There is also the principle 'It takes money to make money.' If you have money, you can make money in a developing country, especially if your wife can own a business there. Let's say you save up enough money to live in the Filippines. If you were alone, you probably wouldn't want to open a hamburger stand on the beach in some resort town since you aren't local.MarcosZeitola wrote:I'm not rich by any Western world standards, and yet I will be able to relocate permanently to the country of my wife's origins in about 3-4 months due to the way I have been able to invest my savings. I will never be a millionaire, not in euros or dollars anyway, but I am able to generate a stable monthly income that allows my wife, myself and our children to have a comfortable life, a roof over our head and enough food on the table for us to remain healthy.
It's not impossible. It's not even incredibly hard. It's a combination of being lucky, of having the right mentors and advisers, of working hard, planning ahead and thinking of your future. People often overestimate the amount of money that one needs to survive abroad, MASSIVELY. They overestimate the price of things, the difficulties, the obstacles. They endlessly think things over, until they become stuck in their heads.
People are their own worst enemies when it comes to successfully making the move. You need to have an adventurous spirit, a good pair of balls and good brains. You need to have the willingness to take risks, to put yourself out there. The willingness to try, at all costs, even when failure is a realistic option. To tell that nasty little voice inside your head, that tells you you'll fail, to f**k off. And not to listen to the naysayers, the doom scenario preachers, the prophets of negativity, telling you your dreams cannot become reality.
But since your wife is from there, if you decide you need an income, maybe you could open a hamburger stand. And since developing countries often don't have or enforce health codes, you don't have to worry about having a special kitchen or health inspections. It's easy to open a noodle cart in Indonesia. You need some wood, paint, bicycle tires, a gas tank hose, etc. You just make a little cart and sell noodles. Those guys don't make much. But it's cheap to open stuff and you could go a little high end on price and still sell food in a hut, especially if you sell to expats and they see your white face there serving their kind of food. The problem in some of these countries is you can't trust people to give you the money from the sales, so you may have to end up actually staying there at the burger stand in this scenario. You'd have to find people you can trust and put together some kind of accounting security process to actually get your money.
Or you could open a little stand in a market selling telephone recharge cards. I knew the guys who did the consulting to create the futures market in Indonesia, and they also made money by renting a fish farm and raising fish and by opening little phone recharge cards in malls and things like that. There are a million ways to make money, and what you need to get started overseas is so much less. Mall rental space is cheaper. The standard for how fancy your stand has to be is lower.
That's something to consider when marrying a wife. If your wife spent your childhood hawking stuff from road-side stands like mind, she knows how to do it as an adult. If you can manage to get other people to work something like this and monitor inventory and sales, it can work. If you have enough trust in phone-card sales people not to run off with the merchandise (e.g. know their daddy, know where they live, etc.) you can count the value of your inventory and count the sales, which is much easier to count than in the hamburger stand scenario.
So you don't have to be stuck overseas with no money if the money does end up going down faster than you predict.
