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by spacedcowboy 9 days ago
As someone who moved from the UK, to the US and back to the UK, my money goes a lot further in the UK.

I can afford to not work at all here. With health insurance, property taxes, and general outgoings per month being so much higher in the US (California, at least), there was no way I could retire early over there.

And whereas it's easy to hand-wave away "Trump, the healthcare, guns, ... " in a dismissive sentence, those things have real impact on a society and on the individuals living in that society. There's a reason [1] I moved away from the US, and will never return. Money-über-alles has its downside.

It's also worth noting (since the author brings it up) that the Mississippi comparison is pretty bogus. According to data from the Office for National Statistics and the US Census Bureau, median household wealth in Great Britain is substantially higher (around £300,000, or $403,000)[2] compared to the US ($175,000) [3] and Mississippi ($59,000). GDP and personal wealth are not the same thing.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44217106

2: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/personal...

3: https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/2024/demo/p70br...

1 comments

> there was no way I could retire early over there.

It seems that the UK is becoming the new Portugal (warm retiree destination with stagnant non-retiree economy)

That seems quite a claim from one datapoint...
Ah, more of a joke on your datapoint. And the traditional British practice of retiring to more southern locations in Europe.
:)

FWIW, I retired to the coast in the NW, I have a beach on one side of the house and a park on the other. It's pretty nice :)

Even up here in the NW though, it's been too damn hot recently...