Tim Leffel's Cheapest Destinations

Why are you still home?

If you have lost your job lately, why are you still here? If you got a severance package, why didn’t you take off traveling as soon as your affairs were squared away?

If you go to one or more cheap countries, every day will be more interesting than a fruitless job-searching one at home and you will spend 1/3 or 1/2 the amount of money per week or month. Come back when the recession is over and everyone is hiring like crazy again. Why fight the trends?

Or you could still work, but somewhere else.

We put up with lousy work schedules and minimal vacations because U.S. employees don’t know any better and dumb employers don’t value refreshed employees, despite overwhelming evidence that overworked people are sloppy and unmotivated. Then when everyone is afraid of losing their job, they’re even more inclined to take on more burdens and put in more hours.

So go work somewhere else, especially if you can do whatever it is you do from a laptop. Right this minute there is a webmaster working poolside in Costa Rica. There’s an ad copy writer with a laptop in one hand and a cocktail in the other, looking out at waves crashing on a beach in Thailand. There’s an editor leading a virtual team of freelancers from a $350 apartment in Quito.

Or make a switch. There’s an English teacher sightseeing around Budapest on one of her days off from the local academy. There’s a divemaster bringing the group back from today’s lessons in the Red Sea. There’s a crewman manning a yacht somewhere off the coast of Crete. Foreign guys and gals are leading white-water rafting trips down the rivers of the Alps, Andes, and Himilayas. Ski instructors are working both hemispheres at different times of the year.

Some four million Americans live outside the United States, not counting those in the military. Put them all together and this “expatriate nation” would be a medium-sized state-more populated than Connecticut or Oregon. There’s no rule saying that working a job has to mean working in the U.S. Imagine the weekend trips!

I still have a job. I created it myself and report to myself so there’s little chance I’ll get fired unless I go all bipolar. But if I were still a cog in the corporate wheel and had just gotten a pink slip, I’d be writing this post from a distant shore, one with a far lower cost of living and a lot less stress…