Category Archives: Personal Finance FAQ

We spent the past six weeks in Istanbul, Turkey, evaluating it as a long-term destination for more extended travels. Istanbul is the largest city we’ve been to in our travels, with an official(ish) population of 16 million, and whispers of it having more than 20 million people due to the influx of refugees from the ongoing Syrian civil war. It was also wracked by inflation while we were there. We saw prices of common toiletries jump by 20% in our six weeks in Istanbul, and the currency exchange rate fluctuated wildly.

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As a result, we wound up withdrawing 500 … Read the article

Yes, I know that’s a pretty sharp headline. The original headline was “Izmir: Turkey’s Ashtray,” so I did tone it down a little.

We just got back from a six day trip to Izmir, Türkiye. We wanted to love it. We first got turned onto Izmir when we saw how much Stephanie and Gillian of Our Freedom Years loved Izmir. So, we decided that when we were in Istanbul, we wanted to check out Izmir as well to see if we wanted to add it to the list of places that we’d want to return to for longer.

We … Read the article

I’ve had good dentists and I’ve had bad dentists in the United States. I guess I should not be surprised that my worst recent dental experience was with our high deductible dental insurance plan, which sent me to a dentistry chain where the hygienist had me do all sorts of treatments, despite previous dentists telling me all was well and normal with my choppers.

As a result, having been inspired by Ali’s experience with dentists internationally, I decided to try going the route of dental tourist in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. That experience went so well that, when we … Read the article

How Accurate are the Cost Estimates of Numbeo and Expatistan?

Whenever we look at places to stay for long-term destinations, one of the items we look at is cost. While we’d love to be the high-rolling ballers who rock up to Saint Tropez in our yachts, that’s not really how we roll. We’re fans of geographic arbitrage, where we can get the same or a better quality of living than we can when we’re back home in Texas (for example, as I’m writing this, the high in our hometown today will be 104 degrees, whereas it’s going to be 73 … Read the article

After landing in Rome, Italy from our transatlantic cruise from New York to Rome on Norwegian Cruise Lines, we flew from Rome to Split, Croatia, where we spent four weeks living on the outskirts of a fourth century Roman emperor’s palace.

Getting to Split was not quite as easy as we thought it would be, or should have been.

Upon disembarking from our ship in the port of Civitavecchia, we took a train to the Termini station in Rome. Since our flight wasn’t for another eight hours, we decided that we would store our bags at the train … Read the article