Cheap Traveling Bastard

May 19, 2010 7:05 PM

I've thought about taking an extended break. How long could $75,000 in savings potentially last me?

I would like to experience the world before I get too old and tied down to myriad obligations. Where could I live a decent life very cheaply? I'm not really picky - it would be nice to not have to cook for myself too often, and reasonable internet access and water would be a definite plus, but otherwise I think I could manage fairly well. I would be willing to learn another language, but I currently only speak English and a couple Germanic languages. My goal would be to see my savings last (at the very least) three years.

Assuming that I take on no work, how long could I make $75,000 last, and where would it go the farthest? Personal anecdotes are welcome, too - if you've done something similar to what I'm thinking about, I'd love to hear about it.

Thanks!

posted by Despondent_Monkey to Work & Money (19 answers total)

Potentially? The rest of your days. Public libraries have free internet, soup kitchens have free food, homeless shelters have free beds. The practicality of this plan depends, of course, on your definition of 'a decent life,' but, basically, the lower your standard of decency, the longer you can last on a given amount of money.
posted by box at 7:09 PM on May 19, 2010

When I was in law school in DC, I lived on between $25,000-$30,000 a year. So, that cash could last you two or three years in DC, I suppose. Note, though, that I lived in a shared house - getting your own place would burn through money a lot faster.
posted by Mr. Excellent at 7:11 PM on May 19, 2010

If you're willing to relocate, like really relocate, you can live like an absolute king on seventy-five large for decades. Like, $400 a month in Madagascar will get you your own house, complete with about three more-or-less full-time staff: cook, maid, and security guard.

You could do that for about fifteen years on that kind of money.
posted by valkyryn at 7:12 PM on May 19, 2010 [3 favorites]

As a point of reference, I've lived in NYC on about $15-20,000/year for a few years now. Three years will be a cakewalk if you know how to budget.
posted by griphus at 7:20 PM on May 19, 2010

if you are up for it and mechanically competent you might get a used class b rv (the best would be a conversion van with a stove, bed and potty). You can park and camp in any national forest for 2 weeks, pack up move down the road a ways (new ranger district) and set up for 2 more weeks. I think you can also do it on BLM land, but this usually isn't as nice of country. YOu can stay in campgrounds on occasionally the wal mart parking lot.

I say mechanically competent because RVs are notorious for being unreliable and they are the way most people use them which is total neglect than expect them to go on a 1000 mile trip. You need to be able to perform basic maintenance yourself and make sure you buy a good one to begin with.

The vans are small enough to not be to heavy for the chassis (another source of unreliability), and used ones are usually available in good shape for less than 20k. Newer ones get 10-20 mpg and are not bad to drive at all. With this you are restricted to the north american continent, and maybe just the USA, but either way its a big country with lots to see and people to meet.

If this sounds appealing there are a lot of rv blogs out there and quite a few books on it. I think the novel blue highways is pretty much all about this as a lifestyle choice.
posted by bartonlong at 7:20 PM on May 19, 2010 [1 favorite]

If I was in your situation I would go to eastern Europe (probably Krakow) or Morocco.
posted by nestor_makhno at 7:26 PM on May 19, 2010

Response by poster: You could do that for about fifteen years on that kind of money.

Thanks for the response, valkryyn and others. I would definitely be willing to relocate for a "semi-retirement" sort of lifestyle.

I probably should have phrased the question a little better - I'm actually thinking more long term, like a decade or so. The three years figure was the absolute minimum that I could tolerate the depletion of my savings.

If I wanted to, is there anywhere I could live in a decent way for two or three decades on that sum? It's hard to define exactly what this means, but I'm thinking water, electricity, internet access (although internet cafes would work), food, and movies / sporting events on occasion.
posted by Despondent_Monkey at 7:26 PM on May 19, 2010

Then you're definitely looking at either Sub-Saharan Africa or South America. South America is closer to the States, but Africa is 1) likely to be cheaper, and 2) more likely to have a lot of English speakers.
posted by valkyryn at 7:34 PM on May 19, 2010

Philippines (they speak English), Honduras (somewhat dangerous), Mexico (ditto), Guatemala (ditto), Thailand (beautiful but not so great politically speaking), Indonesia (ditto)...there are many countries where the cost of living is much lower than in the US and you can easily live on less than $1000 per month.
posted by MsKim at 8:01 PM on May 19, 2010

In Uganda, English is the national language due to its status as a former British colony.

This makes it one of the easiest places in sub-Saharan Africa for foreigners to get by. You can easily get a place with running water and electricity in a population center, you'd just have to treat or boil the water before drinking it. I rent a fairly nice building in Uganda in one of the smaller cities, large enough to sleep about 4-6 people, with flush toilets/running water and electricity, for $450 a month. Eating out at a fancy restaurant costs about $5 for a meal. But I suggest experiencing Africa for a short time first to see if it's a place you would like to live. There are various idiosyncrasies that could make it difficult for some types of people, but I have to say, it's an amazing place with people who are some of the warmest and friendliest you will ever meet.

The only point I would add is that if you are going to a place with this level of poverty with that kind of money, you will have to be used to being looked at as very wealthy and having people beg you for money, food, tuition, etc. For me, it would be very difficult to live under these circumstances, watching the poverty around me. But perhaps you could volunteer to ease that stress.
posted by treehorn+bunny at 8:08 PM on May 19, 2010 [1 favorite]

If you invested 75k at 4 percent, that would be 3k a year, or 250 a month. When I was in grad school I had roommates and a cheap apartment to the tune of 240 dollars a month. Obviously 10 bucks a month doesn't cover anything near your expenses in food and utilities. But this does suggest a few things:

* With the right floor plan, location and tenants, you could potentially buy a house and get the roommates to cover your recurring expenses.
* Or you can just rent and eat into the nest egg a bit each month. Or save up just a bit more for a while longer.

The advantage of Manhattan KS over international destinations is simple: rule of law, liberal alcohol laws, a continual supply of new student tenants, public events on campus (past guest lectures include Gorbachev, Clinton, President Bush and Dick Cheney) and a distinct lack of parasites. The downsides are that I'd hardly call it "experiencing the world". But really, any kind of globe trotting is going to be expensive. Air fare, currency conversions, unpredictable contingencies, etc.
posted by pwnguin at 8:40 PM on May 19, 2010

Of the South American countries I visited on my mini-version of this (10 weeks only), Bolivia was both the cheapest and friendliest. Felt much safer than Peru, cheaper and with a much easier accent to understand than Chile/Argentina. Spanish isn't that hard to learn either. Only problem is, it's not necessarily wise to trust the tap water. Not that a filter / bottled water is that hard to deal with...

The only place I paid more than $10/night for a clean hotel room with private bath was on the Isla del Sol itself. I assume you'd be able to get even better rates if you were renting long-term. Internet cafes are ubiquitous.

Wherever you go, keep abreast of the political situation. The travel.state.gov site is a good starting point, as is local media and just chatting with the locals.

As others have pointed out, you'll get much better advice if you tell us what you want to do other than live cheaply. I find it hard to imagine that somebody want's to just kick back and do absolutely nothing. Also, in my mind, "experience the world" is a very different desire than "live cheaply for a decade or more".
*Are you trying to avoid all types of work, or are you open to something like WWOOF, where you trade a few hours of manual labor a day for food/shelter?
* Are you planning to just plop down in some random city, isolate yourself, and do something creative?
* Are you wanting to travel around the country and explore? (transport can be pretty expensive ... )
* Do you want somewhere with a good expat community? Are you expecting to be immediately welcomed into some local community (hint ... prolly not realistic)?

Man ... to have $75K and a desire to see the world, plus the ability drop it all and go ... I'm jealous =) In your shoes, I'd prolly fly to Europe with a bike and just go wherever my whims took me, but this doesn't exactly seem to match your question. Funds might not last a decade (I estimate you could afford at least 5 years, and that you'll have found somewhere you want to settle down by the time your legs give out), but how awesome would it be to visit every country in Europe by bike, heading down into Africa or Italy for the winters?
posted by Metasyntactic at 9:02 PM on May 19, 2010 [1 favorite]

If you go outside of the principal Brazilian cities, you can live very cheaply. I rented an apartment in Northeast Brazil that was way too big for the two of us for a year at $100 per month, and high-speed internet was $20 per month. It was supplied by what I imagine to be the world's largest 'local area network', with smurf blue indoor ethernet cable strung across the small city on the telephone poles. You could easily live there for $5000 a year or less.
posted by umbú at 9:35 PM on May 19, 2010

You can also manage to live on that money for a very long time in southeast Asia. The language barrier there is, of course, much greater. I spent three and a half months living in Vietnam, and I can tell you that Vietnamese is a hard language to learn, but I did spend a couple of weeks there living on $5 or less a day, and I loved it. That included a basic hotel room, and restaurant meals for $0.50 to $1 each. (That food budget requires you to speak some Vietnamese and eat in local restaurants instead of touristy places.) You could live for 40 years on that money. Upgrade yourself to $20 a day for a nicer place and travel, and you've still got a solid decade. The language and cultural barriers are sufficient that I suspect this wouldn't be your top choice, and, yeah, the water would not agree with you, but feel free to memail me if you want more info.
posted by mandanza at 11:52 PM on May 19, 2010

You can live a pretty nice life in Costa Rica for $2000/month. Or half that if you don't live in a gringo neighborhood, buy many imported goods, or hire servants.
posted by Jacqueline at 12:56 AM on May 20, 2010

On that amount you could live quite comfortably for a decade in much of Asia, also. You probably do want to take into consideration safety issues when considering living for a decade in Asia, Africa, South America. As someone who has lived in South Asia and the US, I can tell you that when you step out of the developed/Western/North/whatever you want to call it, assumptions about what constitutes a decent standard of living change radically.

There are a LOT of places in the world where that money could easily support you for a decade. Unfortunately, you will have to do the research about which of them have the kinds of at least the things you regard as bare essentials. Consider: health facilities, water, sanitation, power (frequency and length of outages in places ostensibly on a well-established power grid), reliability of internet access, freedom of speech, movement, association, availability of the kind of entertainment you most enjoy, rate of violent crime, legal recourse if you're in a bind, how welcome your particular ethnicity/race/creed might be. Then you might also want to consider climate.

It's hard to tell you what place to look at. But those are some of the factors you should consider. And if thinking about all those things is too daunting, then I wouldn't plan on spending a decade in another country.

That said, I would to be able to do this, and I can think of many places where I could have happily lived on that sum for a decade, my hometown included. :)
posted by bardophile at 2:12 AM on May 20, 2010

You can easily live in parts of Asia for $7,500 a year. Like, most of Asia.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 5:56 AM on May 20, 2010

valkyryn: "Then you're definitely looking at either Sub-Saharan Africa or South America. South America is closer to the States, but Africa is 1) likely to be cheaper, and 2) more likely to have a lot of English speakers."

Or anywhere in India or South East Asia. Once you've got a place sorted, you'll live a very comfortable life for about 15 years on that amount of money if you spend it well.
posted by turkeyphant at 6:32 AM on May 20, 2010

I have an acquaintance who moved to Indonesia, where he supported his wife and two kids, employed a driver and a maid, and lived in a rather posh villa, for $600/mo.
posted by adamrice at 7:59 AM on May 20, 2010