How much income do you actually need to live well abroad?
At Blueprint, we’ve helped Canadians across a huge range of incomes plan moves overseas, from people trying to scrape by on $10K a year to business owners earning millions.
And the strategy can look completely different depending on the person.
So I’ll show you where $25K, $50K and $100K+ in income can take you, and how the thinking changes at each level.
What I Mean by “Living Well
When I say “living well,” I don’t mean finding the absolute cheapest place you can survive. If that were the case, you could buy a used RV and live off grid in Canada for pennies.
I mean a pretty comfortable, upper-middle-class lifestyle by local standards: a nice place to live, eating out regularly, hobbies, decent healthcare, some travel, and enough room in the budget that you’re not constantly thinking about money.
$25,000 CAD: You Need to Be Selective
Let’s start at $25,000 CAD after tax, or about $2,083 a month.
You can still live well on that in the right place, but at this income level, the city matters almost as much as the country.
Thailand is a good example. Bangkok has become much more expensive, so building a comfortable lifestyle there on $25,000 CAD can be difficult. But move north to Chiang Mai and the same income can go much further.
You see this everywhere. There can be huge cost-of-living differences within the same country, so I’d focus less on finding a “cheap country” and more on finding the right city.
A few lesser-known options are Kuching, Malaysia, which gives you affordable housing and food with decent infrastructure; Cuenca, Ecuador, which has a mild climate and an established retiree community; and Yogyakarta, Indonesia, a cultural and university city where housing, food and transportation can still be very inexpensive.
While $25,000 isn’t the same thing as being rich, in the right city it can buy you a surprisingly comfortable lifestyle. To get something comparable in Toronto or Vancouver, you might easily need $50,000 to $70,000 a year after tax, especially once you factor in housing.
And I’d be much more cautious with this budget if you’re older. A healthy 35-year-old and a 70-year-old should not look at $25,000 the same way. Private health insurance, prescriptions, specialist care, unexpected medical bills, flights back to Canada, or simply needing more comfortable housing can take a much bigger bite out of your budget.
The older you are, the less I’d want your plan to depend on squeezing every dollar out of a cheap destination.
So $25,000 can absolutely work, but I’d want a genuinely low-cost city and a healthy financial buffer on top of it.
If you’re seriously thinking about leaving Canada, that’s exactly why I built Blueprint Abroad. It walks you through the Canadian side of the move step by step, from residency and departure tax to your accounts and first year abroad. You can check it out at blueprintfinancial.ca/abroad or use the link below.
$50,000 CAD: The Sweet Spot
Now let’s double the budget to $50,000 CAD after tax, or about $4,167 a month.
This is where a huge part of the world starts opening up if you want a genuinely good life while still having room to save for retirement.
In Spain, Portugal or Greece, that could mean living near the Mediterranean, eating out regularly, spending weekends at the beach, and having the rest of Europe a short flight away.
If you want warmer weather and more space for your money, Colombia, Brazil, Argentina or Mexico give you another completely different set of options, with vibrant cities, great food and a lower day-to-day cost than most major Canadian cities.
And if Europe appeals to you but Spain or Portugal are getting too expensive, countries like Albania, Montenegro, Romania and Bulgaria can give you a lot of that European lifestyle at a lower price.
That’s why I think $50,000 is the real sweet spot.
You’re not living like a millionaire. But across a surprisingly large part of the world, you can afford a comfortable home, enjoy yourself, travel, absorb the occasional surprise expense, and still put money away for the future.
At this level, you finally have enough room to choose the lifestyle first and make the numbers work around it.
The Globe and Mail profiled a Toronto couple who did exactly this. Slawko Waschuk, a 49-year-old pharmacist, and his partner Pedro José-Marcellino were renting for about $2,200 a month, a good deal by Toronto standards. Two professional incomes, and they still couldn’t get close to buying a house. Slawko put it plainly: “We have good jobs and we couldn’t even come close.”
So they moved to northern Portugal and bought a historic six-suite property five minutes from the ocean, which they’re turning into a guest house. Their estimate is that life there will cost about half of what it did in Toronto.
$100,000 CAD+: The Map Opens Up
Once you get to around $100,000 CAD after tax, you can start thinking much more broadly.
You could live in a major city like Tokyo, Paris, Sydney or Dubai and live relatively ok. You could base yourself in a smaller coastal city in Europe, spend part of the year in Asia, or choose somewhere mainly because you love the climate, culture or lifestyle.
You’re not completely unconstrained. Manhattan, San Francisco, central London, Zurich and other ultra-expensive places can still burn through $100,000 surprisingly quickly.
But for most of the world, the question stops being “Can I afford to live there?”
And this is also where we see the conversation change with a lot of our own clients.
At this income level, people are often much less focused on shaving a few hundred dollars off rent and much more focused on things like how to reduce taxes through tax residency, investment structure, corporations, capital gains, estate planning, healthcare, and how their Canadian assets will be treated after they leave.
Some entrepreneurs may even look at separating where they live from where their business is structured, using jurisdictions like the UAE, Hong Kong or Singapore for the business side while personally living somewhere else that better fits the lifestyle they want.
That doesn’t mean you can just open a foreign company and magically stop paying tax. Your personal residence, where the company is actually managed, and where the income is earned can all matter.
But that’s really the shift.
At this level, moving abroad becomes less about finding cheap rent and more about designing the whole setup: where you live, where you pay tax, how your investments are treated, where your business sits, and how all those pieces fit together.
If your situation involves higher income, investments, a corporation, or multiple countries, our one-on-one Blueprint planning services can help you work through the details. You can learn more and book a call at blueprintfinancial.ca or use the link below.
Your Type of Income Matters
One thing these income levels don’t capture is where your money comes from and how reliable it is.
Say two people both have $50,000 a year after tax.
One has a stable salary and knows roughly $4,200 is coming in every month. That person can probably live a bit closer to the top of their budget because their income is predictable.
But if you’re self-employed and made $50,000 last year, your next year might be $35,000 or $70,000. In that case, I’d choose a lower-cost destination and leave a much bigger gap between what you earn and what you need to live.
A retiree with CPP, OAS and a workplace pension is different again. That income can be very predictable, which is a big advantage, but I’d want more money set aside for healthcare, insurance and unexpected medical costs as you get older.
And if most of your $50,000 comes from investments or a business, the cost of living may not even be the biggest issue. Taxes on dividends, capital gains, corporate income or withdrawals can change the math a lot.
So my rough rules are:
Stable salary: you can afford to run a tighter budget.
Variable income: choose cheaper and keep a bigger cushion.
Pension income: predictability helps, but budget more conservatively for healthcare.
Investment or business income: focus more on tax structure, not just rent and restaurants.
Same income, but completely different levels of risk and flexibility.
Here’s the part a lot of people get wrong: they budget for rent and skip the tax side. The same $50,000 can be taxed three different ways depending on how you leave Canada.
If your move is serious, the next step is to start building a clear exit plan. Book a free discovery call with us to discuss your situation and identify the key tax, residency, investment, and planning considerations before you leave Canada.
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