It’s a fair question. Relocating to a different country or city to pursue better economic opportunities needs to consider a wide range of factors. Please see a summary of these important factors in Table 1 here. This tool does not replace the need for serious due diligence from the user before relocating. Instead, the aim of the tool is to facilitate narrowing down on a smaller set of cities that can be assessed in more depth. Moving abroad or to a different city can be overwhealming when we consider the amount of places one can choose from.

Put simply, this is the data provided by Numbeo, an expat-oriented data platform. Ideally, we would prefer to use median salary data, but this is not available. It is important to consider the potential downsides of using average city data:

• These averages do not account for potentially large differences existing across sectors. On a city level, consider that unusually high salaries in the finance sector in London may increase the average for the city, but not reflect perfectly the reality for most people living there that are working in other sectors. Again, median salary data would be better for this, but we don’t have access to it.

Indeed, for a small set of countries there are wealth taxes (or similar), where potfolios are taxed on a yearly basis on unrealized gains (e.g., Netherlands). This undoubtably affects your timeline to reaching financial independence. Consider up-to-date information on capital gains tax for different countries (e.g., here), and whether it affects or not the accumulation phase of pursuing FIRE.

We are using net average salary and COL data from Numbeo (2024), and expat-oriented platform. The data is sourced from its users, so you likely need a relevant volume of crowd-sourced data for a city data point to be made available. The larger the city, the more likely it is for a city to appear in the dataset.