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If you want more info, just send me an email! I'd like more guys to join in, so I can get bigger and nicer places. If you are up for some travel and want to work in an office, it's perfect!
Eagerly following this thread.
- Montreal: 300$; dorms 250$
- University town, Germany: 250$, 180$ for the dorms
- University town, Turkey: 120$
- India, monastery guest house: 60$
- China, Kunming (mid-sized city): 80$
I've found that the cost of living is pretty much proportional to the rent. Internet costs are negligible, unless you live in a very remote place.
There's a lot to write about the experience, but in short: best decision of my life. Two years without any responsibility whatsoever, free to hack or just go biking any time of day. With the advent of the Internet, a new lifestyle for doing research and development (aka, sow the seeds of the next Google) has opened outside the constraints of academia and industry. Few people seem to be taking advantage of it.
Tunisia is not expensive, but Egypt is very cheap (3X less expensive) so bootstrapping from there will be easier. and they have good internet connection.
It's dangerous to do, because if you don't succeed returning is much more harder! So good luck if you go for it!
Im currently living in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Low cost of living. Nice relaxed environment for when youre not working. I was previously living in Australia. Made a decent living from consulting work which may have been one of the reasons the product side of the business didn't do terribly well. Once I was out of the country consulting work got harder to get so I've had to devote more energy to products and that seems…
Can I somehow make more money with what I (we) am about to create and stay where I am (or US)?
Sure these places have cheap rent, but you also leave all your social ties behind and will be limited to a particular subset of the social fabric (expats, most likely, that either teach English or are avoiding something important by coming there). It's also distracting by being elsewhere, though often in a good way.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ok, I'll bite. I'm a software developer, 10 years of web dev experience, and I can't fathom a business idea that would "absurdly easily" make me a grand a month. But I have little experience in entrepreneurship as of yet. Mind giving me a few pointers?
There are a lot of business models out there. I'm sort of partial to making software people want and then selling it to them. If that sounds interesting to you, I have a blog linked in my profile.
You may want to bend the ear of these guys: http://www.expatsoftware.com I have lived abroad for the last couple of years. It is a wonderful experience. There are much, muuuuuuuuuuch easier ways of reducing your burn rate, if that is what matters to you. One simple one is taking your fluent command of the English language, American passport, and familiarity with all the local systems and relocating to anywhere in the…
Nothing is "absurdly" easy. No, $1000 is not an incredibly difficult monthly recurring revenue number to achieve, but to say it is "absurd" or even "easy" unless you're a marketing guru with considerable capital and resources at your disposal is preposterous.
As was mentioned, the rents are reasonable (I've got a friend living in a 5 1/2---2 bed, living/dining/kitchen for about $550/month, and he's walking distance to downtown), there's a good tech culture (lots of speech & language related stuff, web companies, game studies, etc.), and the city itself is great---a mix of the best bits of North American and European culture...you can find stuff to do 24hrs/day no problem). Also, the girls are smokin'.
As for language issues, I know people who are born & raised in Mtl and don't speak any French (beyond "oui", "non", "bière", "poutine"). There's a street called St-Laurent that more or less divides the city into eastside/westside. If you're on the west side, you can use English with no fear. Yes, you may run into a French Québecois who's an ass and tells you off, but it's really rare (more common in the east, though).