)

arebelspy

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Re: Mustachians Interested in Retiring Abroad (or Slow Travel)
« Reply #175 on: October 11, 2016, 05:26:36 PM »
Quality wins out over time. Organic growth. Be patient. It's coming. :)
I am a former teacher who accumulated a bunch of real estate, retired at 29, spent some time traveling the world full time and am now settled with three kids.
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iamlindoro

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Re: Mustachians Interested in Retiring Abroad (or Slow Travel)
« Reply #176 on: October 11, 2016, 05:33:18 PM »
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.

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Re: Mustachians Interested in Retiring Abroad (or Slow Travel)
« Reply #177 on: October 11, 2016, 06:34:07 PM »
How much is expensive?
I am a former teacher who accumulated a bunch of real estate, retired at 29, spent some time traveling the world full time and am now settled with three kids.
If you want to know more about me, this Business Insider profile tells the story pretty well.
I (rarely) blog at AdventuringAlong.com. Check out the Now page to see what I'm up to currently.

iamlindoro

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Re: Mustachians Interested in Retiring Abroad (or Slow Travel)
« Reply #178 on: October 11, 2016, 06:42:00 PM »
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 :)
« Last Edit: October 11, 2016, 06:48:44 PM by iamlindoro »

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Re: Mustachians Interested in Retiring Abroad (or Slow Travel)
« Reply #179 on: October 11, 2016, 09:16:19 PM »
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)?
I am a former teacher who accumulated a bunch of real estate, retired at 29, spent some time traveling the world full time and am now settled with three kids.
If you want to know more about me, this Business Insider profile tells the story pretty well.
I (rarely) blog at AdventuringAlong.com. Check out the Now page to see what I'm up to currently.

iamlindoro

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Re: Mustachians Interested in Retiring Abroad (or Slow Travel)
« Reply #180 on: October 11, 2016, 10:40:56 PM »
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 :)

arebelspy

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Re: Mustachians Interested in Retiring Abroad (or Slow Travel)
« Reply #181 on: October 12, 2016, 12:02:37 AM »
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.    :)
I am a former teacher who accumulated a bunch of real estate, retired at 29, spent some time traveling the world full time and am now settled with three kids.
If you want to know more about me, this Business Insider profile tells the story pretty well.
I (rarely) blog at AdventuringAlong.com. Check out the Now page to see what I'm up to currently.

hoping2retire35

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Re: Mustachians Interested in Retiring Abroad (or Slow Travel)
« Reply #182 on: October 12, 2016, 08:16:37 AM »
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?
« Last Edit: October 12, 2016, 08:29:52 AM by hoping2retire35 »

Paul der Krake

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Re: Mustachians Interested in Retiring Abroad (or Slow Travel)
« Reply #183 on: October 12, 2016, 08:26:59 AM »
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?

hoping2retire35

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Re: Mustachians Interested in Retiring Abroad (or Slow Travel)
« Reply #184 on: October 12, 2016, 08:32:35 AM »
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.

iamlindoro

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Re: Mustachians Interested in Retiring Abroad (or Slow Travel)
« Reply #185 on: October 12, 2016, 09:20:51 AM »
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 :)

arebelspy

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Re: Mustachians Interested in Retiring Abroad (or Slow Travel)
« Reply #186 on: October 12, 2016, 06:03:24 PM »
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!  :)
I am a former teacher who accumulated a bunch of real estate, retired at 29, spent some time traveling the world full time and am now settled with three kids.
If you want to know more about me, this Business Insider profile tells the story pretty well.
I (rarely) blog at AdventuringAlong.com. Check out the Now page to see what I'm up to currently.

rocketpj

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Re: Mustachians Interested in Retiring Abroad (or Slow Travel)
« Reply #187 on: October 12, 2016, 07:06:20 PM »
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)?


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Re: Mustachians Interested in Retiring Abroad (or Slow Travel)
« Reply #188 on: October 13, 2016, 12:59:28 AM »
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.

rocketpj

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Re: Mustachians Interested in Retiring Abroad (or Slow Travel)
« Reply #189 on: October 13, 2016, 01:18:57 AM »
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.

iamlindoro

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Re: Mustachians Interested in Retiring Abroad (or Slow Travel)
« Reply #190 on: October 13, 2016, 07:22:53 AM »
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!

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Re: Mustachians Interested in Retiring Abroad (or Slow Travel)
« Reply #191 on: October 16, 2016, 12:33:27 AM »
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!

Poeirenta

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Re: Mustachians Interested in Retiring Abroad (or Slow Travel)
« Reply #192 on: October 16, 2016, 09:54:10 AM »
I'm surprised I'm not finding any results for Belize...any particular reason?

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Re: Mustachians Interested in Retiring Abroad (or Slow Travel)
« Reply #193 on: October 16, 2016, 10:15:01 AM »
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.

Poeirenta

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Re: Mustachians Interested in Retiring Abroad (or Slow Travel)
« Reply #194 on: October 16, 2016, 12:21:46 PM »
Darn, I wish I did know someone in Belize...I suppose I could put a request for data on the Belize Forums.

iamlindoro

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Re: Mustachians Interested in Retiring Abroad (or Slow Travel)
« Reply #195 on: October 16, 2016, 01:02:12 PM »
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.

Poeirenta

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Re: Mustachians Interested in Retiring Abroad (or Slow Travel)
« Reply #196 on: October 16, 2016, 01:34:22 PM »
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?

iamlindoro

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Re: Mustachians Interested in Retiring Abroad (or Slow Travel)
« Reply #197 on: October 16, 2016, 01:39:13 PM »
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!

MarciaB

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Re: Mustachians Interested in Retiring Abroad (or Slow Travel)
« Reply #198 on: October 16, 2016, 02:22:31 PM »
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?

iamlindoro

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Re: Mustachians Interested in Retiring Abroad (or Slow Travel)
« Reply #199 on: October 16, 2016, 03:28:33 PM »
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.