Never Retire: How Currency Exchange Can Impact You Abroad (and Shape Your Daily Life)
Living abroad means you don’t just earn money. You translate it.
When you earn in dollars and live in euros, your income doesn’t stop at what you make. It gets translated by the exchange rate—sometimes in your favor, sometimes against you.
This is one of those things most people don’t think about when they dream of moving abroad. They imagine tapas, bike rides, and days at the beach. They don’t imagine checking the EUR/USD chart like it’s the weather—while you’re at the beach.
But the truth is: if you’re an American in Europe (or anyone earning in one currency and spending in another), currency exchange can affect your budget. It can quietly eat into your income—or give you unexpected breathing room.
Bottom line: If you’re not willing to live with a shifting floor, you probably can’t handle moving abroad.
Today, I’ll break it down—so you can see how much exchange rates really shape daily life abroad.
In the What I Earn and Spend Never Retire newsletter story from earlier this month, I showed my exact average monthly expenses—to the euro—alongside exactly how much I earn in dollars, then convert to euros. That post laid out my baseline—what it really costs to live in Valencia, Spain. This one shows you how much that baseline shifts when exchange rates move.
So consider that an ideal—and necessary—companion post to today’s, where I show how the currency exchange rate fluctuated during the first six months of 2025 and impacted my cash flow.
It’s the same work. The same effort. But depending on the month, the reward looks completely different. That’s the reality you don’t see in Instagram reels about life abroad.
While I’ve mentioned currency before, I’ve never shown the full detail with exact numbers. This is the first time I’ve opened up the ledger to show what really happens when the dollar climbs—or when it stumbles.