You can live a pampered lifestyle that would not be even remotely within reach in the US on the same budget.
https://www.kiplinger.com/tool/real-estate/T010-S003-home-pr...
> For the second year in a row, the world's happiest country is... Finland!
> Finland topped the list of 156 countries, which were ranked in the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network's 2019 World Happiness Report. The report ranks countries on several well-being variables including income, freedom, trust, healthy life expectancy and more.
> Two other Nordic countries came in second and third place, Denmark and Norway, respectively.
From https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/news/2019/03/20/finlan...
Meanwhile, in the tropics:
> On the other hand, South Sudan ranked the least happy on the list.
How many wealthy native born canadians visit sweden? Hardly any. How many wealthy native born swedes visit canada? Hardly any. I bet more swedes visit thailand in one day than they visit canada in a whole year.
Bugs. There is something to be said for a deep winter when opening a window doesn't mean invading in an Attenborough documentary worth of wildlife into your bedroom.
Max out-of-pocket for insurance plans now is very reasonable. If you can afford a $250k house, you can afford the max out-of-pocket cost for many many years.
I'm not old enough to be keeping an eye on the numbers, but it looks like ~$450 / month for hospital (free) + doctor (subsidized) + prescription (pay).
I did some random shopping for a typical family of 5 and found a max rate of ~$1600/mo for insurance premiums. You would only pay this if you were self-employed, part-time employed at a pretty shitty job, or unemployed and run out of the various mechanisms to keep your insurance. After that you have to spend your net worth until you qualify for the insurance benefits for the poor in your state.
In reality, with various employers I have paid between $0 and $200/month for insuring just myself. (I have paid $0, I don't remember the most expensive, but it was <$200 in any case)
Who gets screwed and bankrupt are the lower-middle class who can't manage to get a full time job, especially single parents who get sick. The system is biased towards benefitting married partners with children, only one person needs that full time job to cover everyone. If you are in the middle class or above and do only a small amount of planning, you're fine. If you are below the middle, you generally have to lose everything or go bankrupt before the system will help you – people in that position are often the least equipped to figure out and head through the optimal path for themselves and end up making very bad decisions.
We don't need public healthcare, we need better support which reaches higher up the income scale and better education.
No, health care should be between me and my physician and whatever other experts I decide to consult. The government has no business meddling in it.
Health insurance or health care cost sharing might be things we could arrange cooperatively through government, but it doesn't seem like it's possible to do that without having the government try to meddle in what care people get.
I for one wouldn't like this level of risk with something so vital to my wellbeing. I would rather prefer that the government took this risk on my behalf of me and just charged me a flat rate throughout my life. (Btw this is the case already in almost all developed countries)
In general there are some things where government intervention is needed. Police, Education, Healthcare and Pension as these things cannot have a totally variable cost decided by a free market.
No, it can't, because in a totally free market nobody would have monopoly rights to produce particular drugs or provide particular treatments, so if one provider tried to charge a price nobody who needed the treatment could afford, they would go out of business. If it proved to be impossible for anyone to make the drug or provide the treatment at a price anyone could afford, then that would be a failure of the free market, yes; but it's an extremely unlikely failure mode as compared with the much more common failure modes of government granted monopolies and government determined prices.
That said, in a democratic country if the majority shares your risk preference, then that majority can vote for politicians who will enact it:
> I would rather prefer that the government took this risk on my behalf of me and just charged me a flat rate throughout my life.
And that would be a form of cost sharing, which I mentioned--all taxpayers share the costs of expensive treatments, on the assumption that only a small percentage of them will actually end up having an illness that incurs those costs.
However, that still only protects you on the assumption that in fact only a small percentage of people end up having the costly illnesses. But the illnesses people are generally worried about with respect to high costs--cancer, heart disease, arterial sclerosis leading to a high risk of stroke, liver disease, kidney disease, diabetes--are not that rare. So either we keep paying more and more taxes as a higher and higher percentage of people have the illness, to the point where we are just as badly off as if we each paid our own costs individually, or many people end up not getting the treatments at all because there isn't enough money to go around, so the risk you thought you were offloading to the government is back on you again.
This scheme also ignores the possibility of making the treatments cheaper. But the way to do that is to allow free market competition; we don't have that in the US since prices are not set by supply and demand but by a combination of government agencies and private health insurance companies.
> In general there are some things where government intervention is needed. Police, Education, Healthcare and Pension as these things cannot have a totally variable cost decided by a free market.
This is not the obvious truth you appear to think it is. It is an extremely strong claim which is not at all clearly established by actual historical evidence.
Lets be realistic here. What happens is that most drugs are either actually manufactured overseas or at least can be shipped from overseas for pennies. However due to regulations and lobbying drug companies charge really high prices for the same drugs and they make sure it is illegal to import those drugs. In case the government itself was paying for these drugs it would be much harder for the companies to game the system like this and an individual would be protected from such predatory practices.
> So either we keep paying more and more taxes as a higher and higher percentage of people have the illness, to the point where we are just as badly off as if we each paid our own costs individually,
This is not true if you observe the tax rates in any countries with government funded healthcare. The taxes more or less remain the same but of course there are differences in the healthcare budget.
> This scheme also ignores the possibility of making the treatments cheaper.
Once again the healthcare costs in the US have actually risen quite significantly under the private system.
> This is not the obvious truth you appear to think it is. It is an extremely strong claim which is not at all clearly established by actual historical evidence.
Police and education it already is true even in the US. Even pension has significant regulation. The only reason healthcare is not is aggressive lobbying by private companies.
Why is one large bureaucracy better than the other?
The government is bound by a constitution. Violations of your constitutional rights are remediated on an individual basis through the judicial branch. You may individually hold the entire government responsible for violating your constitutional rights. This happens regularly.
The government is also accountable to you in aggregate through the voting process. Yes you don't get to vote on each individual issue, as you're not an expert on literally everything and have other things to do, so you delegate. Less delegation happens in America than in basically every other established democracy. You don't like what your representative did, vote for someone else, or run for office.
The least fortunate are the disproportionate beneficiaries of constitutional rights. Yes it's not perfect, and direct democracy tends to lead to squelching the rights of minority groups, but that's why America has a constitution plus 3 branches of government with various checks and balances.
Your employer has literally none of the above, which is why it has no business in your healthcare. If you get fired from your job and lose access to healthcare you don't get to run for CEO, you get to fend for yourself. If you're wrongly denied cover under a socialized medical system you can sue anyone and everyone involved and also vote them out, while still having access to the private markets to fend for yourself just as you would have if you left the company you worked at.
And I'm asking you not just to show that a bunch of bad stuff has happened, but that in its totality at least one country most people would consider a democracy (a good but imperfect shortcut for this is if Freedom House rates them as such) has essentially no accountability.
I don't dispute the US is non ideal, I do dispute that as a whole the government is unaccountable. For example, what do you think would happen if Gavin Newsome (governor of California) had someone killed for disrespecting him? That's the kind of thing really unaccountable governments get away with.
So I'm asking you to not only show that bad things have happened and not been adequately punished, but that the government is fundamentally as unaccountable as a reference unaccountable government, like the U.S.S.R under Stalin or Britain under Oliver Cromwell.
Yes, that's an extreme requirement. But you made an extreme claim when you said not just that democracies are insufficiently accountable to be completely just but that they are unaccountable.
Of course many governmental officials would likely be held accountable for extreme misconduct if they weren’t able to cover up the evidence. And of course certain governments are more accountable than others.
Never had to switch doctors and the paperwork amounted to the receptionist asking if my insurance was current and handing them my card.
This sounds like an entire family with a higher-level plan, correct? Higher-level plans have correspondingly reduced out-of-pocket maximums, to the point where the out-of-pocket maximum can be as low as $2000/year — so your premium is nearly your entire spending.
$320,000 / $8000+ a month (not including rising costs) means he has 3.25 years of care coverage paying out of pocket which I don't consider many years.
I'm not sure on the particulars, and certainly don't take the above as any kind of financial advice -- I just started looking into this for an aging parent myself. Though, it might be worth talking to an accountant and see what is applicable for your location.
You’d be doing this in the UK on the NHS too. The patient needs to pay until their assets are drawn down until a certain amount, and then the government will take over until death.
Get checked. Think about it. If you're worried about money you will spend less if you catch and manage something early than if you're late and whatever you have doesn't kill you but makes you very sick.
If you're not insured, get insured. Financial planning via expecting death is just foolish.
Or did you get a "bill" that listed before-insurance numbers which nobody pays and might as well be spit out by a random number generator?
In Birmingham Alabama, you can't get just as hot as you can in Vietnam, and your rent will be pretty similar.
Yes, healthcare and food are more expensive, but not that much. And you'll spend less on those two things over the year than if you come home once a year to keep your citizenship.
A lot of people that get rich because of America would just drop American citizenship once they do get rich to avoid paying back into the system that allowed them to become successful.
There is no other country that offers as much upward mobility as the US to its citizens. Hence the tax.
But yeah that also wouldn’t require coming back to the US necessarily
That's... pretty damn bizarre that you'd find it intriguing.
>In Memphis, TN you can rent a decent apartment in a shitty part of town for $300 a month.
Who _wants_ to live in the shitty part of town? You've deconstructed your own argument in a sentence.
Also, with American money you can live in Vietnam like royalty, and in an area that looks like paradise. There's a reason the places you are talking about are in the "flyover states".
Let's say you just quit your job to live your dream of creating an indie video game. You'll probably want as much runway as possible while you build.
Startups tend to need rapid iteration and experimentation unless they're highly technical, which is why this plan is probably better for things you can do solo and completely cut off.
On the other hand, maybe someone just wants to spend a few years playing video games and reading books? Why not do it cheaply?
The Bi-coastal Americans in this article will take communism on a bankroll over the Bible Belt, take a hint
Shitty extremes of temperature
Shitty hostile weather patterns
Shitty viability of opportunities as a result of ongoing talent drain towards the coasts with everyone wondering why its so cheap
Shitty isolationist mentality and nationalism to rationalize why their dystopian nightmare is okay
Shitty extremes of religion that were literally kicked out of Europe
Shitty public policy and services as a byproduct of the prior two realities
When people want to enjoy their money its an easy and hard pass on the bible belt. Social welfare states and full blown communist states by the water give you everything for free all while you can buy luxury in liberalized state planned economies.
I did not know this. How does this work?
https://www.ssa.gov/international/agreements_overview.html
In a nutshell, all national pension systems work pretty much the same way in that, the longer you put into it, the more you get out. There is also minimum that you have to put in. For the U.S., it's 40 points (or 10 years).
Let's say you work 9 years in the U.S. but then decide to pack your stuff up and move to one of the above listed countries. You will get credit for 9 years worth of work and not have to start over in your new country (and the other way around too)
I'm actually conflating two different topics... one is reciprocal arrangement in terms of pension point system.
Another is, just being able to collect pension from abroad, which is actually not a big deal at all.
https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/110614/how-can-i-re...
Our tax dollars at work, I guess.
Just won’t have pho around and lots of snow.
As is household debt.
I can't tell if the LA Times are thinking this sounds cheap or not?
In many crash-afflicted areas, prices are double what they were in 2011.
> The children were born via caesarean section; the procedure, including a four-day hospital stay, cost about $1,200, far less than it would have in the United States.
> Monthly expenses here rarely exceed $2,000, even to live in a large unit like Rockhold’s, including the help of a cook and a cleaner.
Getting staff for that price in the US is next to impossible.
you can "afford" a gardener as a retired middle manager only because a lot of poeple in that society are being enslaved
What a great idea! Let's retire there and have slaves!
That said, some Asian women also just look young even at a surprisingly high age. I recently had Germans mistake my Asian mother in law to be my younger sister.
But sure, it is a big plus that in Saigon the $2k in retirement money pay not only for one person, but for an entire family. So if you're old and lonely, that might be a very attractive reason to go.
The idea that relationships are based on love is not universal to say the least, many parts of the world still have arranged marriages that are explicitly transactional with an agreed dowry or bride price.
If it makes you feel a bit better, we are currently living through an unprecedented high in relationships based upon love rather than money.
On the one side, that leads to men who feel like they deserve an attractive girlfriend and take evil methods for acquiring one.
On the other side, there's a booming industry in the US and Europe that teaches rich single white dudes how to be a decent enough human being for long enough to go on a normal date with a normal girl.
But for the guy, after they have committed most of their youth to financial success in the hopes that it will lead to a mate, switching course later on will be very painful. And lots of frustrated overly horny dudes might destabilize the country.
Of course you see a lot of sexpats, but Vietnamese culture is definitely less sexualized than in other SE Asia countries. It certainly exists literally everywhere, but it is just harder to find outside of the STD infected backpacker areas. The women are pretty adamant about having a bf.
For a long time, it was also more difficult and expensive to get a visa... so the guys looking to just get laid went to the easier countries. That is changing though as Vietnam now has an e-visa.
In fact, it appears the man in the article may fit that profile. I think there's a big difference between "American couples are retiring to Thailand" and "single American men are retiring to Thailand and marrying Thai women."
The cuisine and the culture in much of the developing world are superb, the cities are dynamic and young, transport and services are cheap, in contrast, going back to my parent's village feels like going to a whale graveyard. Now I'm far from retirement age and maybe I'll mellow out a bit but many western small towns I've seen are outright depressing to live in (and at this point lack basic services and public transport).
that's why you feel this way. After you lived a life and developed social ties and relationships in place it would be impossible to rebuild those in a radically different country.
Statements like "Retire to Vietnam!" are mostly absurd nonsense - really to go to a place you can't even read the signs?. The most valuable asset one has are the social ties - far easier to live in a boring German village where you know most people than in the most dynamic place on Earth where you never lived before.
the problem is though that this is an idealized version of traditional small towns. My parents are still doing fine, but my grandparents were very isolated at the end of their lives because most peers have died off, are too old or sick to go anywhere, and most young people have left too so it's a very, very insular and lonely environment.
From the stories I read about the state of health, drug abuse and so on in American small towns it appears to be even worse.
Boring life is not necessarily a good thing for older folks. The practical problems of being far away from healthcare and so on aside, I believe being in a young and dynamic environment is a good thing for you if you're old, it keeps people stimulated.
People love painting the image of 'loneliness in the city' vs 'community in the village' but in reality, at least in my experience it's the other way around.
Integrating into a foreign culture is orders of magnitude more difficult - for many perhaps impossible at old age.
In kind of a less extreme situation, I've known several couples who retired in the UK and moved lock stock and barrel to Spain. Even there, I've heard horror stories of getting soul crush homesickness, not being able to sell the house, and eventually returning to the UK and living a very much reduced lifestyle thanks to all the assets being tied up in Spain. It's a massive risk.
I'm sure it's a very nice place, but that sum is nothing to sneeze at. I wonder how much it costs now, and what is monthly expense is.
Good thing is, American government has sensible reciprocal arrangement with many countries that offer national pension system that you don't necessarily have to wait until you hit full retirement age to live abroad and collect social security checks from there.