A great number of my Romanian programmer friends have already started to realize this and have stopped emigrating to other European countries.
Yeah, moving to a place like London would most probably get you 2 or maximum 3 times the salary you are now getting, but you'd also have to pay rent which is 8 to 10 times higher in London, going out is outrageously expensive (7 pounds for buying a beer in a pub after a day's work is pure robbery), the general geographic area is quite nice around these parts (we have mountains, seaside, nice rivers for fishing), all in all they're doing quite ok. They won't ever be able to buy a $100,000+ car, a small boat or a small air-plane, like I see many of the SV engineers doing, but that's not that huge of a sacrifice to make. What's letting me down, personally, and what would convince me to finally take the plunge and emigrate to a Western European country is the health and the education system, which right now is in shambles in Romania (and I guess in Bulgaria, too).
The cult of and preference for private and premium health care services in Central/Eastern Europe are going to backslash terribly in couple of decades. Everything works well as long as the only contributors and users of it are young, healthy, employed people. Then those private health providers and insurers will simply disappear or bankrupt, and people will end up with disintegrated public healthcare if only they will be eligible for it at all.
The current state of things is not perfect, and the private healthcare probably has indeed the inherent problem you're describing, but it is also maybe the only thing that keeps the bulk of our medical doctors from emigrating to richer parts of Europe.
An Indian friend who lives in London (this was some years ago) told me that a single naan in London cost about 3 pounds then. Anecdote, of course; how well you manage there will also depend on how much pay you get.
That's exactly my case: working as a niche IT specialist I earn about 4500 USD per month after taxes.
It might not be much by SV standards, but in my neighborhood (which is a capital city of one of CE countries) it is top 2% income. It's enough that after maybe 5 years of saving I'm now able to buy 1 bedroom apartment in the city center WITH CASH. Buying 2-3 bedrooms would also be possible if I needed it and decided to live further from the city center. Add cheap healthcare, free education, overall low living cost and that's really hard to top.
I get job offers from UK on regular basis, but never seriously considered it for that reason.
My plan is to retire in 5-7 years. I could do that sooner if I went into stock market (and prayed that the mythical 4% per year returns will be sustainable in the future) or became a landlord, but I prefer to play it safe.
> Would you be retiring in Poland? What kind of monthly expense do you foresee?
Yes, retiring in Poland. My plan is to go broke at 90-95.
I'm thinking 5000-6000 PLN per month ($1300-$1500), plus owning a property, will allow for a great living. This should even cover a very good nursing home (well as far as these places can ever be very good) when I'm unable to take care of myself. (I dont' and won't have children).
BTW there seems to be plenty of people from the UK who moved permanently to SE Asia (I imagine it can be cheaper than Poland + no winters) and who are sustained via rent from their London flat/house.
Yes. There are accounts in Poland which pay around 0-2% post-tax above inflation (the number vary year-to-year, depending on current economical conditions), which will help the capital still earn a bit of money.
For all, be aware that this kind of money are extremely rare (but doable in some niches) in Poland. Half of that is generally perceived as very good salary for most IT jobs, and median is probably quarter of that.
Yep - even our prime minister/president doesn't make that much a month, more like half that. I used to know a Polish guy making million Polish zloty/year(so about $300k) but he was the head of the Polish division of a major German insurance company.
Most of my Polish friends working in Poland as programmers(ranging from C++ to Web development) make about ~$2500-3500/month, and that's considered extremely good for where they live(Krakow and Warsaw).
Yep that's true. I don't count on making this kind of money locally (I don't even go through Polish job ads any more, as I can make more remotely or by taking up a contract in Western Europe), I just randomly found this opportunity.
But still, you can work remotely for a US company and make that kind of money. That's pretty realistic and was probably the source of the fortune cookie wisdom.
I never thought such kind of money is possible in Poland, except in one shitty company that shall remain unnamed here. Could you tell what do you do to earn such a salary ?
One was a remote job at a SV startup and now I'm making pretty much the same in an in-office job in an international corp. I filled a niche they badly needed to fill (it's not like I'm some unicorn though) hence the unusally high pay.
Nope, it's Big Data (infrastructure, pipelines etc.). Nothing exciting or innovative, it's just that there are too few people in this field who know what they're doing compared to the demand.
Yes, if you can manage to find even some 40k or 50k/year contract it will put you into about 5% of top earner in population in many central/east european countries.
Prices are not as low as you might imagine, but it will give you a very nice life standards. You are not going to be able to afford luxury cars or other luxury items (those costs the same everywhere), but otherwise you would be set.
It is a huge bargain, because most of what people really want out of life are positional goods - the nicest house in the neighbourhood, status with the higher-class local women whether for tinder dates or relationships/marriage, cheap local staff to perform services (child care, cleaners, gardeners, drivers, cooks).
You can afford none of these earning $100k in SV, but most of these earning $30k in Bucharest or Minsk.
Of course if you are after material goods, the opposite is true - if you don't care about a nice house but want a new Tesla, a new iDevice every year, Hermes bags and a Cessna instead, then you are better of living in a flatshare or a shoebox in San Fran or the Valley.
If they are local, they may not want to go abroad. The mindset here is that you begin to accumulate large amount of cash savings early in life (20s-30s), which is a huge boon. This gives you a number of benefits compared to your peers in less hot industries: you can buy an apartment and save on rent long term; you can start your own business; you sleep better not worrying about the future; you can negotiate better work conditions because you are not afraid you'll lose a job.
The fact that you would not have the same position abroad (i.e. your cash savings are large locally but small if you lived in a rich country) is not a loss of any kind, it's just a fact that has no bearing on daily life.
Even at the 50k/year contract (and you can get much more), you'll afford a mortgage on a big house, will afford eating out daily etc. You'll be way above average most people in Europe and probably in the US as well.
Your saving rate is going to be higher on 50k/year in easter Europe than 100k SF salary. Just by using this extra money and investing them in various assets might help you get additional income streams that will eventually helps you cross that gap or maybe just retire much earlier.
> Your saving rate is going to be higher on 50k/year in eastern Europe than 100k SF salary.
Yeah, except that the going rate for a good junior developer in SV is about $150k (Google, Facebook) and in Romania it's $20k. I recently moved away from Romania because while I could find a job in Western Europe paying more than $100k, there was no way to find something in Romania (or remote) paying even 30% of that. And not for lack of trying.
Also, $300k a year in SV is much more achievable than $100k in Romania or Bulgaria, and with that sort of money you start caring about other stuff than housing (luxury goods, exotic vacations, investments etc.) whose stuff doesn't depend on location.
Yeah, moving to a place like London would most probably get you 2 or maximum 3 times the salary you are now getting, but you'd also have to pay rent which is 8 to 10 times higher in London, going out is outrageously expensive (7 pounds for buying a beer in a pub after a day's work is pure robbery), the general geographic area is quite nice around these parts (we have mountains, seaside, nice rivers for fishing), all in all they're doing quite ok. They won't ever be able to buy a $100,000+ car, a small boat or a small air-plane, like I see many of the SV engineers doing, but that's not that huge of a sacrifice to make. What's letting me down, personally, and what would convince me to finally take the plunge and emigrate to a Western European country is the health and the education system, which right now is in shambles in Romania (and I guess in Bulgaria, too).