17 March 2018: If I do this right, I can travel overseas and spend less on a day-to-day basis than I would by staying put in Washington, D.C. Pretty cool!

So why not just move overseas? Every three or four years I get the urge to pull up stakes and move somewhere new anyway. I’ll travel for a while, hopping between promising candidate locales, and at the end of my journey, I’ll pick my favorite and move there. Even on a tourist visa, I’m sure I could find a furnished apartment to rent month-to-month, and before my visa expires at the end of 90 days or whatever, I can pop over to a neighboring country for a few days and then come right back.

I’m a natural planner; I don’t have a spontaneous bone in my body. Here’s the plan, and the rules I’ve set for myself:

Through research on websites such as Numbeo (which compiles information about cost of living and quality of life in a large number of cities and countries worldwide) and in travel guidebooks, I identified dozens of cities with excellent bang for the buck in terms of relatively high quality of life and low cost of living. I knew I would only consider living in cities because, as a single man, urban downtowns are what we in my former line of work termed “target-rich environments.”

I take my planning (and my Excel spreadsheets) very seriously.

My total budget for this trip is $20,000. I can spend that much and still have enough of my rainy day fund left over to support me for several months while I’m getting my second career (whatever it turns out to be) off the ground. Based on this budget, I had to cut the planned Southern Hemisphere leg of my trip. Colombia, Chile, and Argentina will just have to wait until my second retirement, I guess! I limited my journey to a four-month round-the-world jaunt through Asia and Europe.

My itinerary “only” includes Northern Hemisphere destinations.

Further, I’m limiting myself to a maximum of $50/night for lodging. That ensures that my housing costs while traveling do not exceed the $1,500 a month in rent I paid to live in my D.C. studio apartment. And it means I can afford my own room — no youth hostel dorms this trip!

I budgeted $30/day for food.

Since this isn’t merely a tourist trip — I’m scouting out potential places to live, not (just) sightseeing — I’m spending a week in each city that I visit. Or at least the weekend and a weekday or two either side of it. I hope that’ll give me a good flavor of what each city is like on different days of the week and different times of day. This approach also maximizes relaxation, minimizes stress, and gives me a cushion if I need to convalesce for a couple of days here or there to get over a cold, overcome jet lag, wait out bad weather, etc.

The exceptions to the week-long stay rule are a handful of “layover” cities (Colombo, Sri Lanka; Kyiv, Ukraine; Salamanca, Spain; Rijeka, Croatia; Riga, Latvia) where I’m just spending a night or two in between my target destinations.

I whittled down my list of cities to 18, based on low cost of living, which I have pretty good data on, and on my best educated guess about high quality of life. In my next blog post I’ll discuss in more detail what I’m looking for in an ideal home city.