"They bought the four-bedroom, 3½-bathroom unit, measuring about 1,840 square feet along with a separate veranda, for about $250,000 in 2011."
I'm sure it's a very nice place, but that sum is nothing to sneeze at. I wonder how much it costs now, and what is monthly expense is.
Good thing is, American government has sensible reciprocal arrangement with many countries that offer national pension system that you don't necessarily have to wait until you hit full retirement age to live abroad and collect social security checks from there.
The apartment complex they’re talking about in the article is (educated guess, used to live there) one of the nicest and most expensive in the country. It’s overlooking the Saigon River and has luxuries and amenities that you wouldn’t have except at super luxury buildings the US.
You can live a pampered lifestyle that would not be even remotely within reach in the US on the same budget.
$250,000 is more or less the median price for a house that size in Ames, IA, a university town which regularly shows up on various "Best Places to Live" lists.
Its about the median across the whole of the US, not just Iowa. Other cities with lower or similar median: Miami, Atlanta, Dallas, Philadelphia, Chicago, Salt Lake City, Nashville. Loads of cities are cheaper.
Can't get much colder or wintery than Finland, Denmark, and Norway, but
> For the second year in a row, the world's happiest country is... Finland!
> Finland topped the list of 156 countries, which were ranked in the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network's 2019 World Happiness Report. The report ranks countries on several well-being variables including income, freedom, trust, healthy life expectancy and more.
> Two other Nordic countries came in second and third place, Denmark and Norway, respectively.
So perhaps the answer to “who would want to live somewhere that cold?” is “people who were born there and lived their whole lives there.” This is based on my understanding that those countries have very low rates of immigration.
Well, Sweden is 7th on the list and over 20% of the ppl here have foreign background (individuals either born abroad or having both parents born abroad).
Canada is 9th.
People immigrate to sweden and canada for jobs, opportunities and generous welfare, not because they want to live there. It's mostly the poor and desperate who immigrate to these countries.
How many wealthy native born canadians visit sweden? Hardly any. How many wealthy native born swedes visit canada? Hardly any. I bet more swedes visit thailand in one day than they visit canada in a whole year.
>> when you have the option of staying in a place that is warm year round.
Bugs. There is something to be said for a deep winter when opening a window doesn't mean invading in an Attenborough documentary worth of wildlife into your bedroom.
There are plenty of temperate places that are not tropical and don’t host a ton of bugs. Speaking of bug, the Russian tundra or Alaska are an absolute bug nightmare come summer.
No doubt based on that recommendation Ames is a great place to live, but you're still in the American healthcare system which could financially drain you dry from one major medical incident. The article specifically mentions cheap healthcare as the other draw besides cheap cost of living.
Max out-of-pocket for insurance plans now is very reasonable. If you can afford a $250k house, you can afford the max out-of-pocket cost for many many years.
Don't you also have to pay the actual insurance premium as well? Before you even get to the out-of-pocket costs? I have friends in the US who pay thousands a month for health insurance premiums.
At 65 you're eligible for single-payer, government-supported Medicare.
I'm not old enough to be keeping an eye on the numbers, but it looks like ~$450 / month for hospital (free) + doctor (subsidized) + prescription (pay).
Then you consider that the total unsubsidized out of pocket cost for a surgery at a private hospital in one of the medical tourism destinations amounts to only a few months of premiums. And on top of it the service and hospitality with which the medical care is delivered is unlike any you've ever even imagined in the US.
All except the smallest employers are required by law to provide health insurance to full-time employees and may have employees contribute up to only 10% of their household income.
I did some random shopping for a typical family of 5 and found a max rate of ~$1600/mo for insurance premiums. You would only pay this if you were self-employed, part-time employed at a pretty shitty job, or unemployed and run out of the various mechanisms to keep your insurance. After that you have to spend your net worth until you qualify for the insurance benefits for the poor in your state.
In reality, with various employers I have paid between $0 and $200/month for insuring just myself. (I have paid $0, I don't remember the most expensive, but it was <$200 in any case)
Who gets screwed and bankrupt are the lower-middle class who can't manage to get a full time job, especially single parents who get sick. The system is biased towards benefitting married partners with children, only one person needs that full time job to cover everyone. If you are in the middle class or above and do only a small amount of planning, you're fine. If you are below the middle, you generally have to lose everything or go bankrupt before the system will help you – people in that position are often the least equipped to figure out and head through the optimal path for themselves and end up making very bad decisions.
We don't need public healthcare, we need better support which reaches higher up the income scale and better education.
I find the idea that employers should have anything to do with healthcare quite revolting. Healthcare should be a deal between you and the government for which you should pay taxes. This and some other reasons are why I cannot fathom living in the US under 250K a year.
> Healthcare should be a deal between you and the government
No, health care should be between me and my physician and whatever other experts I decide to consult. The government has no business meddling in it.
Health insurance or health care cost sharing might be things we could arrange cooperatively through government, but it doesn't seem like it's possible to do that without having the government try to meddle in what care people get.
Well then there will be a variable cost depending on the treatment you need and the prices that the market decides. No amount of money in your bank could give you any financial security as you are basically one accident, surgery or even treatment away from bankruptcy. It could be that this one pill you need is suddenly priced at a million dollars a pill and you cant survive anymore. (Hypothetically can happen in a totally free market).
I for one wouldn't like this level of risk with something so vital to my wellbeing. I would rather prefer that the government took this risk on my behalf of me and just charged me a flat rate throughout my life. (Btw this is the case already in almost all developed countries)
In general there are some things where government intervention is needed. Police, Education, Healthcare and Pension as these things cannot have a totally variable cost decided by a free market.
> It could be that this one pill you need is suddenly priced at a million dollars a pill and you cant survive anymore. (Hypothetically can happen in a totally free market).
No, it can't, because in a totally free market nobody would have monopoly rights to produce particular drugs or provide particular treatments, so if one provider tried to charge a price nobody who needed the treatment could afford, they would go out of business. If it proved to be impossible for anyone to make the drug or provide the treatment at a price anyone could afford, then that would be a failure of the free market, yes; but it's an extremely unlikely failure mode as compared with the much more common failure modes of government granted monopolies and government determined prices.
That said, in a democratic country if the majority shares your risk preference, then that majority can vote for politicians who will enact it:
> I would rather prefer that the government took this risk on my behalf of me and just charged me a flat rate throughout my life.
And that would be a form of cost sharing, which I mentioned--all taxpayers share the costs of expensive treatments, on the assumption that only a small percentage of them will actually end up having an illness that incurs those costs.
However, that still only protects you on the assumption that in fact only a small percentage of people end up having the costly illnesses. But the illnesses people are generally worried about with respect to high costs--cancer, heart disease, arterial sclerosis leading to a high risk of stroke, liver disease, kidney disease, diabetes--are not that rare. So either we keep paying more and more taxes as a higher and higher percentage of people have the illness, to the point where we are just as badly off as if we each paid our own costs individually, or many people end up not getting the treatments at all because there isn't enough money to go around, so the risk you thought you were offloading to the government is back on you again.
This scheme also ignores the possibility of making the treatments cheaper. But the way to do that is to allow free market competition; we don't have that in the US since prices are not set by supply and demand but by a combination of government agencies and private health insurance companies.
> In general there are some things where government intervention is needed. Police, Education, Healthcare and Pension as these things cannot have a totally variable cost decided by a free market.
This is not the obvious truth you appear to think it is. It is an extremely strong claim which is not at all clearly established by actual historical evidence.
> so if one provider tried to charge a price nobody who needed the treatment could afford, they would go out of business
Lets be realistic here. What happens is that most drugs are either actually manufactured overseas or at least can be shipped from overseas for pennies. However due to regulations and lobbying drug companies charge really high prices for the same drugs and they make sure it is illegal to import those drugs. In case the government itself was paying for these drugs it would be much harder for the companies to game the system like this and an individual would be protected from such predatory practices.
> So either we keep paying more and more taxes as a higher and higher percentage of people have the illness, to the point where we are just as badly off as if we each paid our own costs individually,
This is not true if you observe the tax rates in any countries with government funded healthcare. The taxes more or less remain the same but of course there are differences in the healthcare budget.
> This scheme also ignores the possibility of making the treatments cheaper.
Once again the healthcare costs in the US have actually risen quite significantly under the private system.
> This is not the obvious truth you appear to think it is. It is an extremely strong claim which is not at all clearly established by actual historical evidence.
Police and education it already is true even in the US. Even pension has significant regulation. The only reason healthcare is not is aggressive lobbying by private companies.
One of the large bureaucracies will be there as long as you're alive, and there is no need to switch between health provider paperwork or worry it will disappear when you change jobs or become unemployed.
One word: accountability. Your employer is not accountable to you, you’re at best a cost center. Your government is accountable to you via process known as democracy.
No, it, literally and directly does, that's the definition of it. Your representatives are accountable to you via vote. If not that, then what do you think democracy even means?
I think democracy generally means that the population elects representatives who establish policy. That’s certainly true. But in what sense is the government actually accountable to an individual in any meaningful sense? If you are wronged by a democratic government do you honestly believe that you have a remotely decent chance of holding the government accountable? And how about for individuals who are among the least fortunate in society?
I mean, this tends to be covered in high school civics classes.
The government is bound by a constitution. Violations of your constitutional rights are remediated on an individual basis through the judicial branch. You may individually hold the entire government responsible for violating your constitutional rights. This happens regularly.
The government is also accountable to you in aggregate through the voting process. Yes you don't get to vote on each individual issue, as you're not an expert on literally everything and have other things to do, so you delegate. Less delegation happens in America than in basically every other established democracy. You don't like what your representative did, vote for someone else, or run for office.
The least fortunate are the disproportionate beneficiaries of constitutional rights. Yes it's not perfect, and direct democracy tends to lead to squelching the rights of minority groups, but that's why America has a constitution plus 3 branches of government with various checks and balances.
Your employer has literally none of the above, which is why it has no business in your healthcare. If you get fired from your job and lose access to healthcare you don't get to run for CEO, you get to fend for yourself. If you're wrongly denied cover under a socialized medical system you can sue anyone and everyone involved and also vote them out, while still having access to the private markets to fend for yourself just as you would have if you left the company you worked at.
And I'm asking you not just to show that a bunch of bad stuff has happened, but that in its totality at least one country most people would consider a democracy (a good but imperfect shortcut for this is if Freedom House rates them as such) has essentially no accountability.
Well, if you think that showing many many examples of democratic governments wronging individuals and then not being held accountable for those wrongs (including many examples of long-standing systematic wrongs, not just one-off extreme cases) is NOT sufficient evidence for the claim “democratic governments are not accountable to you,” then I don’t know what evidence would satisfy you.
Let me guess: you're thinking of civil foreiture and qualified immunity in the US?
I don't dispute the US is non ideal, I do dispute that as a whole the government is unaccountable. For example, what do you think would happen if Gavin Newsome (governor of California) had someone killed for disrespecting him? That's the kind of thing really unaccountable governments get away with.
So I'm asking you to not only show that bad things have happened and not been adequately punished, but that the government is fundamentally as unaccountable as a reference unaccountable government, like the U.S.S.R under Stalin or Britain under Oliver Cromwell.
Yes, that's an extreme requirement. But you made an extreme claim when you said not just that democracies are insufficiently accountable to be completely just but that they are unaccountable.
I didn’t have specific examples in mind, and my argument is not about what type of government is ideal or even whether it’s possible to do better. My claim was simply that democratic governments are not accountable to individuals in any ordinary meaningful sense, and I stand by that.
Of course many governmental officials would likely be held accountable for extreme misconduct if they weren’t able to cover up the evidence. And of course certain governments are more accountable than others.
Just the everyday definition that people use in normal conversation, not subtle insinuation about political philosophy or anything like that. I’m accountable to my employer for showing up and doing solid work. A student is accountable to their instructor. I’m accountable to the government for my income taxes (and many other laws). It just means that there is a fairly clear set of expectations and a pretty reliable and straightforward process that disincentivizes violation of those expectations in practice (not just in theory).
You may be in the fortunate position that your government is not in an adversarial relationship with you. There are many people with that good fortune. But there are also many people who are not in that position.
Because I want to switch jobs without switching doctors loads of paper work, and health is the sort of fickle thing where if I get really sick they will always be able to price-gouge me so I rather remove the profit motive.
>I have friends in the US who pay thousands a month for health insurance premiums.
This sounds like an entire family with a higher-level plan, correct? Higher-level plans have correspondingly reduced out-of-pocket maximums, to the point where the out-of-pocket maximum can be as low as $2000/year — so your premium is nearly your entire spending.
I am just about to sell my father's $320,000 house so I can pay for his nursing home care. He sadly did not have the foresight to acquire long-term disability insurance or put his assets into a trust so we'll be paying out of pocket until his money runs out and he goes on Medicaid, which will still only cover 60% of his care.
$320,000 / $8000+ a month (not including rising costs) means he has 3.25 years of care coverage paying out of pocket which I don't consider many years.
Don't forget about the annual max gift tax limit (15k for 2020). Your father could reasonably gift you 15k a year (possibly another 15k to your spouse if you happen to be married) to reduce his savings a tiny bit quicker, so medicaid kicks in a bit sooner. At that point you could maybe even claim your parent as a dependent, and help him pay for his medical costs (which I think you can also deduct?).
I'm not sure on the particulars, and certainly don't take the above as any kind of financial advice -- I just started looking into this for an aging parent myself. Though, it might be worth talking to an accountant and see what is applicable for your location.
If I understand correctly from my non-CPA googling, $15K is just the amount you don't have to report to the IRS. You can give more, up to a lifetime limit of several million, before the gifts are taxed. How that interacts with medicaid, I have no idea.
There are the local medicaid/medicare administrations and elder care law specialists that can advise on medical care as well as the various tax writeoffs and eligibility for programs that the poster should investigate now since rules vary so much from state to state in the USA, and he is talking about years of care.
> I am just about to sell my father's $320,000 house so I can pay for his nursing home care.
You’d be doing this in the UK on the NHS too. The patient needs to pay until their assets are drawn down until a certain amount, and then the government will take over until death.
Is he not eligible for Medicare? I thought even the pricier Part C plans would be less than $8k for a whole year's worth of premiums + the out of pocket maximum
The last time I had to look at this, one cannot have any assets in excess of a small dollar number for Medicaid, so one has to start drawing down all savings to pay for care, and Medicare does not cover long term care, only short stays for specific reasons.
Now you know why I'm waiting to see my PCP despite having earlyish symptoms of heart disease. Should I have a heart attack it's better to leave my wife a cheap, dead corpse and a life insurance payout rather than an expensive out of work husband. That's the calculus of the American medical system.
Get checked. Think about it. If you're worried about money you will spend less if you catch and manage something early than if you're late and whatever you have doesn't kill you but makes you very sick.
If you're not insured, get insured. Financial planning via expecting death is just foolish.
Whoa, I always figured that Rabies would be like a state covered thing, given that generally every case makes a news article. Sorry that happened to you, did you for sure come in contact with Rabies or just suspected?
This obsession with cheap places to live intrigues me. In Memphis, TN you can rent a decent apartment in a shitty part of town for $300 a month. And Memphis isn't even close to the cheapest big city in the US.
In Birmingham Alabama, you can't get just as hot as you can in Vietnam, and your rent will be pretty similar.
Yes, healthcare and food are more expensive, but not that much. And you'll spend less on those two things over the year than if you come home once a year to keep your citizenship.
I believe the reason for this is simple (though understandably unpopular):
A lot of people that get rich because of America would just drop American citizenship once they do get rich to avoid paying back into the system that allowed them to become successful.
There is no other country that offers as much upward mobility as the US to its citizens. Hence the tax.
Nope. First of all, social mobility in the US is not better than anywhere else (https://www.epi.org/publication/usa-lags-peer-countries-mobi...) . Secondly, it's not that much harder to renounce US citizenship than other countries - in fact, in some ways it's easier because the US is the only country I know of that allows you to renounce citizenship without having another citizenship already.
My point was only that you don't have to "actively keep" your citizenship, by visiting the US or any other means.
Also the services that the US Government provides to even their overseas expats is pretty remarkable. I’m not sure there’s another country in the world that can bail you out of a dicey situation within hours in almost any spot on earth.
You don't know what you are talking about. The US overseas generally won't lift a finger unless it has invaded the country in question. Canada, the UK, Germany, Ireland, Japan: all in fact assist.
>This obsession with cheap places to live intrigues me.
That's... pretty damn bizarre that you'd find it intriguing.
>In Memphis, TN you can rent a decent apartment in a shitty part of town for $300 a month.
Who _wants_ to live in the shitty part of town? You've deconstructed your own argument in a sentence.
Also, with American money you can live in Vietnam like royalty, and in an area that looks like paradise. There's a reason the places you are talking about are in the "flyover states".
> Who _wants_ to live in the shitty part of town? You've deconstructed your own argument in a sentence.
Let's say you just quit your job to live your dream of creating an indie video game. You'll probably want as much runway as possible while you build.
Startups tend to need rapid iteration and experimentation unless they're highly technical, which is why this plan is probably better for things you can do solo and completely cut off.
On the other hand, maybe someone just wants to spend a few years playing video games and reading books? Why not do it cheaply?
Sure, I don’t mean to suggest it’s a good idea for all or even most Americans to retire in Vietnam vs. a cheaper city in the USA. However I do think a sizeable amount (maybe some 5% of retirees?) would be a good match for that
Tropical weather and ocean access helps. A flat land with extremes of hot and cold, tornadoes and drastic divergences in daily temperature are more worrisome than being on the head with a Bible, personally.
Yes all that is geographically part of the Bible Belt:
Shitty extremes of temperature
Shitty hostile weather patterns
Shitty viability of opportunities as a result of ongoing talent drain towards the coasts with everyone wondering why its so cheap
Shitty isolationist mentality and nationalism to rationalize why their dystopian nightmare is okay
Shitty extremes of religion that were literally kicked out of Europe
Shitty public policy and services as a byproduct of the prior two realities
When people want to enjoy their money its an easy and hard pass on the bible belt. Social welfare states and full blown communist states by the water give you everything for free all while you can buy luxury in liberalized state planned economies.
A resort town in SE Asia is pretty nice; you also have to consider much cheaper services that you aren’t going to get in a cheap Deep South city. It has nothing to do with communism or Bible belts.
>Good thing is, American government has sensible reciprocal arrangement with many countries that offer national pension system that you don't necessarily have to wait until you hit full retirement age to live abroad and collect social security checks from there.
In a nutshell, all national pension systems work pretty much the same way in that, the longer you put into it, the more you get out. There is also minimum that you have to put in. For the U.S., it's 40 points (or 10 years).
Let's say you work 9 years in the U.S. but then decide to pack your stuff up and move to one of the above listed countries. You will get credit for 9 years worth of work and not have to start over in your new country (and the other way around too)
I'm actually conflating two different topics... one is reciprocal arrangement in terms of pension point system.
Another is, just being able to collect pension from abroad, which is actually not a big deal at all.
I'm surprised by how well written the social security administration article is. I found it interesting and readable enough to read all the way through, which I absolutely wasn't expecting.
That's very expensive for Vietnam or relative to what you get in terms of infrastructure/law. They either got a bad deal or the market right there is crazier than the US.
> The children were born via caesarean
section; the procedure, including a four-day hospital stay, cost about $1,200, far less than it would have in the United States.
> Monthly expenses here rarely exceed $2,000, even to live in a large unit like Rockhold’s, including the help of a cook and a cleaner.
Getting staff for that price in the US is next to impossible.
Yeah, but then you’d have to live in the rural midwest US rather than a beach city. The rural life just isn’t for some people. Also, old people like to retire to warmer places so they don’t feel cold all the time.
They also want to be able to afford housekeepers, gardeners, and cooks at a rate so low they can afford to have all three and still come out cheaper than having one of those in the US.
Yeah, but you can't find an 18 year old woman to marry you as a modern day indentured servant in the midwest. Ninety percent or so of the old white men I encountered in SEA had his arm around some poor childlike girl.
While that is a horrible thing to say, I wouldn't disagree. I also saw some rather worrying couples when I was living in Saigon.
That said, some Asian women also just look young even at a surprisingly high age. I recently had Germans mistake my Asian mother in law to be my younger sister.
But sure, it is a big plus that in Saigon the $2k in retirement money pay not only for one person, but for an entire family. So if you're old and lonely, that might be a very attractive reason to go.
Absolutely, but I hope my comment was not taken as an endorsement by any means. I don't think most folks know how rampant it is. It was something I had read about and knew existed, but seeing it in person is eye opening. I know it's not my business and I shouldn't care, logically, but it makes me disgusted in some way every time.
If both people are getting what they want out of a relationship, what is the problem exactly?
The idea that relationships are based on love is not universal to say the least, many parts of the world still have arranged marriages that are explicitly transactional with an agreed dowry or bride price.
If it makes you feel a bit better, we are currently living through an unprecedented high in relationships based upon love rather than money.
That kind of thing's basically the norm among the rich, no matter where they live. Not really surprising that the non-rich do the same thing when they go somewhere that makes them, relative to the locals, rich.
I believe that it may well become an existential crisis for western cultures that guys are conditioned by advertisements to expect an attractive girlfriend in exchange for being successful at work, but in reality that rarely works out.
On the one side, that leads to men who feel like they deserve an attractive girlfriend and take evil methods for acquiring one.
On the other side, there's a booming industry in the US and Europe that teaches rich single white dudes how to be a decent enough human being for long enough to go on a normal date with a normal girl.
But for the guy, after they have committed most of their youth to financial success in the hopes that it will lead to a mate, switching course later on will be very painful. And lots of frustrated overly horny dudes might destabilize the country.
In my experience that's significantly less common in Vietnam than in Thailand or the Philippines (having been to all three, and dated women in all three).
Agreed. I am going on my 4th year living in Vietnam, it is significantly less common here.
Of course you see a lot of sexpats, but Vietnamese culture is definitely less sexualized than in other SE Asia countries. It certainly exists literally everywhere, but it is just harder to find outside of the STD infected backpacker areas. The women are pretty adamant about having a bf.
For a long time, it was also more difficult and expensive to get a visa... so the guys looking to just get laid went to the easier countries. That is changing though as Vietnam now has an e-visa.
Indeed, this is kind of a gross thing that is definitely happening in not-so-subtle ways. It's also been called "sex tourism."
In fact, it appears the man in the article may fit that profile. I think there's a big difference between "American couples are retiring to Thailand" and "single American men are retiring to Thailand and marrying Thai women."
May I ask why that is? I've travelled a fair amount of Asia and Africa over the last decade and I have to say many places are significantly more exciting than a rural or small town in the US. I have not so much personal experience with the US, but my family is from a rural German region and if the US is anything like it (and I suspect it's not too far off), there are many more exciting places out there.
The cuisine and the culture in much of the developing world are superb, the cities are dynamic and young, transport and services are cheap, in contrast, going back to my parent's village feels like going to a whale graveyard. Now I'm far from retirement age and maybe I'll mellow out a bit but many western small towns I've seen are outright depressing to live in (and at this point lack basic services and public transport).
that's why you feel this way. After you lived a life and developed social ties and relationships in place it would be impossible to rebuild those in a radically different country.
Statements like "Retire to Vietnam!" are mostly absurd nonsense - really to go to a place you can't even read the signs?. The most valuable asset one has are the social ties - far easier to live in a boring German village where you know most people than in the most dynamic place on Earth where you never lived before.
>The most valuable asset one has are the social ties - far easier to live in a boring German village where you know most people
the problem is though that this is an idealized version of traditional small towns. My parents are still doing fine, but my grandparents were very isolated at the end of their lives because most peers have died off, are too old or sick to go anywhere, and most young people have left too so it's a very, very insular and lonely environment.
From the stories I read about the state of health, drug abuse and so on in American small towns it appears to be even worse.
Boring life is not necessarily a good thing for older folks. The practical problems of being far away from healthcare and so on aside, I believe being in a young and dynamic environment is a good thing for you if you're old, it keeps people stimulated.
People love painting the image of 'loneliness in the city' vs 'community in the village' but in reality, at least in my experience it's the other way around.
I moved to Japan 12 years ago and while I love it and it's the only home I know, I agree with you. Retiring, picking up and moving to a new country with a new culture would involve pretty serious culture shock. Betting the farm, so to speak, on wanting to live there for the rest of your life is kind of crazy I think. I've also had some health issues while I've lived here in Japan and even though I speak Japanese quite well and the Japanese health system is quite good, it's incredibly frustrating having to deal with something so important in a way that is foreign to you.
In kind of a less extreme situation, I've known several couples who retired in the UK and moved lock stock and barrel to Spain. Even there, I've heard horror stories of getting soul crush homesickness, not being able to sell the house, and eventually returning to the UK and living a very much reduced lifestyle thanks to all the assets being tied up in Spain. It's a massive risk.
I can only speak to Bangkok, but life in Bangkok will be cheaper, safer, more convenient, the food quality will be higher, medical and dental care will be much higher standards, public transport is better, than in Iowa. I’ve spent less time in Vietnam, but it seems to be hot on the heels of Thailand.
Bangkok ain't cheap. The current Thai government discourages retirees. Those who have already retired there are moving to Vietnam, Cambodia or the Phils.
I'm sure it's a very nice place, but that sum is nothing to sneeze at. I wonder how much it costs now, and what is monthly expense is.
Good thing is, American government has sensible reciprocal arrangement with many countries that offer national pension system that you don't necessarily have to wait until you hit full retirement age to live abroad and collect social security checks from there.