Travel widely enough, and you'll notice something about the Americans you encounter abroad. While the people I know in the States are too often shackled to dull jobs or unrewarding relationships, the entrenched expats I've met while visiting more than 100 countries never show evidence of boredom, worry, or regret. Nearly all seem to embody what a quintessential Outback man -- twice my age and hitching in the opposite direction on an Australian backroad -- yelled across the pavement: "Don't spend time; enjoy it."
If you're thinking of starting up somewhere else for the YOLO of it, don't let cost stand in your way. The US government pegs the poverty line at about $12,000 a year for a childless person. That won't take you far in Oakland (or even Omaha), but it'll buy you a full year of wonders in one of these nine countries. In any of these, $1,000 a month covers housing and food, as well as access to adventures that chumps with much fatter salaries can only imagine. The price of a beer, I've found, works as a pretty reliable stand-in for almost any cost-of-living survey you care to enlist; those are included here.
This list could dig deeper into hardcore country steals. Unless voluntourism is your goal, risky places like Nigeria and Pakistan aren't wise choices. And a note on budgeting: If you're working abroad, you'll blow less money, simply because you'll stumble into fewer budget-wrecking hedonistic binges while on the clock. If you're earning even a few American dollars a month, you can stretch a trip to any of these spots indefinitely. (If you need a handbook for these sorts of life-changing jaunts, A Better Life for Half the Price by Tim Leffel is the bible for bargain-hunting wannabe expats.) Life is short, as they say. So go long.
1.Armenia
Local draft: $1.50, served by someone with a PhD
What you'll save on: A world-class opera runs $6.
Why here? University grads probably speak English better than you do and chess is the national pastime. Their top export seems to be smarts. Fashion and wine run deep; the always-organic produce is ridiculously cheap. Sandwiched between Iran, Turkey, and Georgia, many of the tiny Christian country's 4,000 epic religious structures are on prime real estate -- analogous to where America created its ultimate national parks and resorts. Nearly every monastery offers the option to interact with the chatty, emcee-style resident priests who exemplify the coolness of all Armenians. Like most orthodox holy men, they marry and have families, which seems to give them an enhanced sense of humor -- not short on jokes or offering samples of homebrew wines in clay jugs.
Affordable adventure: Armenia’s stairway to heaven -- an ascending Grand Canyon-esque road -- leads to the mind-melting Noravank monastery. Imagine multihued Moab speckled with ancient hilltop World Heritage Sites.
If you need a hedonistic binge: Armenia's 300 days of sunshine each year paired with hundreds of denuded mountains above the tree line make it one of the world's best places to paraglide, either as a beginner or a one-timer flying tandem with a pro.
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