Marrying My Wife Was #1 But You Get The Point
Over a year ago my wife and I had just enrolled our daughter into a day care and were finally “adulting” now that we had a car, a house, insurance, a dog and a beautiful baby girl.
We were living the American dream by the book. Is THIS what happiness was supposed to be like? I felt happiness and loved my family so much but my wife and I were simply treading water with our lifestyle.
I couldn’t help but feel like there was something more to life than having a nice car nice house and all of our basic needs met.
Don’t get me wrong, we were fairly frugal people who saved over 30% of our income every month to invest, we decided to house hack which involves lowering your mortgage payment by renting out a portion of your house to increase the total savings that you have.
We were by no means extravagant in our spending and burning all the money that came in every month.
We were diligent and disciplined in our money habits. So why did we feel like no matter how much money we earned, it felt like we were taking one step forward and two steps back?
After all, I couldn’t help but read articles all the time about people who aren’t able to retire early by putting away over 70% of their income or more because they have incredible jobs and virtually no expenses.
How could that even be possible without working in corporate for 15 plus years and selling my soul for a paycheck?
Is Cutting Coffee The Way To Financial Freedom?
You constantly read articles online about how someone recommends the best way to become a millionaire is to stop drinking $3 coffees and rather invest that into the market for the next 20 years.
Why stop there?
Why not keep using the same underwear for the next 20 years rips and stains included in order to save that $10 and invest that into the stock market as well?
Matter of fact, sell your house, live in a cardboard box, Walk to work, and save every possible dollar that you can and will ever make for the next 20 years to invest it. Surely that will help speed the process along of financial freedom.
You see how ridiculous that sounds for starters? Rather than penny pinching and trying to find small sub $5 purchases to save money on, why not try to just 2X your income while keeping the same expense level that you already have?
That’ll do a lot more for your financial freedom than cutting out your favorite drink will ever do. Plus everyone should be spending money on things they enjoy and brings them happiness, not cutting it out entirely.
The goal is to live a good life on your terms, not to make yourself miserable along the way by trying to save every single dollar.
99% of your journey will be consisting of these small micro decisions that you make.
I guarantee you, the moment that you actually hit the income goal or that invested amount balance, you’re not automatically going to feel a 100 times happier.
That feeling will inevitably fade.
You’ll be left with is that feeling of regret that you cut out all of life’s pleasures along the past 10 plus years.
Ramit Sethi does an amazing job of describing this in his book, I Will Teach You To Be Rich When he mentions, “Spend extravagantly on things you love, and cut costs mercilessly on things you don’t.”
Savings Rate of 90%?
Your savings rate is simply how much money you have at the end of all your expenses every month. So if you spend $500 and you earn $5,000 a month, your savings rate is 90%
Participating in a game of endless hustling just to finally be able to breathe a little financially seemed odd. In the Financial Independence Retire Early Community (FIRE for short) The common advice is to put away 25X your yearly expenses into an index fund in order to fund your lifestyle.
For Example, If you average $50,000 a year, you will need $1.25 million invested in order to pay for the lifestyle you have.
Which for most people is a few trips to a restaurant a month, affordable healthcare, A few trips to the movie theater, groceries, house payments if you still have them, expenses for your kids , and any other miscellaneous costs like gas and unexpected expenses.
This amount of saving and working just didn’t seem like the life for me and my family.
What Is Geoarbitrage?
It wasn’t until I read a book by Tim Ferriss named the 4 Hour Workweek that I was introduced to an idea called GeoArbitrage. Simply put, you earn US dollars and live in a country that allows you to save more of your income.
That sounded intriguing but surely it’s a massive overtaking to create that kind of lifestyle.
Let’s run the numbers then, is your time and life worth more than a few months of planning to move to a country where you might be able to get back 20 years of your life or more?
For many people they are trapped in the rat race constantly running in circles in hopes of a better life someday 20 years down the road.
Why not build that life now?
Life is way too short to put something off for 15 years or more in order to move somewhere and have the same, if not a better quality of life than the income equivalent of the next 15 years of savings.
That’s also not to mention that your body will break down over time and you might not even be able to enjoy the same luxuries in 15 plus years from now.
The cost for many is way too high to put something like geoarbitrage off.
As someone who is currently living that lifestyle, it is 1000% worth it to wake up every day and not be up to my eyeballs in stress about are we going to be able to afford our mortgage payment this month.
With a daughter and another child on the way, that is a risk I did not want to take because life only gets more expensive with more kids.
With my wife and I living in America, our average expenses ranged between $3,000-$5,000 dollars a month covering day care, groceries, insurance, mortgage payments, travel expenses, and miscellaneous items.
Now that we live abroad our expenses are maxed out at $1000 a MONTH.
Realistically, we could get by comfortably with $500 a month but we like to eat at restaurants every now and then.
The change of geo arbitrage was immediate because we went from our mortgage payment in day care costs combined exceeding $4000 monthly to now us having a completely paid off house and day care costs never go above $50 a month.
We are putting $4000 in our pocket minimum every single month by living outside of the United States.
This is not a lifestyle for everyone of course but for all the reasons that it was important for my wife and I, we made the trip and it has paid extreme dividends.
So I encourage those out there that feel like there’s more to life than working behind a desk to challenge themselves to try living abroad for at least three months.
You can partake in many retirements where you take extended vacations in countries Where you almost max out your visa stay limit and then come back to the states.
The elephant in the room is that geo-arbitrage is a lot easier with a remote job. Sure you can work some small end jobs in most countries you visit. But for many and myself included, remote work is the most seamless way to lean into geoarbitrage.
So for most people finding a remote job can have its challenges but it is one of the greatest options you can give yourself to be able to continue working for your company while getting paid abroad.
Why Sacrifice Your mental health and your youth?
Too many people now are struggling beyond belief financially. Housing prices are at an all time high. It’s not getting any cheaper to live. It’s safe to say the economy is in a terrible position.
Life is only getting more expensive while wages are stagnating and potentially even going down year over year.
If the companies you work for aren’t willing to make a change beyond a 2% annual raise, why should you sit around and wait for the clouds to clear in some magical moment to happen in order for you to start getting paid fairly?
Doesn’t it sound better to make the same if not even a little bit less money but be able to save 2x what you can save now? Instead of you saving 10% of your money, wouldn’t it be swell to save 40%? What would that DO for you?
Start living life now
There’s a common story among the financial independence community about the dedicated hard workers who never take a day off, always work harder than everyone else in the room and save all their vacation days.
Eventually, when it comes time to start considering taking some days off they pass away.
Of these people spent decades of their precious lives working for a company who likely didn’t value them very much and in many cases, upper management likely didn’t even know their name.
How sad is it that people can dedicate themselves to a job for so long in order for them to only get a pizza party for their retirement?
No doubt most employees have either brought in or saved the company hundreds of thousands of dollars during their time of employment. And these companies simply turn around and give you a pat on the back and say “great job bucko.” “It was great working with you” As they go into the neighboring room already interviewing their replacement.
I truly think one of the biggest mistakes anyone can ever make in life is to continue pushing off living the life you want in order to “save more money quote” The only thing in life that you cannot get back is time. You can always make more money, you can always get another job, and you can always go on another vacation.
That begs the question, what’s been holding you back to taking that trip you’ve always wanted? If it’s important enough, you’ll find a way, if not, you’ll find an excuse.
Experiences are greater than saving money
You can have your cake and eat it too. By living in a lower cost of living country and saving $1,000 for example, you could put $500 away for savings while budgeting out $500 per month for 6 months. Now you’re saving money, creating more memorable experiences, and living a higher quality of life as a result!
Stop Thriving, Start Surviving
What If I told you, you didn’t have to work 3 jobs or 80 hour weeks to put your kids through school?
What if there was a way to comfortably live life on YOUR terms, not your boss? Imagine the day you can make work optional. What would that DO for you?
My wife Polina and I went on a 2 week vacation over a year ago to Ecuador. Despite everyone’s concerns about how dangerous and scary it was, we went regardless.
After arriving there, we were blown away with the beauty and accessibility to the nature around us. Simply going from the Airport and getting a Taxi to our Airbnb, we spent $1.25 for a 15 minute ride.
That’s the moment I knew what people were talking about when they mentioned Geoarbitrage. During those 2 weeks, we ate out at least once, if not twice (or even three times) a day. It was fantastic, we bought what we wanted, went wherever we wanted, had no restrictions.
We got private in home massages, ate out at multiple farm to table gastronomic restaurants, went on a private tour in the Andes mountains with our daughter
We also stayed at an Airbnb right in the heart of downtown. There were zero limits on this vacation.
The best part, our total bill for the 2 weeks… $950.
You can absolutely live like royalty in other countries for a fraction of what you are now.
The funniest part is that you would save and even pay yourself by traveling to multiple countries.
There are countless experiences of people who travel the world for less than what it costs to be stagnant in their home country.
Where would you go, what would be the first thing you would do?
Geoarbitrage has changed millions of peoples lives around the world. In this economy, there’s only a few ways to really get ahead in life. You start a successfull business (10% success rate)
Get a large inheritance (less than 5% chance) Work in upper management (goodbye 10+ years of life) or you can live on an average American salary in another country.
To me, the option is simple.
For others, it’s not so easy. I’m simply saying, if you want to win the game, you have to change the rules. Just playing the cards you’re dealt and accepting your circumstances doesn’t make sense.
Why not decide to change the direction of your life? Don’t you want what’s best for you and your family? Life outside the US isn’t as scary as people make it out to be.
There’s so many topics I would love to cover but that will conclude this brief introduction on living abroad and being a digital nomad. It has absolutely changed my life and I’m happy to answer questions that you have. God Bless and stay tuned!
