According to CNN Money, USA Today, the Department of Labor and the U.S. Census Bureau, the cost of living in the United States is around $60,000 per year for a family of four with two working adults. However, the median salary for those individuals is actually only around $52,000 per year, or $26,000 per adult, after taxes. Finding a way to retire early when you are spending $8,000 more than what your actual salary covers is an impossibility. Instead, most Americans are living on borrowed money, putting themselves deeper and deeper in debt each year.
Before most people reach thirty years of age they have achieved around $300,000 of debt. $225,000 of that debt is related to the cost of a home, with the average cost of a car running around $30,000 as of 2011. Credit card debt and school loans make up the last chunk of that $300,000, leading to a never-ending cycle of debt to where the average individual will never see an early retirement because they will be working the next 40 or 50 years of their lives to pay off the bank.
This is why more and more people each year are choosing to leave the U.S. behind in favor of modern countries like Chile, Brazil, Bulgaria, Italy, Mexico, Argentina and beyond. There, they can live as expats in countries where the cost of living for a family of four is between $15,000 and $20,000 per year, less than half of what they were paying back home. And because they can retain their salary of $52,000 a year, that family can then put away a minimum of $25,000 per year straight into the savings towards an early retirement.
To put it into perspective, a brand-new house in a modern subdivision in a country such as Bulgaria costs around $50,000. A slightly used home with 10 to 15 years behind it will only cost you around $25,000 in Mexico. In both cases, you are talking about three or four bedroom houses that are $200,000 less in terms of cost would you compare them to the United States. This is more proof of the expat lifestyle and an early retirement through expat living.
It is easy to see the reality of the expat lifestyle when you start putting away $30,000 a year in your bank account on an average, middle-of-the-road income. The more you make, the more you save, but it’s entirely feasible to put the money away and just a couple of years to pay for your retirement, long before your peers who will be putting away 40 years of their life on the chopping block of wage slavery.
An early retirement is only one of dozens of little things you can begin appreciating while living the expat lifestyle in other countries around the world.