Expat & International Careers: Interview with Expatistan: Cost of Living Figures Worldwide and (soon) Expat Job Boards

As a person who helps expats build careers and businesses to support their life abroad, I'm always on the look out for new resources for my clients.  When I came up on Expatistan I was thrilled to find such a valuable resource - especially since they are free!  

Almost every expat deals with the challenges of understanding how differences in cost of living can affect their country and expat job choices. Many expats also struggle with finding English speaking jobs overseas. These are two challenges that Expatistan is in the process of addressing or will be addressing soon.

Expatistan is a relatively new tool and depends on expats contributions of cost of living estimates where they are to be effective. I am hoping that raising awareness will encourage expats to contribute, thereby making a a valuable resource for all.

Gerardo Robledillo, creator of Expatistan, graciously agreed to answer a few questions and share about the amazing resources he's built for expats. Here are my questions and his answers:

 

Gerardo, can you tell us a little bit about yourself, your background and what inspired you to create Expatistan?

I am a software engineer from Madrid, Spain. I've been working for internet companies ever since I graduated. I love to code, I love internet, and I really like internet businesses. All the time that I don't spend working for clients or with my family, I am working on my own private internet projects.

What inspired me to create Expatistan.com? Well, I was basically scratching my own itch. In most of my relocations (4 in the last 6 years), when it was time to negotiate the salary with my new employer I was basically blind. I knew how much I was making in my current city, I knew how much I wanted to make relative to my current income, but I had no idea how much would that translate to in the new city. In the internet you can find tones of indices about cost of living, but they are either behind (very expensive) paid walls, or are dubious, or work only with American cities, or are focused on very high profile executives (since the companies doing them want to sell them to big corporations to calculate the relocation package of big shots). In all these cases, it was frustrating not to have reliable, detailed information for free.

I wanted an index that would allow me to compare any city in the world (not only US cities). It would allow me to see at a glance what the difference in cost of living would be. And if I wanted to, it would allow me to see the items that make the index, so I can check myself that the data is not wildly inaccurate. 

It didn't exist, so I created it.

What is Expatistan exactly and how does it work?

Expatistan is a collaborative database of prices around the world. People all over the world enter prices for their local cities. Expatistan aggregates them and makes them available to everyone. You can see the prices of every day items in (almost) any city in the world and compare the cost of living between two cities. 

Soon Expatistan will also help you find an English speaking job in several cities around the world, so you can land with a job already secured; or at least, with some interviews lined up! 

 

Can you explain how and when Expatistan would be most useful to the expat?

In my experience, it is most useful when you are doing the typical research previous to move into another city. Specially when you have to decide how much money will you need in the new city to live comfortably. 

Let's say that you live in London and someone offers you a job in Berlin. You have no idea about what kind of life the salary offered will afford you in Berlin. You know how much you are making in London, and how expensive life there is, but you have no idea about Berlin. A quick search in Expatistan and you'll know that the cost of living in London is 47% more expensive than in Berlin. Therefore, you could take a cut in your current salary, and still life quite comfortably in Berlin.

 

I love the fact that you’ve created a system where expats worldwide help you with you to keep the pricing accurate and up-to date. How does that work?

When you compare two cities using Expatistan (one of them likely the one where you currently live) I ask you to help out by adding some prices to the system. All the items that are in Expatistan's index are common everyday goods. You probably have a pretty good idea of how much these goods cost in your city without too much thinking. Enter a couple of them in the database, and you've just made the index more accurate for you and for everyone else.

It's interesting to note that quite a lot of people do enter prices. Between 1 every 20 people and 1 every 50 people enter data depending on the city.

 

What is the cheat sheet and how did it come about?

The cheatsheet is a printable list of the items in the index used to calculate the cost of living in all the cities covered by Expatistan. You can see the cheat sheet and list of goods we use here.

It came about because one of my users wrote me asking for a list of the items in the index to print out, so he could take it with him and write down the exact prices while he was making his shopping. I thought it was a great idea, and of course I wanted to help this user since he was so nice to ask for it in the first place. Ten minutes of coding later, the cheat sheet was available to print.

 

You have some additional projects you are working on – 360cities, Worldtaximeter and Expat job boards. Can you share a little bit about each of them and how expats can benefit from them?

Sure. 

Expat job boards are the next feature I'm adding to Expatistan. A lot of the current visitors are interested in the comparisons because they are thinking on moving to a new city, or they are actively trying to move to a new city. I've been there and I know that the first (and most important) step for making this move is to find a job in the new city. But it is not easy at all to find a job when you don't speak the local city's language. To start with, you can't use most local webpages, including job boards, since they are not in your language or English. Even when you can use a local website because it's translated into English, there simply are not many English speaking jobs in most cities. They are very hard to find.

The job boards are my attempt to help with this problem. I'm currently working on creating these job boards with local recruiters and HR companies. Hopefully the first expat job boards will be functioning in the next months. 

Worldtaximeter is a project that has been working for the last 3 years or so. It allows travellers and locals (including expats) to get an estimate of how much a taxi ride will cost. Imagine that you just moved in to a new city, and you want to take a taxi. The taxi that will take you from the airport to your hotel, for example. You will probably be wondering for the whole ride whether the taxi driver is taking the "touristic route" and whether you will end up paying twice the price that the ride should have cost. Worldtaximeter provides a little peace of mind in this respect. Enter your origin and destination, and we'll calculate, according to the official taxi fares, how much (approximately) you should end up paying.

It's also great to decide whether it's worth to take a taxi or not (3 in the morning, 20 euros left in the pocket... should I take a taxi home or not?).

Finally, 360 Cities is the biggest project that I am working on right now. It is an awesome community of panoramic photographers. The biggest and best collection of spherical interactive photos in the web. Similar to Google's StreetView, but nicer, prettier and for places that you would never imagine (4,000 meters up in the air, underwater in a coral reef, in the middle of a demonstration). 

When you want to feel like you are back home, there's no easier way to "teleport" yourself and wander about than using 360Cities.net.

 

Wow Gerardo - I'm so impressed with the work you've done to support millions of expats worldwide. As someone who helps expats build successful and satisfying careers abroad, I cannot begin to tell you how appreciative I am of your efforts. Are there any words of wisdom you’d like to share with other expats given your extensive experience abroad and in building these resources?

Travel. As much as you can, and for as long as you can. Become an expat if you can. Spend some years living in a different country and culture. Being an expat brings a lot of experiences, and you grow quite a lot. You'll see life from a different perspective after you've lived as a foreigner in a different culture.

 

Many many thanks Gerardo fortaking the time to answer these questions and sharing all of these valuable resources. 

 

I hope that as the words spreads more expats will contribute to your cost of living tool so that it will become an extremely effective tool for expats world wide. 

 

EXPAT CAREER AND BUSINESS SUCCESS TIP: Are you an expat in the midst of considering a country change but not sure how the cost of living differences could affect you? Are you considering an expat job but not sure if you can afford to live on the salary offered?  Are you uncertain what salary in another country would allow you to enjoy the same lifestyle (or a better one) now? Visit Expatistan.com to find out. Please be sure to contribute cost of living data so the Expatistan will have the most relevant and updated data and will be a fantastic tool for expats worldwide. Also stay tuned for more news about the upcoming Expat Job Boards!

 

 

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Comments

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