Comment by jasonkester | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jasonkester | Hacker News Reader

Here's the thing though. You're way better off earning your money in a place with a high cost of living.

There are lots of things that cost the same regardless of where you buy them. New cars, flat screen TVs, plane tickets to Thailand (and 6-month winter climbing trips to Thailand), and pretty much everything else besides housing all cost the same everywhere.

With that in mind, your best bet is to find a job in LA/SF/NYC then dig in and find the absolute cheapest way to live while you're there. My personal angle was to take short (3-6 month) contracts in LA and find cheap rooms for rent while there. You can save up a ton of money in a short time, then head back to whatever low cost place you prefer to call home.

So to modify the author's idea, instead of setting up shop in Oz full time, go work in LA for half the year. Using his numbers you'll save the same as you would working an entire year in Australia. Then go back to Australia and spend the other half of the year doing whatever you want.

End result: you spend the same, save the same, and get an extra 6 months off work with which to improve your surfing.

Sorted.

There are lots of things that cost the same regardless of where you buy them. New cars, flat screen TVs

Not really true. You're ignoring local taxes, import tariffs and other markups. I nice car costs at least 3 times as much in Norway as it does in Germany for example. A lot of countries have tariffs on electronics meaning TVs and computers can cost up to twice as much you'd pay in the US.

You're right. I wasn't thinking about crossing borders when I wrote that. Within the US, it's essentially true. Comparing US to Europe or anywhere else and it's all over the map.

I guess that's just another variable to throw in when working on your arbitrage strategy. Personally, I'd opt to take that contract job in Oslo if it were an option. Given how much they charged me for beer when I was there, I can only assume the wages must be nice and high!

Wages in Norway are quite flat compared to the US. The low end wages are much higher and the high wages are lower. If you're making $20-30k in the US you'll earn a lot more in Norway. If you're making around $100k you'll probably make the same. If you're earning over $200K you'll probably make less.

Wages usually depend on supply and demand in the local market, unless your niche is so specialized you personally compete globally (in which case you're probably earning a lot more than $100K). I'm not intimately familiar with Norway, but I'd bet heavily that a $100K job in the Bay Area probably would not translate to a 570K NOK salary. Healthcare, pension and cost of living differences also make it hard to compare.

Depends on your propensity to consume all your in the short term. If you aren't too worried about quality of housing and want to maximise the amount of freedom you can enjoy on holiday then living (relatively) cheaply and working at high rates is a sensible strategy. If you can't live in LA for less than $23000 per annum and prefer to spend your cash on nights out on the town, the lower costs of living in some cities will be more important to you than the wage differential, especially given tax bracket advantages.

There's also the option of working remotely, but then you'd know better than me about that anyway...

You just hit the real way to work it.

I'm bootstrapping at the moment, so every morning I make the arduous telecommute to Southern California and bill out at my SoCal rate. A fella can bank away several years worth of beach runway in a short period that way.

I think that LA/SF/NYC is not the optimum location in you strategy. I remember seeing an analysis somewhere comparing salary/cost of living and size of city in the US (I tried googling the original article but came up empty).

Basically if you start in a little village then move to a small town your salary rises faster than the cost of living and so you end up slightly better off financially. Then if you move to a larger town you're slightly better off again. And so on as you move up in city size.

This relationship holds except for at the very top, where the curve flattens off and drops slightly. You're actually slightly worse off in the banner cities like LA/SF/NYC.

In other words you, as an individual, are paying a premium to live in those places. The sweet spot in the curve financially is the next tier of cities down. I suspect this curve might have some degree of regional variation and might be different in other countries too.

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