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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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How do you feel about island life?

A lot of the places that are trying to attract remote workers and are themselves decent places to live are small island nations.

Malta, Guernsey, Bermuda, Cayman, BVI, Antigua, Monserrat. There's a lot of choice of places that are safe, commonwealth members (and therefore English speaking), tax havens (and therefore self selecting for affluent international elites and their needs) with warm climates, beaches and all the nautical activities you could want.

I've never seriously considered island life. I tend to think of the islands as a pretty strict dichotomy between the working class locals (involved in service and tourism industries) and the wealthy who bring their money with them.

Neither of us has spent any non-vacation time in any island nation so we are coming at it blind. Is there a particular nation you'd recommend above the others? Also keep in mind the kids aspect: would you want to raise your children there?

Malta in particular I thought was really child friendly, very safe, lots of activities, strong local communities and therefore lots of them running around the place, to a degree that surprised me as a "regular" Europeean, and it has a few other advantages due to its proximity to Europe. People there mostly work in the online gaming industry too, which percludes it from being solely a tourist trap, but let us be honest, wherever you go there is always going to be a gap between international elites and locals (even in Germany and the like). It's just a feature of the globalized world at this point and how fair the arrangements they have negotiated with each other are is really what you should be looking at rather than whether the gap exists.

And it's not the only one like that, what few time I spent on Corsica or even Sark I thought I would have loved growing up there. But I might be biased because I love both the countryside and the sea.

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