How about the first time you went to a supermarket in your new country overseas only to discover a favourite food item had a price tag that nearly knocked you off your feet? Or you visited accommodation while apartment hunting that was expensive yet missing what you consider to be basic features? When we move abroad we have to decide which toys, trinkets, and habits we’ll keep in our adoptive country and which we’ll let go. I recently wrote an article about the cost of living for an expat retiree in Vietnam and discovered during research that I was spending money on things out of habit, not need, and that I could save a fair amount by tweaking priorities: How much does it cost an expat retiree to live in Vietnam? - Tuoi Tre... Part of that exercise was a sanity check on where money was going because the cost structure is quite different in Vietnam, so simply converting prices from a foreign currency to Vietnamese dong (VND) only tells part of the story. Some … [Read more...] about Out of sight…
