36 Best Cities for Quality of Life or Business

Vancouver, BC Canada

As future expats trying to decide where to live, we have to balance all sorts of important issues: quality of life, health care, affordability, weather and climate seem to top everyone’s lists. The Economist recently ranked cities worldwide for Quality of Life. Vancouver, BC, Canada Melbourne, Australia Vienna, Austria Toronto, Canada Calgary, Alberta, Canada Helsinki, [...]

Cheap Cities for Expats — But Would You Really Want to Live There?

city of Sanaa, Yemen

Last week we published the top cities in the world for high cost of expat living. Now it’s time to flip it around and show you the lowest-cost cities. I explained the methodology here. While most of the high cost-of-living cities are in the Pacific Rim and Europe, most of the lowest cost cities are [...]

Highest Cost of Living Cities for Expats

Tokyo Ginza at night

It’s that time of year again — time to list the “best of” 2010. From XPatulator, here are the 10 most expensive cities in the world to live in. “Expensive” was determined by looking at the cost of a basket of items in each location. How They Rank Xpatulator ranks the cost of living based [...]

An Antidote to Doom and Gloom

Occasionally I reprint articles here that appeared on other expat websites. This one struck a chord with me, and I hope it will with you too. Thanks to Live and Invest Overseas, where you can read the original in its entirety. “Vicki and I recently returned to Argentina after a six-month absence,” writes Intrepid Correspondent [...]

Social Networking for Expats

social media icons for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Delicious, YouTube, WordPress

Social networking is playing an ever-increasing role in our lives. With a computer and an internet connection, an expat can investigate their new overseas location and connect with people already there. There are many ways you can use social networking to ease your overseas move — before, during and after. Besides the obvious sites like [...]

Retire to Latin America if You’re Poor, Europe if You’re Not

Paris and the Eiffel Tower

I don’t generally follow investment websites or blogs, but The Oblivious Investor caught my eye recently. Why? Because author Rick Todd rated some expat retirement destinations based on how much income you have to retire on. His top five picks for retirees with a limited (primarily Social Security) income: Costa Rica Malaysia Uruguay Panama Nicaragua [...]

10 Best Expat Destinations

A few days ago, I posted the results of International Living’s 2010 Annual Retirement Index. Topping this prestigious list are Ecuador Panama Mexico France Italy Today I’m looking at a very different list: this one includes the 10 Most Suitable Countries for American Expatriates. According to the website Expatify.com, they considered these important criteria: How [...]

Living in the Land of Love

Terraced rice paddy fields Bali, Indonesia

Guest Post by Mike Henry As I write this, the movie Eat, Pray, Love is hitting the cinemas in the United States. I am sure most people are already familiar with the story. The book’s author, Elizabeth Gilbert, is frustrated with her life in the United States and decides to take a year off traveling, [...]

A Video Look at Some Expat Destinations

For a change of pace today, I thought I’d share with you some YouTube videos about expats and their new homes. A quick YouTube search of “expat” turns up over 4,000 videos. As you’d expect, some are good, some are terrible and most are in between. Some are slick, commercially produced efforts, most are not. [...]

9 Expat Blogs to Follow

It’s been a while since I’ve done any kind of list, so I thought I’d give you a look today at some of the expat blogs I follow, and that you might find helpful, too. Empty Nest Expat. Currently living in Prague, the blogger describes herself as “an American expatriate bursting with enthusiasm to GET [...]