Your own estimate, in US dollars. Published figures for the same country vary wildly — see below.
Medicare generally does not travel. Quote your own policy; set to $0 if a local public system covers you.
Defaults to 3.5%, not 4% — reasoning below.
Benefits do follow you abroad in most countries. Set $0 to see the portfolio-only figure.
Portfolio required
—
Total annual cost
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budget + health
Portfolio covers
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per year
Health share
of annual cost
Portfolio required by withdrawal rate
Retire Abroad Portfolio Estimate — Financial Depth
financialdepth.com/retire-abroad
The short answer
Geographic arbitrage is real, and the size of it is straightforward: (annual budget + annual health cover − Social Security) ÷ withdrawal rate. What people get wrong is not the arithmetic but the inputs — they carry over a US withdrawal rate, forget that Medicare stops at the border, and assume an expat tax break that does not apply to investment income. Each of those errors pushes the required portfolio in the same direction: upward.
Portfolio required at each credible withdrawal rate
Using the budget, health cover and Social Security figure you entered. The 2.31% row is not a scare number — it is the published finding from the broadest historical dataset available, and it is the most defensible floor for someone whose spending is no longer denominated in dollars.
| Withdrawal rate | Portfolio required | Where the rate comes from |
|---|
"$0 needed" means the Social Security figure you entered already covers the whole budget on its own.
Why no two sources agree on what a country costs
Search for the monthly cost of retiring in Thailand and you will be told $1,300, $1,500, $2,000, $2,500 and $3,100 — all presented with equal confidence. The spread is not because the country is unknowable. It is because of who is publishing.
Most figures trace back to user-submitted cost indexes. Useful for rough ratios between cities, weak as a budget: the sample is self-selected and skews toward whoever bothered to fill in the form.
Much of the top of this search result is visa agencies, immigration lawyers, property firms, and newsletters harvesting emails. A low number is good marketing; nobody audits it.
One figure assumes a shared flat outside the city and street food. Another assumes a condo with a pool, a car, imported groceries and private hospitals. Both are honest. Neither is yours.
Numbers get republished across aggregator sites for years without re-checking, so a figure can look independently corroborated when it has one stale origin.
So this page does not tell you what a country costs. The honest division of labour is that you supply the local budget — ideally from your own visit, or from people currently living the life you intend to live — and this tool does the portfolio mathematics on it properly.
Three things that change the day you leave the United States
US citizens can generally receive Social Security while living in most countries. Original Medicare, by contrast, does not pay for care delivered outside the United States — aside from a few narrow exceptions and the US territories. So the income side of your plan travels and the healthcare side does not. Practically, that means either qualifying for a local public system or buying a private international policy, and putting that premium in your budget as a hard line item rather than an afterthought. If you drop Part B and later move home, re-enrolment can carry a penalty of roughly 10% of the premium for each year you were not enrolled.
The Foreign Earned Income Exclusion covers earned income only — wages, salary, self-employment for work performed abroad. Dividends, interest, capital gains, pensions and Social Security are all outside it. If you are retired and living on portfolio withdrawals, the FEIE does nothing for you. US citizens and green-card holders still file on worldwide income from anywhere on earth. For investment income the relevant tool is the Foreign Tax Credit, which offsets tax paid to your new country of residence rather than exempting the income.
Residence usually brings local tax obligations, and the rules move. Thailand is a live example: from January 2024 foreign income brought into the country by tax residents came into scope, and a subsequent proposal would exempt money remitted in the same year it is earned or the year after, with amounts outside that window taxed at progressive rates. The lesson is not the specific rule — it may have changed again by the time you read this — but that any plan resting on a foreign tax treatment needs re-checking against the current local rules, and ideally a local professional, before you commit.
Should the withdrawal rate itself be lower?
This page defaults to 3.5% instead of 4%, and the reasoning is worth stating openly rather than burying in a footnote. Two independent arguments point the same way.
The historical evidence outside the US is weaker. Every figure in the 4% lineage rests on twentieth-century American data. A 2025 paper in the Journal of Pension Economics and Finance rebuilt the analysis across 38 developed countries from 1890 to 2019, correcting for survivor bias, and found that a 65-year-old couple accepting a 5% chance of ruin could sustain only 2.31%. If you believe the American record is the relevant one for a US-listed portfolio, 4% still has a case. If you think the last American century was unusually kind, it does not.
You have added a currency mismatch. Your portfolio is priced in dollars; your rent, food and hospital bills are not. An adverse exchange-rate move cuts your real spending power even in a year when the portfolio does nothing wrong — a risk a domestic retiree simply does not carry. It is not usually catastrophic, but it is a second source of variance stacked on top of market risk, and the standard response to more variance is a lower starting rate or genuinely flexible spending.
Neither argument establishes a precise number, and this page does not pretend otherwise. Run the table above at 2.31%, 3%, 3.5% and 4% and treat the span as the honest answer. If your plan survives the low end, the rest is margin. For the full picture of where these figures come from, see the 4% rule research comparison.
Frequently asked questions
Does Medicare cover me if I retire abroad?
Generally no. Original Medicare does not pay for care received outside the United States, apart from a few narrow exceptions and coverage of US territories such as Puerto Rico and Guam. Social Security payments do follow you abroad; Medicare effectively does not. That asymmetry is the single largest budget item most people miss — you will usually need local public cover, if eligible, or a private international policy, and that annual premium belongs in the calculator above. Note that dropping Part B and later returning to the US can trigger a late-enrolment penalty of about 10% of the premium for each year you could have been enrolled.
Will the Foreign Earned Income Exclusion cut my taxes if I live on investments?
No, and this is the most common and most expensive misunderstanding in the retire-abroad conversation. The FEIE applies only to earned income — wages, salary, self-employment — for services performed in a foreign country. Dividends, interest, capital gains, pension income and Social Security are all excluded from it. A retiree living entirely on portfolio withdrawals therefore gets no benefit from the headline expat tax break at all. US citizens and green-card holders continue to file US returns on worldwide income no matter where they live. The Foreign Tax Credit, not the FEIE, is the mechanism that usually matters for investment income.
Why does every website give a different cost of living for the same country?
Because most of them are not measuring the same thing, and many are not measuring at all. Published monthly budgets for retiring in Thailand, for example, currently range from roughly $1,300 to over $3,100 depending on the source. Most trace back to crowdsourced cost databases or to sites whose business is selling visas, property, or advisory services rather than to a survey. None of them knows your rent, your health, or whether you drink imported wine. That is deliberately why this calculator asks you for the number instead of supplying one — the arithmetic is reliable, the cost-of-living input is the part only you can source.
Should my withdrawal rate be lower if I retire abroad?
There is a reasonable argument that it should. The 4% rule is calibrated on twentieth-century US market data, and a 2025 study in the Journal of Pension Economics and Finance covering 38 developed countries from 1890 to 2019 found a sustainable rate of just 2.31% for a 65-year-old couple accepting a 5% chance of ruin. On top of that, retiring abroad usually creates a currency mismatch: the portfolio is priced in dollars while the spending is in another currency, so an adverse exchange-rate move cuts real spending power even when the portfolio is flat. Neither point proves a specific number, but both push in the same direction — which is why this page defaults to 3.5% rather than 4%.
Related tools on FinancialDepth
Every credible withdrawal rate from 2.31% to 6%, with sources.
Retire on $X/month →The same reverse math for a US-based budget.
Can I retire on $X? →Income and longevity from $300K to $5M.
Barista FIRE →When part-time income closes the gap instead.