How to decide where to live

I am retired, but since I also maintain a YT channel, I could also call myself a digital nomad. Since Covid, the world was forced to embrace remote work, and for many, it was shown to be a more efficient way to run a company (no commercial office space, lower overhead costs, etc), so there are now many fully remote startups out there (some run by my friends). For the growing population of folks in this category, I want to outline the logical steps I take to decide where to call home.

• Currency Exchange Rate

You want to go where your currency goes the furthest. This is one of the main reasons why I chose to visit Japan as the first leg of my life abroad. However, at any given time, you can easily look up a list of exchange rates and find where the currency you’re paid in will give you the most value. In the past, I would actively monitor these rates and decide on where to go for a vacation abroad based on it. While it may sound predatory, I visited Argentina shortly after a major currency crisis and everything was literally half off. I ate at the finest restaurants in Buenos Aires for under $100. The food tasted so much better knowing it was half off.

• Flight costs

This is a minor point, but flight prices can be seasonal or differ dramatically from a year ago. If there’s a really good flight deal, or flights to a certain country are grossly overpriced, it may move the needle on whether I decide to visit there. Not to say I won’t ever visit there, but I may change the order of my travels where I visit a nearby country first if it has cheaper flights.

• Choosing tier 2 cities

It is my belief that tier 2 cities provide the most bang for the buck. If you aren’t a billionaire, your quality of life will depend heavily on your budget constraints. When I first moved to Chicago for my career, I didn’t like that their main improv comedy troupe was called Second City (the nick name Chicago was given since NYC was First City). My first few years, I was thinking about how I could potentially move back to NYC within the same trading firm and work for their smaller NYC office. Over time, I actually realized that I prefer Chicago over NYC. I’d visit my friends in NYC and their apartments were so much smaller but more expensive, their restaurants were so crowded and you’d be seated right next to strangers and have little elbow room. Ubers and other costs were way higher, and because NYC understood how badly people want to live there, they have a city wage tax of close to 4% for my income bracket. That’s $4k on every $100k of my income that I’d have to give to NYC just to say I live there. Not to mention other factors like how much more competitive the dating market is when you’re in an international city that’s a playground for the ultra wealthy around the world, and competing with nepo babies and actual celebrities like Aziz Ansari and James Franco who were both known to be swiping on Tinder and sniping off fans. I have found that the very best of something is often overpriced, and the very worse of something is often underpriced in the same way that financial markets overshoot during euphoric FOMO bubbles and undershoot during panics. So in my opinion the sweet spot in any country is the solid tier 2 city. Of course, swing through the tier 1 city and check that box first.

• Dating Market

If you are single, this is a crucial one. Most people don’t realize that the culture of a city is often downstream to raw statistics. For example, the women in Rio and São Paulo Brazil are known to actually hit on men at bars and make the first move while the women in San Francisco are known to be flaky and stuck up. This is mostly about supply and demand. In those Brazilian cities, there are 90 men for every 100 women, so women need to be aggressive if they want to secure a good man. They will also be more compliant and cater to men. In the Bay Area, there are more men than women, so it works the other way around where mid women are stuck up and flaky, and if you don’t tolerate their bad behavior, the guy standing right behind you will.

• Racial considerations

If you are Asian, you will be treated with more respect in Asia. You want to go where you’re treated best. Since the Europeans were first to industrialize and they dominated the last few centuries, they will generally get respect anywhere. If you’re of African descent, you may want to choose Latin America where there’s a mix of African blood within many countries, and the people are familiar with your look. The more important point being, you want to find out where your race is heavily looked down upon, and avoid those countries. I remember the very last time I chose to go to a club in Chicago was on a very cold night where me and a few Indian friends were waiting in a line outside of a major club and the door man was literally pointing at groups behind us and letting them in while we stood there freezing for hours. I eventually just gave up and went home, but asked some friends who work in the club industry about it, and they openly told me that a lot of the club owners outright tell their bouncer to not let Asian men into the club if it’s getting close to maximum capacity. This is a real thing. I’m not a progressive that sees racism everywhere. I’m now in Japan, and experiencing the exact opposite. There are Japanese-only izakaya that I get invited to, and clubs where the bouncers are openly told not to let foreigners (gaijin) in. There are these secret blowjob spots in plain sight all over the city where if you get off the elevator at the right stop, you chat with a dude and pay him about $30 and they walk you to this area with pillows where you get bareback head from random girls in 10min rotations. They only let Japanese men in and it’s full of salarymen getting dome 5ft apart from each other. The Japanese not only bathe together they get dome together.

• Everything else

Safety, weather, cuisine, pollution, visa, language (do they speak your language or is it worth learning their language if it’s not commonly spoken in the world?) along with the other more common factors are lumped together in this bullet point. These are things that most people already know, so I chose not to put emphasis on it.