U$ 30,000 is doable, but not millionaire-ish. You could live quite comfortably and with housemaids and eating out often, but forget about a (good) car or high-end electronic toys (unless you bring them with you from abroad).

There are some nice places to retire, but I'm not sure if you wouldn't find it boring quite quickly.

Oh, and government loves to swamp you with taxes.

(*) that's after taxes, my pre-tax earnings are about U$ 24,000

I've heard lots of good stuff about it but never from someone that actually lived there.

Most curious!

The grass is always greener on the other side, but I'll try to be less biased:

- It's reasonably safe and orderly by South American standards (1)

- Some things are much cheaper, like anything labor-related (like housemaids) (2), or meat (we're the biggest per capita meat consumers in the world, as there are 5 cows per inhabitant)

- Healthcare is in a socialist style (actually Mutualism) (3), and while it's always "on the brink of collapse", it works,

- People are reasonably educated, you'll find enough English-speakers if you come here :) , quite an important "hacker"/IT population (small in numbers, but big relative to the overall 3.000.000 inhabitants).

- OTOH, there's a big marginalized community (similar to the "favelas" in Brazil) that make about 10% of the population, but are the fastest-growing segment. So far, the most striking for an American will be seeing horse-drawn carriages full of litter, with poor children darting to collect the garbage bags of the middle class (needless to say, avoid them or they will relieve them of your wallet or cell phone as well), and beggars at quite a few street lights, or begging on the buses.

- There's a mix of almost-cutting edge (countrywide 3G cell phone and internet access) with old-tech (all the paper-based bureaucracy for example)

- Climate is quite moderate, although it's humid - some people, especially from middle Europe or Canada, think they won't experience the cold or heat. They're wrong. Humid cold and heat are way worse than their dry equivalents. Also, housing is not built to minimize the weather (no double or triple pane windows, bad insulation, bad or no heating in most houses)

There are nice vacation spots if you like beaches, though the water is colder and less clear than in Brazil and way less so than in the Caribbean :) (sand is among the best in the world, though)

- Several first world niceties like modern cars or electronics are out of reach for the masses, because the government likes to tax them out of reach. For smaller electronics, it's cheaper to fly to the US and smuggle them back than to buy them in a store. For larger stuff (say, a LCD TV) you're out of luck. Also, several easy credit options available in the US are not available here.

- Housing in the nicer parts of Montevideo is expensive (on par with some of the not-as-nice parts of American or Canadian cities), as the housing bubble hasn't exploded yet, and credit is not as easily available.

(1) it reminds me of a National Geographic story about the Baltic countries. If you arrived at them from Russia, they seem 1st world and orderly. But if you came to them from Europe, they seem disorderly and third-worldish :P

(2) there are several legal pitfalls, as there are quite cumbersome legal regulations. Most people live in a "grey" economy, complying with most regulations but underreporting or not complying with others (it's quite usual to underreport salaries to the tax collectors)

(3) The best explanation I could come up with after some Googling is: http://www.hmg.gov.uk/media/60217/mutuals.pdf "Mutual organisations do not have external shareholders - they are controlled by their members. Members may be users of the mutual, employees, other stakeholders or a combination of these Mutual organisations are either owned by and run in the interests of existing members, as is the case in building societies, cooperatives and friendly societies, or, as in many public services, owned on behalf of the wider community and run in the interests of the wider community"

Thanks for writing that very detailed response, there is lots of concrete information in there.

I've visited Latin America several times, Bogota, Colombia and Coronado, Panama but never got around to visiting Uruguay. I hear lots of good stuff about Costa Rica as well.

- 17.5% is withdrawn for retirements savings/pension funds

- the first 600 dollars are untaxed, then bracketed 10%, 15%, 20% and 22%. I pay up to 22% tax bracket, 25% on the extra holidays check. (in all, it's about 12% of my pre-deductions income except in Christmas where it shoots up to 20% or so)(1)

- 6% goes to healthcare (it's mandatory), I pay an extra 6% on top of that but that was entirely my option (for better healthcare).

- some miscellaneous taxes (a reconversion fund for workers and others)

Well that makes out like 40%, not 50%, but you get the idea :)

After that, we have a 22% Value Added Tax on everything, and a minimum of 60% taxes on imports, but those are "optional" (optional, that is, if you don't eat or buy anything - and it's regressive taxation)

(1)Some companies cheat the DGI (IRS equivalent) by under-reporting employee's salaries (typically so they fall in a lower income bracket, or untaxed income bracket), and then pay a slightly higher than average market salary overall. Of course, that means you can't go to the government and complain if they fail to pay you, and it goes back to bite you when you retire (retirement plans are tied to how much you were paid when working).

In my opinion, with a 25,000$ salary here, you can live more comfortably than you can in the US on a 50,000+$ salary. For instance, at 500$/month, you can get a spacious 2br apartment that comes with a nice inner courtyard, tennis courts and a swimming pool. You can go to nice restaurants for under 6$ and take the taxi for ridiculously cheap (less than 5$ for a 15 minutes ride).

And don't worry about getting bored. There are tons of bars, amusement parks, movie theaters, not to mention that most commerces close very late (11pm+). And if you're not into Asian girls, a lot of female foreigners are models from Russia/Eastern Europe that haven't seen westerners in a long time. :)

I heard that this is the case in China nowadays too. Boozing and going out to bars in China is dollar-by-dollar as expensive as the States. Real estate is sky-rocketing.

I looked into moving to China as well, your salary range looks comparable to the numbers I was told. But I'm not sure it 25K is even sustainable in Shenzhen. Perhaps cost of living there is lower than Shanghai, but my guess is that it's not that much lower as it's located in the Pearl River Delta.

Whereas Costa Rica lets you stay for 3 months before you need to cross the border to extend your visitor visa. And apparently obtaining a permanent residency isn't difficult if you can prove income from foreign sources.

Costa Rica sounds like a good destination - I may check that out one day.

"The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things"

http://www.amazon.com/Culture-Fear-Americans-Afraid-Things/d...

    s/a nice Latin American country/Japan/;
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      print "yes";
    }
    # http://www.bingocardcreator.com/expenses/profitability-pie-chart

Obviously it varies from area to area, but 35% of households in the US make under 30,000 a year. And that's not all just twenty-two year-olds fresh out of school.

The thing is, whenever this comes up on a tech site, software engineers don't realize how much money they really do make. If you look at the median household income anywhere, it's shockingly low. ( $38,000 in NYC? $60,000 in San Fran proper? )

I guarantee that if most people here looked at the median income in their region, their jaws would drop at the thought of families getting by on that. But somehow they are.

(Not that this has anything to do with FU money. It's just a pet peeve of mine whenever 'money needed to live' comes up in a group of highly-skilled highly-paid people, and they don't realize how good they have it.)

> I think I could get by on $30,000 a year

Also, most people couldn't survive? Seriously? I live on two thirds of this, and I'm putting money in the bank every month.

It is worse if you have a family, but then you have two incomes to play with.

Unless of course you have one or more young children in the house, in which case a good bit of time that you could spend on work goes towards taking care of the kids. Effectively that works out to about one full timer.

But, at the risk of sounding callous... that's what happens when you make those choices.

- 3 room house on nice neighborhood $150,000 USD

- A 2010 Toyota corolla. $15,000 USD.

- A maid visiting twice a week. $1,700 USD a year. (This is really nice!)

- Private school for kids $3,000 USD a year for each kid.

- Dinner for two twice a week. $3,100 USD a year.

Edit:fixed number formatting

(I live in Montevideo, Uruguay which is quite close to Buenos Aires)

But I see it much like I expect Canadians see the US: something like my home city (Montevideo), with both the good and (especially) the bad things magnified.

There are beautiful parts of Buenos Aires (I recommend Recoleta and Palermo), and lively parts of Buenos Aires (not my speciality :) ), and they're both nice.