Although he’s not an American, Gerardo has created a very useful site for American Expats: Expatistan. The site collects pricing information for large cities around the world and lets you compare costs. It’s not perfect, but it gives you a quick grasp of whether your cost of living will increase or decrease, and by how much. Another great thing about the site is that the price information is crowd-sourced, which means that the site should get more accurate the more it is used.
Where are you from? What’s your background?
I was born in Madrid, Spain. I lived there for the first 20 something years of my life, although I spent a lot of my summers abroad working and studying to improve my English. In retrospect, this was the best way that I could have possibly spent my summers. It gave me the urge to travel, and opened my mind in a way that most of the people around me had not experienced. As for my background, there’s nothing really exciting there. I have a MS in Computer Science, and I have been working as Web Developer ever since I finished it 7 years ago.
Where do you live now, and what led you to move there?
I’m now in Prague, Czech Republic. I guess that some of the responsibility of me being here must go to my wife, a Czech girl. Although to be honest, I moved here on my own, before I even knew her. After we met, we also lived in other cities. But we were never as happy as we have been here, so we decided to move back.
Where else have you lived overseas? Which places would you like to live in again?
I’ve lived in Madrid, Prague, Frankfurt, Barcelona, and then Prague again (if you consider ‘living in a city’ as spending more than 3-4 months there). I wouldn’t mind living in Barcelona or Madrid again, if the situation in Spain improves. I don’t want to go back to Frankfurt, though. It’s too boring for me there.
You run a site called Expatistan, which crowd sources cost of living information for cities around the world. Where did you get the idea?
Yes, I have created and I run Expatistan.com. The idea, as usual, came out of necessity. Even though I haven’t lived in so many cities compared to other people, I’ve considered moving to many more. In each case, the question was the same, how much money would I need to keep my current standard of life? How much more expensive is it there than here?
You can find a lot of forums with scattered data from 3 years ago. But that is tedious and the image you get is anything but comprehensive. You can also pay for some big consulting company study. But, well, you have to pay. And then I wouldn’t trust those big companies. I couldn’t see the actual prices of items, just rankings of cities. It wasn’t transparent at all. And I always had the feeling that those companies had their own agendas when compiling the indices. After all, they cater to other big companies, not to “average” expats.
So, I realized that what I wanted didn’t exist. And judging by the number of questions that I always got from friends about prices in my city compared to theirs, and by the number of people making those questions all over the internet again and again, I wasn’t alone. Something like Expatistan wanted to be created.
Since I have the skills, the motivation, and it would be fun to build, I started to work on it. Stealing hours of my sleep, and weekends from my wife.
Recently, Lifehacker wrote a post about Expatistan. Did that bring a lot of traffic to the site? And how did it affect you? Did it help you get better numbers for the cities?
Yes, it brought a lot of traffic. It killed the small server where I was hosting Expatistan. I had to get a new server, ramp up the configuration of my web server, and make some emergency fixes to use the cache even more intensely than I was doing before. It seems the website has stabilized now, but for some days, it was reaaally slow. I was a little embarrased about it, actually. I should have had the application ready to scale up by pressing a button. Well, you live and learn.
The good thing is that a lot of people got to see Expatistan. And a nice percentage of them have been entering prices. Something like 6% of the users are entering prices for their cities, which is awesome. I went from around 20,000 prices in 200 cities entered in the previous 6 months, to around 40,000 prices in 400 cities in 3 days. The data almost doubled in 3 days!
I also received a lot of comments and emails (76 emails in the first 2 days after the mention on Lifehacker). Lots of useful feedback, really nice words, and encouragement. It has also been going around in Twitter and Facebook quite a bit.
How has living abroad affected the way you think about life?
You realize how many things that you never gave a second thought to and assumed were normal, actually are not. Little things but also bigger ones. The way that you hold your fork, the kind of food that you consume, the attitude towards animals, or how to handle the education of kids. There are lots of things that you just assume are done in some way because that’s the way it is. Well, actually it turns out that it is not true. You can do everything in a million different ways. Living abroad allows you to see some of those different ways of doing things, and some are better than your way.
Any good sources of information for expats that you can recommend?
If you happen to live in Prague, expats.cz is the place to go. Then, each city has their local forum for expats, which is usually pretty active. And the best source of information is other expats. Just make a search on Google for the city you want to move to, and you’ll likely find an expat forum there. Show up in the forum, and start asking. In my experience, expats are very extroverted, and they love to help. So just ask around.
What’s your advice for someone who dreams of living abroad?
If English is not your native language, study it. If you already speak it, then start looking for a job while you still live in your home city. It may take months, but it’s worth it to land with a job secured. I know too many people that burnt through their savings while trying to find a job in their dream city overseas, and ended up unhappy and having to return back. Even if it means that the move will happen some months later, try to find a job (or at least land some interviews) while you are still at home. In the worst case, you will realize that you wouldn’t be able to support yourself in that city you wanted to move to. It’s better to realize that beforehand, and then try to find another city to move to.
When I wanted to change cities I came up with a list of 4-6 cities where I would like to move to. I would start a little research on the internet to find out how living in the city actually was. I would also start looking at local job boards, and to apply to jobs that seemed like I could fancy. After a month or so, that initial list of cities would have been trimmed down to 2 or 3. Then, for as long as it would take, I would keep searching for jobs in those 2 or 3 cities. Using online job boards, looking for companies in the city and contacting them directly, and using my network of friends. In the end, when I had a job secured in the city, I moved, knowing that I would be able to support myself, and that I would be living an expat life (as opposed as a tourist life).
What memories and wisdom have you gained, which you will carry with you wherever you live?
There are nice people everywhere. And as many ways to understand life as there are people on the planet.
