This is a good point. Living on $500/mo in a lush tropical paradise sounds fantastic.
Until you realize there are no like minded people around - you'll have no one to bounce ideas off of. This is one thing that interests me about dubai over generic-cheap-tropical-place, it's very much a driven environment.
Thailand is great for a vacation, or retirement. But I wouldn't want to hire technical talent there.
It very much a pick and choose your tradeoffs sort of situation. Can you find low living costs with a good, cosmopolitan urban core nearby? If so I think you've found shangri-la.
Let me help you: Porto Alegre, Curitiba, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte and Recife, all cities in Brazil with boatloads of developers and entrepreneurs, healthy ecosystems, booming markets, great culture and nightlife.
We just held the largest Javascript conference on the planet in Porto Alegre, with 900+ attendees, while RubyConf was simultaneously happening in São Paulo.
We do have excess bureaucracy for business, but it's getting better.
Argentina's government has taken a hard left turn, and has gotten the nationalization bug. This isn't the first time, either. This is a contrast to Chile- the government in Chile has been rather stable since Pinochet was voted out.
Santiago is a great cosmopolitan urban city, and it has quite the concentration of startups-- Startup Chile brings in 100 new startups three times a year, and that's on top of the startups that were already here (though Chile is not as entrepreneurial as the government would like it to be, Chileans seem to be very attuned to world pop culture -- anime, american bands, etc. This includes a subculture of startups that was blown up by Startup Chile.)
And Startup Chile is just one of the government programs. There are many of them, of a wide variety of types.
One bonus about Chile- some big summer movies premier here first. For instance, I saw The Avengers a week before you guys did. And usually they are in english with spanish subtitles. (I suspect the Chileans would not like the cheap acting of the spanish voiceovers that many movies get.)
But this isn't a "live on $500 a month" situation- cost of living is about what it was on the west coast of the USA. But then, I suspect dubai isn't either (but I cant' comment on Dubai having not been there.)
I just looked it up. The taxes are way higher than I'm paying now, or I'd pay in dubai(zero). The prices can be high in dubai (Currently less than a major US city), but they're one time costs.
There's almost a need to start a wiki on this subject.
This is a good point. Living on $500/mo in a lush tropical paradise sounds fantastic.
Until you realize there are no like minded people around - you'll have no one to bounce ideas off of. This is one thing that interests me about dubai over generic-cheap-tropical-place, it's very much a driven environment.
Thailand is great for a vacation, or retirement. But I wouldn't want to hire technical talent there.
It very much a pick and choose your tradeoffs sort of situation. Can you find low living costs with a good, cosmopolitan urban core nearby? If so I think you've found shangri-la.
I suspect Buenos Aires might be on that list.