Category Archives: Personal Finance FAQ

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, when I first published this, the high in our hometown was 104 degrees, whereas it was 73 degrees in Istanbul…quality … 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

Since arriving from our cruise from New York to Rome, we’ve been staying in Split, Croatia.

However, when a friend of ours reached out and said that he’d be in Munich and wanted to meet us somewhere in the middle between Split and Munich, we jumped at the opportunity to see Vienna, Austria. Even though I was stationed in Germany, I’d never really been to Austria. I drove over the border one time after a training exercise just to say that I’d been in Austria, but that was the extent of my time – maybe 5 minutes.

Admittedly, we … Read the article

I was tested positive for COVID on day 11 of our 17 day trans-Atlantic cruise. It started with a scratchy throat, which immediately alarmed me because I knew that was a symptom of Omicron. But, the ship was fully vaccinated and boosted AND all passengers had to test negative twice before the cruise began — 1 PCR test required for Bermuda within 2 days of embarkation and 1 antigen test the day before embarkation. The scratchy throat started the day after only our second port of call: Ponta Delgada in the Azores.  We’d sailed from New York, had one sea … Read the article

After spending last September in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico to learn Spanish, we were getting the travel bug again. My wife had been to see her optometrist for her annual exam. She’s presbyopic, and wanted to see if there was an option like the LASIK we had back in 2001 to get rid of reading glasses.

Her optometrist suggested that she could be a candidate for a lens replacement surgery – similar to cataract surgery but replacing the lens with a trifocal lens that would remove the need to have reading glasses. Given our forthcoming travel schedule, she was very … Read the article