The “Retire Anywhere” Series

You need exactly $100 million to retire. Seriously. Any less and you’d be eating ramen until you fall over. At least this is what most people have told me. Okay maybe they didn’t explicitly state $100 million but they definitely used the m-word. Being an engineer, this way of thinking rubbed me the wrong way, surely retirement could be something more flexible, more achievable and less dystopic than a climb to millions of dollars? Well, that’s the main objective of this series and this blog in general – to outline what retirement would look like in many countries all over the world and hopefully inspire you (the reader).

To be painfully redundant, the less money you spend in retirement the further your retirement goes. While this reasoning is obvious, it does lead to a rather important question: what does less money actually mean? To answer this question, I managed to rank the average living expenses of over 140 countries as summarised in the table and infographic below. While the summary includes the average cost of living, I have estimated lower and upper estimates of the cost of living which is included in the URL column.

Overall, the most cost-effective destinations are India, Pakistan and Algeria. The South American continent seems to host a few attractive retirement destinations as well.