I was in Beijing for about 6 months. I would not recommend that unless you either (a) speak Mandarin fluently or (b) plan on staying there for the long haul. Engineers were highest quality I've seen though.
- Montreal: 300$; dorms 250$
- University town, Germany: 250$, 180$ for the dorms
- University town, Turkey: 120$
- India, monastery guest house: 60$
- China, Kunming (mid-sized city): 80$
I've found that the cost of living is pretty much proportional to the rent. Internet costs are negligible, unless you live in a very remote place.
There's a lot to write about the experience, but in short: best decision of my life. Two years without any responsibility whatsoever, free to hack or just go biking any time of day. With the advent of the Internet, a new lifestyle for doing research and development (aka, sow the seeds of the next Google) has opened outside the constraints of academia and industry. Few people seem to be taking advantage of it.
I have lived abroad for the last couple of years. It is a wonderful experience. There are much, muuuuuuuuuuch easier ways of reducing your burn rate, if that is what matters to you. One simple one is taking your fluent command of the English language, American passport, and familiarity with all the local systems and relocating to anywhere in the US where the living is cheap. In St. Louis, for example, I know there are plenty of livable apartments near Washington University for about $450 or so. (When I was there it was $800 a month for a very capacious 2 bedroom apartment.) Add on another $200 for food, and we'll round it up to $1,000 so that you can take the bus to see a movie once a week and deal with life's little expenses. There, that's your ramen profitable number.
It is absurdly easy to sell that much a month, if you actually sell stuff.
Going to another country is sexier, but also more distracting.
If you move out of the bay area and live like a college student, that should be more than enough to bring your expenses to a bare minimum.
I know its not hard to find a room in my local college town for under $400 a month. And thats right by the university. I assume that somewhere further out in the boondocks you can get a place for even cheaper.
But I don't really agree with a part time job. A part time computer job anyway, will totally kill your focus. There is something big to be said for full timing it. It sounds like he's talking about saving to go full time out of the US, and the bottom line is that he can do the same thing by living in poverty IN the US - and still have access to the networks in the bay area.
"Excuse-moi, parlez-vous anglais?" ("Excuse me, do you speak English?")
(phonetically that's roughly "ex-cues-eh-mwah, par-lay-voo an-glays" with a little emphasis on the "glays", just say it fast and it'll sound recognizable)
You might get no. Then you say, "Oh... no parlez-vous francais... do you know where xyz thing is... xyz thing... xyz thing... y'know xyz thing..." Eventually they'll get it. The two-second politeness of addressing someone in French has always been enough for me.
I spent a week in Montréal for the 2001 Yet Another Perl Conference (YAPC) followed by some sightseeing, and while it was sweltering and they had us stuffed in the McGill dorms (no A/C; needed to keep the window open) while Katie Holmes' latest movie was filming night scenes all night long outside (wishing I could close the window), it was still a great week and a wonderful city experience.
I was a bit clueless, and I really owe it to the local Perl community for being gracious enough to put up with me. If any of you are on here, cheers!
Edit: More than a bit, really.
I found most places in Asia to be too distracting or too removed from business life. In places like Bangkok you will be hanging out with tourists and teachers, laid back crowd. In Hong Kong or Singapore, it's too fast, too over-paid and too British and annoying; you will be very self conscious and/or lonely if you're not hanging out with MBAs and other well-paid careerists.
The short version is: you can't ALL leave. Someone needs to be near your market, whatever that is. You've got to be iterating products. Even for an internet company, I am skeptical that this can be done in isolation.
That being said, Costa Rica or some place cheap to get to/from is probably a better idea than... India :)
All in all, it was a great experience. I... learned Java, did a lot of catching up on things like design patterns to be able to work in Eclipse, etc. I learned... those startup things you learn the first time round. But being stuck in India when my attorney friend stopped answering my emails meant I was SOL on that product concept, and I could not iterate from India. I ended up doing something entirely different, but I couldn't even get to another product idea from there. I had to come home.
I was previously living in Australia. Made a decent living from consulting work which may have been one of the reasons the product side of the business didn't do terribly well. Once I was out of the country consulting work got harder to get so I've had to devote more energy to products and that seems to be bearing fruit.
Apartment rent is maybe $300/mth inc net connection, water, electricity. Can get a good thai meal for $1-3. Net connection is pretty quick although the infrastructure is a bit dodgy so there is an outtage probably once a week for generally no more than an hour or two. Dont think Id host here but for your own connection its fine.
If you want more info, just send me an email! I'd like more guys to join in, so I can get bigger and nicer places. If you are up for some travel and want to work in an office, it's perfect!
I think this might have something to do with the disparity in wages; standards are just higher around here. Yeah, you pay more for a person, but the pool from which you can hire is so much richer. if you can choose good people, you can get better deals in the bay area than most other places.
But I do always see ads in the Wall Street Journal enjoining people to move their businesses to Moldova for a variety of attractive reasons — low cost of living being one of them if I remember correctly.
Renting out residential homes is technically illegal, at least on Oahu, but people still do it and you can still probably find tons of people renting out rooms in their homes for short-term stay on all the islands on Craigslist. On Oahu there are a lot of short-term accommodations in Waikiki, but Waikiki is very touristy, somewhat expensive, and most of the places are converted hotel rooms with no kitchens. A few centrally-located neighborhoods you might want to check that are relatively affordable are Manoa, Palolo, Kaimuki, and Makiki. Kailua and Kaneohe are also nice, but they're on the other side of the island and they're inconvenient without a car.
As was mentioned, the rents are reasonable (I've got a friend living in a 5 1/2---2 bed, living/dining/kitchen for about $550/month, and he's walking distance to downtown), there's a good tech culture (lots of speech & language related stuff, web companies, game studies, etc.), and the city itself is great---a mix of the best bits of North American and European culture...you can find stuff to do 24hrs/day no problem). Also, the girls are smokin'.
As for language issues, I know people who are born & raised in Mtl and don't speak any French (beyond "oui", "non", "bière", "poutine"). There's a street called St-Laurent that more or less divides the city into eastside/westside. If you're on the west side, you can use English with no fear. Yes, you may run into a French Québecois who's an ass and tells you off, but it's really rare (more common in the east, though).
But, if that's too much, head over to a college town like Athens. Can easily get a 2 or 3-bedroom apartment for $500-$600, $700-$900 if you want a rather upscale one. Salaries are low, and no shortage of college talent pool. There are a lot of townies, too; the charm of Athens seems to rub off on a lot of folks that finish college here. The University of Georgia is here - 32,000 students or more.
The broadband is good, and the living generally cheap. Real estate is by far the most expensive thing in Athens. It's somewhat annoyingly suburban outside of downtown and older historical areas, but that can be dealt with.
Honestly, I think that's a lot easier than trying to go through all the trouble of moving abroad.
I've done TONS of research on this and for me and my family, NZ makes the most sense. When we get there we'll look around at the various cities and towns, but we'll start in Auckland. The great thing about NZ is English, 4 hr time zone diff to west coast of US (+ 1 day, but really a 4 hour diff) and a great lifestyle balance. Plus, who wouldn't want to go to the place voted to be the most peaceful nation on earth!!
Over the weekend I found another team that is already doing something similar in Europe & was planning to relocate to South America. They've already got a profitable product just a few months after launched. We hashed out a plan to get us all down to Costa Rica in early September.
I'm very excited about the opportunity & encourage anybody who is even considering something like this to do whatever you can to make it happen!
Can I somehow make more money with what I (we) am about to create and stay where I am (or US)?
Sure these places have cheap rent, but you also leave all your social ties behind and will be limited to a particular subset of the social fabric (expats, most likely, that either teach English or are avoiding something important by coming there). It's also distracting by being elsewhere, though often in a good way.
Eagerly following this thread.
Working out ok so far
Hong Kong is actually a great location if you're interested in China. Getting investment visas is not too difficult and living costs are similar to the US. If you're smart, it can be much cheaper.
Trying to startup in China is _very_ difficult. I wouldn't recommend it until you have some experience in the area. As such, Hong Kong is a great place to get started.
If you are going to try Hong Kong, I would suggest getting in touch with an immigration advisor as soon as possible, because you can waste a lot of time otherwise. Also, get in touch with the people at the Hong Kong Startup Association:
Tunisia is not expensive, but Egypt is very cheap (3X less expensive) so bootstrapping from there will be easier. and they have good internet connection.
It's dangerous to do, because if you don't succeed returning is much more harder! So good luck if you go for it!
Many many things here are an order of magnitude cheaper than they are in the states