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Comment by jasonkester | Hacker News Reader

Absolutely agree on checking the situation on he ground before committing to move to another country. The culture and the expat vibe are going to be important factors in your life from here on out.

We did a winter in Nicaragua with the intention of scoping out the possibility of buying a house. It looks pretty good on paper, until you meet the grumpy expat American surfers who will be your pool of future friends and see the soulless dusty plots of building land with all the locals cleared out except one guy with a shotgun whose job is to sit the same plastic chair all day every day... yeah. Pass.

Naturally this is written from the perspective of a US expat developer with the entire world to chose from, so it’s a bit of a different situation to the one discussed in the article.

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> It looks pretty good on paper, until you meet the grumpy expat American surfers who will be your pool of future friends

Why would you move to another country and not make friends with the (native) locals?

That was kinda my point. It would be surprisingly difficult to settle in the little fishing village with the undiscovered point break that every surfer fantasizes about. Instead you’ll end up in one of the tourist towns that were never local villages in the first place, and thus don’t have any locals to hang out with, since they mostly live inland in towns jobs.

Puerto Rico, on the other hand does have towns full of Puerto Ricans all along the coast, so it’s possible to meet one of them who is not in the process of serving you a beer. That’s one of many reasons it ranks higher on my list of possible places to set up shop.

For most people, it’s not as simple as deciding to make friends with locals. People have various heuristics to determine the probability of rate of return (not financially speaking, but all around) on certain relationships, including differences in socioeconomic status, cultural background, age, etc.

The locals also probably already have their own friend circles (or tribes or whatever you want to call it), and it might take a lot of effort to break in, especially if there is a group of expats that are easier to communicate with.

It depends on the country and on how the locals view you. The locals may be very hesitant to make friends with you. Also, even if you and they are very friendly, you might just not have a lot in common with them. Of course, you should try to actually live in the country you move to rather than in some expat bubble, but you may find that your choices are expat bubble or just don't go. My choice would be not to go, but some are happy with the expat bubble.

Cost of living most likely. A retirement goes further in some countries.

That's not really an argument against learning the language and making new friends?

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