Cost of living is something everyone should consider and even more so for those of us who can make our living anywhere in the world, but there is more to life than just cost of living, you also have to consider how happy you will be in a certain place. If we look at the countries with the highest happiness ratings we'll often find that they are also among the happiest countries.
Spot on. Simply looking to find the cheapest place to live is probably not a good way to go about it, as there are definitely reasons those places are so cheap, namely no one wants to live there.
Look at high cost cities in the US, sure the so called "cost of living" might be high, but then so are the wages and opportunities. I don't mind paying 50% of my income for living expenses if I am making $250k a year.
People put too much emphasis on housing costs where everything else I need is the same prices as it is in other locations. So while my housing expenses may be higher, since I also have a correspondingly higher salary than I can find elsewhere, my other costs are essentially a smaller portion of that salary.
For example, I want to buy 1 BTC it will cost me around $9k. With my $250k salary this represents only 3.6% of my salary, where as I lived somewhere with a cheaper cost of living and my salary was half, say $125k then the same Bitcoin would consume 7.2% of my income.
Exactly, there is so much more that comes in to it. Somewhere with a cheap cost of living may be ideal for some people and many of those people will exist within crypto, those are the guys who work for themselves and their income is not dependent on location. But there's a reason that the highest paying jobs are in certain places and in turn the cost of living in these places is much higher. I lived in Switzerland for a while and was in fact not working, even though my cost of living was much higher I could easily see why people were so much happier, the average person earned so much, a simple store cashier could earn more than $4000 per month, all taxes and such were put to very good use etc.