Why Living Abroad Doesn’t Save You Money—It Reallocates It
Why cost of living is really about how you live—not what things cost
I don’t want to brand everyone who talks about moving abroad—to Spain—as disingenuous. Because there are lots of people doing great work.
But there are also the grifters—the opportunists who arrived one day and became full-fledged relocation consultants the next. You have to pay attention to these people because they cut through the algorithm and make it into your feed.
And they arrive with the worst possible information.
So, today, we’ll discuss the reality of what it actually costs to live in Spain. A discussion that I think applies to other places around the world.
I’m not going to chronicle my spending anymore or show a line-item budget because if that’s all you think “cost of living” means, you’re missing the real story.
The grifters love to play the bait and switch. Or use other people’s bait to set up their own switch.
On one hand, Spain gets billed as this low cost of living haven. In some respects, this is true. However, it’s complicated. We’ll get into that.
On the other, the grifters often bring up so-called “hidden costs.” Like the tax trap, expenses no one warned you about (e.g., apartment security deposits, kitchen utensils, and bed sheets), and expensive cheeses at your local market.
I just paid my quarterly taxes the other day. It’s a lot of money (though no more really than I owed in the U.S.), but I knew long before we moved here what that would look like. We also secured our apartment with a deposit, paid the agency, and bought the things we needed. I’ve been sticker-shocked by €35 per kilo cheese—here, across Europe, and at freaking Whole Foods.
I’ve also moved around enough—since I was 19 years old—to understand that moves across town, across country, or across the world involve startup costs. I’ve lived enough to have run into my fair share of expensive—and stinky—cheese.
We’ll tackle this two ways—psychologically and practically because both areas apply to this conversation in approximately equal parts.
Psychologically, people treat cost of living as yet another distraction that sidesteps the real issues associated with moving and living abroad. The real work that needs to be done.
Practically, they treat cost of living as little more than a comparison of expenses. I used to do that—so, guilty as charged. But I’ve come to believe that you can’t separate cost of living from quality of life and ignore how quality of life can impact cost of living in both directions.
Cost-of-living discourse is obsessed with prices. I almost regret the role I played in perpetuating that conversation. But it’s okay. You live. You learn. You reset how you see and think about things.
Because prices are not the primary financial variable in a true cost-of-living analysis.
The real variables are desire, access, and how conducive a place is to actually living the life you say you want.
This is why living abroad rarely “saves” you money in the way people expect. It doesn’t eliminate all costs—it reallocates them. Away from certain kinds of stress and toward certain kinds of living.
Whether that works for you depends less on prices than on what kind of life you’re trying to sustain.
What follows is the part most cost-of-living posts never get to.