Americans have enjoyed lifestyles that would normally be out of reach to them by working remotely in countries with lower living costs.

A woman in a brown leather jacket leans against a stone railing with colorful homes behind her.

Nino Trentinella has built a new life in Tbilisi, Georgia, where she can afford a housekeeper and regular meals at restaurants.Credit...Tako Robakidze for The New York Times

Nino Trentinella enjoys the luxuries of an upper-middle-class life in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, where she has lived for more than two years.

Ms. Trentinella, 46, who grew up in Baltimore after emigrating from Tbilisi as a child, has been working remotely as an expatriate, choosing to live a nomadic existence. She earns under $40,000 a year as a freelance educator specializing in art, mostly working with children. She has a housekeeper who comes twice a week, takes cabs almost every day and eats at local restaurants regularly. Her husband earns a variable mid-five-figure income annually.

Ms. Trentinella, who is an American citizen, and her husband benefit from the foreign earned income exclusion, in which the first $130,000 earned by Americans abroad (for the 2025 tax year) plus a portion of housing costs is exempt from U.S. taxation. Moreover, she pays just 1 percent in local taxes because of Georgia’s beneficial tax laws for remote workers.

This lifestyle would be unattainable for someone in her position and salary in the United States, she said. Even as a freelancer, she was able to take six months of maternity leave and hire household help, something few of her friends working in the U.S. corporate world are able to do.

“We had a cook,” Ms. Trentinella said. “She came to the house and prepared food for us a few times a week. We had a housekeeper.”

Ms. Trentinella would like to eventually move back to the United States to give her eldest child more opportunities and retire around her extended family. But the cost of returning seems much too high.

Digital nomadism rose in popularity in 2020 as the pandemic normalized remote work. Since the 2024 presidential election, interest among U.S. citizens in moving abroad has spiked, and Americans left in record numbers last year, many in search of lower living costs.

About 5.5 million Americans live abroad, according to the Association of Americans Resident Overseas, a nonpartisan group for citizens outside the country. For those planning to return home, many find that they aren’t able to replicate the same comfortable lifestyles they’ve had abroad. As a result, they have made plans to continue living outside the United States, or have made radical life changes.

One major concern is having enough money to retire comfortably. As a freelancer, Ms. Trentinella described her retirement prospects as “a bit weird” and hasn’t started saving in earnest.

“I don’t get any benefits,” she said. “Everything kind of comes out of pocket. In a way, it’s easier when a company does it for you.”

Ms. Trentinella is looking into alternative income streams to sustain her family in later years.

Another concern is the high cost of health care in the United States. Ms. Trentinella said she relied on health care insurance from France, where she lived briefly and where her partner is originally from. She said many other local expats enjoyed cheap, fast, out-of-pocket services, paying just under $40 for routine treatments like blood tests.

Saving Via Geographic Arbitrage

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A man with a beard, wearing a yellow beanie, a gray shirt and a blue plaid scarf, leans against a bright orange torii gate.

Corey O’Flanagan has been living a nomadic lifestyle outside the United States for three years. Working in countries with lower costs of living has allowed him to save for retirement faster.Credit...via Corey O’Flanagan

Corey O’Flanagan, a video editor, earns a low-six-figure income annually alongside his partner. He said he spent roughly $70,000 a year splitting his time among Southeast Asia, Southern Europe and the Balkans and estimated that his current lifestyle would cost $120,000 a year to maintain in his native Denver.

Mr. O’Flanagan, 43, said he kept within his budget regardless of where he traveled, splurging more on things like eating out in low-cost locations like Malaysia or Thailand and less in higher-cost areas like Italy or Spain. He enjoys luxuries like massages, which he said he wouldn’t consider spending on in the United States.

“I think eating out is a big thing — we don’t cook at home,” Mr. O’Flanagan said. “I would say that 80 percent of what we do in America involves groceries, and we will eat out once in a while. When we’re in Southeast Asia, it almost makes more sense to eat out than it does to go buy groceries.”

Mr. O’Flanagan has been living a nomadic lifestyle for three years and started seriously thinking about retirement only at the age of 38. He said he had managed to save somewhere in the mid-six figures for retirement and had also built up a $50,000 emergency fund.

He has been able to save much faster by doing what is known as geographic arbitrage — working for American and Australian clients while living in low-cost countries like Vietnam.

“I felt like I was falling behind for my age, so I’ve just got a little bit more serious about it,” Mr. O’Flanagan said.

With his current income, he said he wouldn’t feel comfortable retiring in the United States, or even visiting for extended periods.

“Health care in the United States really scares both of us,” Mr. O’Flanagan said of himself and his spouse. “My wife’s English, so it really scares her, and I’m learning how bad it is when I go to use health care systems in other countries.”

In Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, for example, he and his wife paid $400 each for a series of proactive health tests, including urine samples, bloodwork and an ultrasound of all their organs, along with a consultation with a doctor that lasted for over an hour. These types of full-service preventive screenings could cost several thousand dollars in the United States.

Mr. O’Flanagan said his current plan was to retire abroad, but maybe with the option to return home for a few months each year to visit family.

Peter Sengelmann, an expat-focused chartered financial analyst at Creative Planning International, a wealth management firm, has seen people make mistakes when they try to save for retirement abroad.

Common pitfalls include contributing to U.S. retirement accounts when they don’t qualify or using after-tax money to fund a traditional individual retirement account, which can lead to taxation on both contributions and withdrawals.

If expats are able to fully exclude their earned income from U.S. taxation by using the foreign earned income exclusion, they do not qualify to make a contribution to an I.R.A. or a Roth I.R.A. account, both of which require taxable earned income.

In addition, Mr. Sengelmann has noticed nomads not being mindful of taxes in general when living in another country. Some may not realize, for example, that “they must file and pay local income taxes or even contribute to local or state pensions.”

“The general rule we remind people of is that where you earn the money is where you’ll likely need to pay income tax,” Mr. Sengelmann said, “even if a nomad’s clients — and the money they’re paid — are based in the U.S.”

Leaving and Returning

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A man with red, curly hair and black-rimmed glasses leans against a brown chair in a living room.

James Stanley, who made just under $15,000 a year when he lived in Mexico City, managed to rent a room there for $400 a month.Credit...Joshua Lott for The New York Times

James Stanley started out his nomad adventure without a clear financial plan for how he would make things work long term, initially spending the money he made doing seasonal work as a chef in the United States. Unlike many digital nomads, who have spent years working remotely in technology industries, Mr. Stanley planned to move and then sort out a remote income later.

Mr. Stanley, 35, earned just under $15,000 a year while living in Mexico City, doing a mixture of teaching English online to Chinese children and writing for content mills “producing spam,” he said, or articles to promote services and products.

Though this income wouldn’t be sustainable in his native Chicago, it afforded him a solid living in Mexico City.

“I’m very minimalist — I don’t need that much to live,” Mr. Stanley said.

He rented big rooms from friends in less gentrified areas of Mexico City for $400 a month, still within reach of some of the city’s most popular locations. He spent less than $10 a day on food while eating a diet rich in fruits and vegetables.

Mr. Stanley said he was able to maintain $5,000 in liquid savings but wasn’t putting away money for retirement. He did not have health insurance, and instead paid several hundred dollars out of pocket each time he needed treatment.

His life in Mexico, was a happy one, he said, but the lack of health insurance as he aged, and the inability to build a future nest egg, terrified him.

Though Mr. Stanley did have good experiences visiting low-cost walk-in clinics attached to pharmacies, paying $100 for treatment for short-term ailments such as bouts of vertigo, he had misgivings about navigating health care in a foreign country as an individual in a financially precarious situation.

“The remote work wasn’t really cutting it,” Mr. Stanley said. “I knew, sooner or later, I’m going to get into a situation where I have a serious health problem.”

These worries came to a head after a back spasm that left him bedridden for roughly a week last year.

A few months ago, Mr. Stanley moved in with his parents in the Chicago suburbs. He’s studying to get an insurance license with the aim of jump-starting an insurance career, later pivoting to remote work if he can.

His goal? To return to Latin America on a more secure financial footing, as a better-heeled expat.

From the comments

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Mike Dang

Editor

The "expat dream" looks great on Instagram — nice homes and nightly dinners for a fraction of U.S. prices. But what happens when they want to return home?

I asked Will McCurdy, a London-based journalist, to talk with Americans living abroad about the financial reality of moving back. Two major hurdles stood out: the staggering cost of U.S. healthcare and having enough saved for a domestic retirement.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5858355&forum_id=2],#49826956)