You don’t necessarily need more money. You may just need a different address.
Self-congratulations are in order: I moved from a country ranked 5th to one ranked 64th!
I’m not talking about rankings of “freedom,” safety, or any of the other metrics often bandied about. I’m talking about how much money one needs to survive retirement.
I recently saw a graphic from Visual Capitalist outlining cost of living figures sourced from Numbeo, ranking the “cost to retire” in 91 countries. (Singapore is the most expensive; Pakistan is the cheapest.) The methodology puts a dollar figure on the total amount of money you’re likely to need to pay for a comfortable retirement.
The United States, which I left permanently some years back, ranks number five. South Africa, where I live today, is 64th. In other words, for $313,000, over the course of my retirement, I can live as well as a retirement that would have cost $740,000 in the US… a 58% cost saving.
To put that into perspective, only a little over 6% of US households—one in 16—have $750,000 available to fund their retirement. For those over 55, the figure is a little better: a little over 18% of such households can afford a US retirement. Everyone else is looking at dramatically reduced circumstances in retirement.
I could go on and on about why the US is so expensive. But I’d rather focus on the opportunities to reduce those costs by living abroad, using myself as an example. Since I moved from Atlanta in 2022, let’s compare it to where I live now, in Cape Town.
| Item | Cape Town Discount |
| Overall | -45% |
| Groceries | -54% |
| Dining Out | -56% |
| Utilities | -36% |
| Mobile Phone Plan | -55% |
| Broadband Internet | -53% |
| Housing per square metre | -38% |
Those numbers explain why my wife and I decided to return to South Africa permanently. Our retirement savings will go much, much further here.
But what about quality of life? According to Numbeo, healthcare, climate, and pollution are all better in Cape Town than in Atlanta. Georgia’s capital edges out Cape Town for safety, but not by much. On traffic commutes—a big issue in both cities—the two are about the same.
Broadening the comparison, the figures show that overall quality of life in South Africa is higher than in places like Singapore, Uruguay, Greece, Malaysia, Malta, Ecuador, Costa Rica, Mexico, and Panama. And yet the cost of living is less than all of them.
My point isn’t to sell South Africa. It’s to use myself as an illustration of how global mobility can dramatically improve your enjoyment of life’s later years.
The fact that I had acquired a South African passport meant that I had the option of taking advantage of a lower cost of living in a nation with a generally higher quality of life. But anyone who can show retirement income of at least $3,500 can apply to live here as a retiree. Every one of those dollars will go much further here than in the US.
The same is true of many countries we cover here at International Living. Compared to $740,000 in the United States, retirement in Mexico will cost you $356,000. Portugal and Spain will run you $478,000. France is right behind them at $496,000. Uruguay will cost you $451,000.
Retirement is a big-ticket purchase. But once you broaden your market horizons to the rest of the countries in the world, you can easily achieve massive savings… and a much more comfortable and quality life to boot.
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