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The Motte Picks Where I Spend the Rest of My Life

Alternative Title: Where would you live if you had only minimal constraints?

While I am very much soliciting genuine requests and hope to follow through on the post title, I hope this prompt will also be a fun one.

Many of us fantasize about living abroad or starting over. But there is always an excuse. Some factor tying us down or preventing us from making the lunge: a job, a partner, a sick relative. I have found myself with these excuses recently plucked away.

Since any (good) recommendation should be tailored to the recipient, here are the aforementioned minimal constraints:

  1. American citizen. Native English speaker.
    • Not restricted to English speaking locations, but the difficulties of learning a language and assimilating should be considered
    • For simplicity and op-sec, assume fluency in other languages can be rounded down to 0
  2. Long Term, Stable Couple
    • All preferences are shared between both of us
    • Do not need to consider relationship prospects of destination
    • Monogamous
    • Straight
  3. Young (~30) years old
  4. No children yet. Will have first (of several) children within next 3 years.
    • No adult dependents (such as sick family members that need to be cared for)
  5. $250k household income
    • Assume standard income growth for competitive tech field: +5-10% real growth per year.
  6. Fully Remote Work
    • This is the big one that opens up the world
    • Assume remote work will remain viable (fair assumption given our fields)

I'm a believer in the idea that constraints can paradoxically increase creativity, but if you have a dream destination that is incompatible with these constraints don't let me stop you from sharing.

The Motte has an eclectic mix of users and I specifically want to know YOUR ideal destination, NOT what you think someone like us would want. The standard lists and rankings of "best places to live" are either bizarre (they overweight metrics that don't matter to most) or end up just being too blank - effectively just a list of major cities.

I'm hoping to discover some unusual preferences. Maybe your dream is a few hundred acres of farmland in a rural spot. Maybe it's something incredibly niche like needing to be walking distance from the Louvre or being able to view the Khumbu at sunrise from your porch. Now is the time to sell me the rest of us on your dream :).

We will be visiting a number of options this summer and would love to add some additional locations to either this trip or the next. The goal is to move to this location early 2025.

Will include some of the options I've been toying with as a comment.

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I've been looking at moving to Malaysia (albeit my partner is from there and has a big, pretty well-off Malaysian Chinese family which makes the decision considerably easier) with my newborn, sooner or later.

  • Cheap (About a third COL of Australia). Can buy a reasonable longterm family home in the gated community in a upper middle class suburb my partner's family lives in for $300-350k AUD (About $200k USD)
  • 90% Developed. There's stuff you'll miss from the West but if you pick one of the outlying spots around Kuala Lumpur or Georgetown you're getting the vast majority of creature comforts and cheap as hell.
  • English reasonably strong
  • Education system strong if in Malaysian Chinese area
  • Childcare very cheap due to proximity to the rest of SEA. Foreign maid is about $10-15k per annum AUD.
  • Going from 0 cousins for my child in Australia due to my only child status to about 40 within 20 minutes in Malaysia.
  • Nice and central for Asian tourism (also only 8 hours back to Australia for occasional trips in my case)

Honestly in my opinion technology's reached a point where there's just not a huge dropoff in QOL/development between a city in a country with a first tier Western GDP per capita and one that's above $15k per capita or so.

Dude nice! Southeast Asia is probably one of the most intriguing areas of the world for me. One of the better non-Western country choices, if you ask me. Seems like Malay isn't too hard to learn either, for a non-Indo-European language, and a lot of people speak it.

Which language to learn in some countries is a bit of a question. In my personal situation I'd be a lot better served improving my Mandarin than my Malay, since despite Malaysia's diversity it's in kind of an odd 'everybody lives in their little bubbles and deeply distrusts the other ethnics' kinda way.

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