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Comment by seanmcdirmid | Hacker News Reader

I think the math is a bit wrong. Your money actually doesn't go much farther in Beijing, Bangkok, New Delhi, Kuala Lumpur, etc... Some things might be cheaper (eating out) but many things will be more expensive (cars, iPads, decent clothes). You might be able to hire a driver for 2 or 3000 RMB a month in China, but you still have to buy the car for $4-50,000. At best, its basically a wash, and if you are American, you'll realize how much cheaper most things are back home.

Also, how much do you value clean air and decent schooling for your kids?

I've been out for 7 years now, and I don't regret it. But its not an easy win life style wise.

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Don't forget the worse part: salaries are much much lower in third-world nations - at least here in Malaysia - especially after considering currency conversion.

To put this into perspective: median annual salary for software engineers in Malaysia is about RM45,000, which is $15,000 a year. A 'highly-paid' consultant might make about RM150,000 a year - all of $50,000 per annum.

So have US customers (who pay near-US rates) and outsource all your work to skilled local contractors. Added bonus: it scales way beyond your normal 168/hour week cap.

And where do you find those "skilled local contractors"? And why should they work for you vs. a stable job?

You can take advantage of local labor sometimes, but its definitely not a given, and it never lasts very long.

Don't forget that Americans working overseas still have to pay the IRS!

We get a $90K blanket exemption + we can directly deduct whatever we pay for taxes in the country we are working in. So it usually works out to $0 + the expense of filing a tax form. Disclaimer: I am not a tax attorney and this shouldn't be taken as advice.

That's right. Food and gas is cheaper back home (USA) than it is in India, where the cost of living is astronomical vis-a-vis the paycheck drawn by the average Indian. A per-item price comparison shows vegetables and meat are a lot cheaper (and cleaner) in the US than what I find in India. Metro cities like Mumbai and Bangalore are very expensive when it comes to rental costs, transportation costs and entertainment costs. Have you checked out how much beer/alcohol costs in pubs in Mumbai and Bangalore. Let me tell you, its way more than what we pay in the USA.

Schooling is the most expensive - there is no free public schooling worth sending your kid to. A good school can cost INR. 100,000 per year and even the poorest person I met aspires and scrapes money to be able to afford the astronomical fees required to send their kid to a "private English-medium" school.

http://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?coun...

How old are those numbers? Lets take one listing for an Apartment (3 bedrooms) in City Centre: Houston, TX is listed as $2,050.00 while Bangalore is $ 559.02. If you check out a property listing site: <http://www.magicbricks.com/propertyDetails/3-BHK-3000-Sq-ft-..., it says INR.60,000 which works out to approximately $1153.84 (around 52 rupees to a dollar). Obviously, numbeo.com has got the most important (housing) numbers wrong.

> How old are those numbers?

Numbeo says it is up to date (April, 2013 for Houston data and May 2013, for Bangalore data). I feel that the (Bangalore) housing numbers are reasonably accurate because: 1. Data being crowd-sourced with no real incentive for contributors to lie; 2. Going by personal experience

> If you check out a property listing site: <http://www.magicbricks.com/propertyDetails/3-BHK-3000-Sq-ft-..., it says INR.60,000 which works out to approximately $1153.84 (around 52 rupees to a dollar). Obviously, numbeo.com has got the most important (housing) numbers wrong.

This is a texas sharpshooter argument. It is based on a single data point---which happens to be a 5-floor multi-storey apartment---which is hardly a representative sample of (single floor) 3-BHK apartments in central Bangalore. Claiming that numbeo has got housing numbers wrong by this one data point alone is ridiculous.

I checked for China, they seem to be pretty accurate for here at least. I have no idea about India.

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