Numbeo and Expatistan are solid for raw cost-of-living prices. But if you're actually trying to work out how many years sooner you could retire by moving somewhere cheaper, a price index alone doesn't get you there — it ignores expat health insurance, visa costs, home-country investment tax, and currency risk. Here's the gap, and a free tool built to close it.
Numbeo's cost-of-living index is crowdsourced and generally a reasonable starting point for comparing everyday prices — rent, groceries, transport, a coffee, a gym membership — between two cities. That's genuinely useful. The problem is what happens next: most people checking Numbeo before an international move or an early-retirement plan aren't actually asking "what does a coffee cost in Lisbon" — they're asking "could I retire sooner if I moved there," and Numbeo was never built to answer that.
| What you need to know | Numbeo / Expatistan | MyDailyCost Geo Arbitrage |
|---|---|---|
| Raw cost-of-living price index | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes |
| Converts to a FIRE number & years-to-retire impact | ✗ No | ✓ Yes |
| Expat health insurance cost modeled in | ✗ No | ✓ Yes |
| Visa / residency cost by country | ✗ No | ✓ Yes (44 countries) |
| Home-country investment tax reality check | ✗ No | ✓ Yes |
| Currency depreciation / FX risk band | ✗ No | ✓ Yes |
| Slow-travel split (e.g. 6 months here, 6 months there) | ✗ No | ✓ Yes |
| Price | Free | Free, no account |
Numbeo and Expatistan remain genuinely useful for raw price lookups city-by-city — this isn't a knock on that data, just a different job.
Say Numbeo tells you Chiang Mai is roughly 70% cheaper than Sydney. On the surface that looks like a huge win. Run it through a FIRE-focused calculator instead and the real picture includes: ~$3,000–6,000/year for comprehensive expat health cover (you generally can't use Australia's public system once you're not a resident), Thailand's retirement/LTR visa costs, and whether Australia still taxes your investment income once you've left — because for many home countries, it does. None of that shows up in a raw cost-of-living comparison, and all of it changes how many years sooner you'd actually get to retire.