The US is really good at "money", so US is certainly one of the best from an economic perspective, but I would take the "high salaries" with a tiny grain of salt. The US also has one of the highest if not the highest inequality of income distribution in the OECD. This is great if you're at the top---not remarkable (compared to the rest of OECD) if you're in the middle---and rather sucks if you're in the bottom.thrifty++ wrote: ↑Tue Oct 29, 2019 3:03 amI like the idea of moving to the USA from a financial perspective. I definitely think its the best economically. Listening to USA based podcasts and reading USA based personal finance blogs I am regularly shocked at how high the pay is and how low living costs are, in particular housing.
If you read the internations survey (linked in my first response, there's one for each year which goes back to 2014), expats love the economic possibilities(*), but they don't like the high costs of health insurance/care and childcare/education which is something pretty much every American/resident has to worry about and that people in other developed countries generally don't. Since everybody pays "the same", this poses a particular problem for the median and low income groups. At the lowest rung of the ladder, living in the US does begin to resemble third world conditions complete with pop-up tent clinics.
See http://worldpopulationreview.com/countr ... y-country/
(*) And not just the potential for high salaries, but also the enormous variety of careers by virtue of living in a large and technologically and commercially advanced country.
Ahh.. perhaps it makes sense to talk about how US is better seen as bunch of different nations in that regard. For example, California is very different from, say, Indiana. Alabama is very different from Vermont. More different from each other than say England and Germany. Read this https://www.amazon.com/American-Nations ... 0143122029 and keep it in mind before choosing a state (or country).
It's also easy to think that the high salaries and the low cost of living exist in the same area. Again Silicon Valley is different from Humboldt county. Generally, they do not. E.g. a 1bd/1ba apartment in Menlo Park (Facebook HQ) where engineering incomes are in the six-fig range is about $2500/month. Whereas in the sticks, rent might be $400/month but the only jobs available pay $12/hr. However, one thing ERE can do is to find creative ways around that issue, but it might require living in an RV
