Financial independence isn't one date — it's a different date in every city. Set your numbers, then click a dot to see what living there actually involves.
Every dot is a city. Left to right is the age you could retire there — further left is sooner. Up and down is whatever you pick above (), so higher is better on that measure.
That makes the top-left corner the sweet spot: retire soonest, give up least. A dot sitting alone in the bottom-right is the worst of both — expensive and weak on the thing you said you cared about. Dot size is metro population, colour is continent.
Scroll to zoom, drag to pan, click a dot for the full picture. Cities you could never afford on these numbers aren't plotted at all.
| Real return | Earliest | Median city | Lisbon |
|---|
Costs. Researched estimates for one person living comfortably long-term: rent on a private one-bedroom in a desirable neighbourhood, groceries and eating out, transport, private health insurance, coworking, and leisure. They are a starting point for comparison, not quotes.
Exchange rates are fetched live from a free public API and cached for 12 hours. Because every city converts at the same rate, currency choice cannot change the ranking — only the absolute figures.
Political stability is the World Bank's governance percentile for political stability and absence of violence, rounded to the nearest 5. It measures the country, not your street, and it moves. Safety, English, internet and the transport scores are coarser still — the car-free number is three rough judgements averaged, useful for filtering and not much more.
Visa and tax entries are the most perishable thing here. Thailand's remittance rules changed in 2024, Portugal's NHR regime closed to new entrants, and Indonesia's treatment of foreign income has moved more than once. Anything here is a prompt to go and check, not an answer.
Planning to a death age assumes you know it. You don't. Spending down to zero by 90 needs far less capital than living off returns forever, and that gap is exactly the risk you take on if you live to 95. Real plans usually sit between the two.
What the model leaves out entirely: currency risk, healthcare costs as you age, the cost of moving and visa runs, and sequence-of-returns risk. A constant real return is a convenient fiction — the order of returns in your first few years matters more than the average.
This is a tool for comparing destinations against each other. The ranking is far more trustworthy than the absolute dates. It is not financial advice.