It’s a fair question. Relocating to a different country 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 countries that can be assessed in more depth. Moving abroad can be overwhealming when we consider the amount of countries 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 data:

• National averages don’t reflect differences within countries, especially between those found between cities and rural areas. However, this phenomena is likely to exist in most countries, so, while averages may not perfectly capture individual circumstances, they provide a useful relative comparison across countries.

• These averages as well 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 (e.g., here), and whether it affects or not the accumulation phase of pursuing FIRE.

As mentioned, average country data does not reflect differences across cities. For this reason, I am building a similar approach that applies this methodology on a city level.