November 14, 2016 | 6:53 p.m. UTC
Exciting news! If you are a site owner or blogger, you can now place a beautiful cost of living widget on your site, which will always show up-to-date calculated cost of living data for the city of your choice! Check it out over on our embed page.
Here's an example of the widget:
October 30, 2016 | 9:20 p.m. UTC
Based on all the excellent feedback we've received over the past month or two, we've added a number of small (but helpful) new features.
First, all new visitors will be shown a brief tour of the site to explain the basic features and provide an orientation on how to find the best places in the world to live.
Second, we've added code to produce budgets for two bedroom apartments (in and outside the city center) after many requests that we do so. This information is calculated based on the one and three bedroom apartment information for each city, so it's not quite as accurate as actual crowdsourced data... but it should be close enough for a rough estimate.
Finally, our Facebook page now has a message bot! You can message us at on the page and ask a question like, "What's the budget for four people in Prague?" or "What's the budget for two people living an ample lifestyle in Paris?" The bot will use the same budget calculation as the rest of the site and give you an answer. Note that language parsing is pretty tricky, so bear with us as we improve the results.
October 13, 2016 | 11:38 p.m. UTC
Wow, it has certainly been a heck of a 48 hours.
Yesterday, we posted The Earth Awaits to Reddit's /r/InternetIsBeautiful, and within an hour it had been upvoted onto the main page of Reddit itself. The traffic was so huge that we had to ask the moderators of the subreddit to hide the post-- twice-- to allow our hosting company, Python Anywhere, to move resources around to try to meet the demand. At peak, the traffic to and from The Earth Awaits was greater than all other customers of Python Anywhere combined.
Needless to say, we were humbled and amazed by the attention, doubly so when sites like The Next Web picked up and ran with the story. By the end of the day, there were news stories in at least four languages that we know of, and we were seeing visitors from over fifty countries. We're aware of a few more coming, and have reached out to a few news sources to see if they'd like to share the site with their readers.
We're grateful and inspired by the level of excitement about the idea of life abroad. It reaffirms our passion, and-- waxing philosophical for a moment-- makes us so proud that people from everywhere, from all sorts of backgrounds, are so enthusiastic about finding adventure, friendship, and happiness somewhere new. Human beings are amazing, and we will always be proud to play a part in your journey.
October 05, 2016 | 4:55 a.m. UTC
Another late night, another awesome new feature! As of now, you can see your results plotted on a world map with our new map view!
A cursory search shows everything showing up on at least the right continent, but if you find that a city is misplaced on the map or any other wonky behavior, please let us know.
October 02, 2016 | 2:51 a.m. UTC
This post comes a few days late, but after a few long nights of work, you can now use the site in US Dollars, British Pounds, Euros, Swiss Francs, Australian Dollars, Canadian Dollars, and Singapore Dollars!
Many more currencies are coming soon (and New Zealand Dollars just barely missed the cut) but the others required some layout changes that we knew would need further work and testing. We hope to have lots more currencies available in the next week or two, but hopefully this helps out a substantial portion of our visitors.
You can change the currency by clicking the gear icon in the upper right of your screen from the home/search page.
Please feel free to reach out to us on the contact page if you have any issues.
September 19, 2016 | 5:03 p.m. UTC
The dust has settled on our launch, and things have started to calm down a bit. So, what did we learn?
First, people have been very generous in offering great feedback on the site. As a result of your input, we've added some interesting features that we hope you'll love:
What's coming next? First, currency conversion will be available in a few weeks for non-US folks to be able to search and browse in their native currency. Next up after that will be user account registration and signup so that I can bring you important features like favorites, stored custom budgets, and (eventually) some community features.
Other much-requested features that are coming a little further down the road are a map view in search results, tag-based searching (so that you can find places that are in the mountains, close to the ocean, have great surfing, etc.), and a few other surprises.
Thanks to you all for the support and help you've given me so far. The very best thing you can do to help me keep the site improving is to share the site, and cities you love, with your friends. If you have any questions or comments, please reach out to me using the contact form or email.
For anyone interested, we were shared on Reddit and by Rockstar Finance over the past few weeks. If you are in the media, or know anyone who is, and would like to talk about our quest to bring life abroad to everyone, regardless of their budget, please reach out!
September 09, 2016 | 5:03 p.m. UTC
We're pleased to announce our first set of additional cities! As always, we are happy to add cities which have good data and are of general interest. Just reach out to us via the contact form.
The new cities are:
September 07, 2016 | 6:18 p.m. UTC
After many months of working on the site, hundreds of hours and more than a few gray hairs, The Earth Awaits is ready for the public. Without (too much) exaggeration, I think it's the only tool of its kind on the Internet. It's the only site that will build you a custom budget for hundreds of cities around the world based on your lifestyle-- not the random guesses of a total stranger.
Who am I? Well, maybe I'm just like you-- someone who loves travel, loves the world, and doesn't want to wait the rest of his life to experience it all, despite a limited budget. I'm someone who loves a person who could retire if they would only consider a move abroad. I'm someone who would drop everything if the right adventure came knocking.
If you want to know more about the behind-the-scenes working, check out this article on my blog. Otherwise, sign up for the newsletter, reach out and give me some feedback, and let's explore the world!
August 04, 2016 | 11:47 p.m. UTC
Welcome to The Earth Awaits!
The Earth Awaits is a tool for long-term travelers, students taking a gap year, retirees, and anyone else with an irrepressible wanderlust. By providing just a few simple pieces of information, you can use the site to find a city that matches your lifestyle and budget.
The Earth Awaits uses up-to-date cost of living information to give accurate estimates for housing, food, and entertainment budgets in your new home. The data is crowdsourced from those who live or have lived in each city. The cost of living data is updated from Numbeo every night to keep all budget estimates as accurate as possible.
For more information about how this site came to be, see the Retire Abroad series at The Frugal Vagabond and the About page.