Crucial Life-Saving Tips for Millennials Moving Out
By: Levi Borba
Tags: Personal Development, Personal Growth, Life, Education, Life Lessons

Crucial Life-Saving Tips for Millennials Moving Out

Take effortless measures to keep more money in your pocket and jumpstart a new life.

Photo by Ivan Samkov from Pexels

Congratulations! You received a Ph.D. scholarship on the other side of the country. Or you just opened the email with an incredible professional opportunity abroad. Maybe you were approved for that internship in Europe?

These situations are more frequent than ever among millennials. But, what can happen when you move far away?

I do not want to put your excitement down — later I give you all the answers to the questions raised — but:

Stress may be common even in small situations like buying a bus ticket.

Living costs hugely differ and either you get carried by the spending frenzy caused by smaller price-tags, or the higher bills make you feel ripped by everyone.

You start to feel sick and discover that your local health insurance does not cover you in the new location, even for minor health checkups.

Maybe you do some continuous therapy (eg: most anti-baldness treatments, like finasteride) and realize that in your new place, it is near 300% more expensive. This happened to me when I moved from Brazil to Poland.

Adjusting to a completely new culture already demands a lot of energy and at some point is downright exhausting! Why do not take a few measures that make your life much easier and avoid the problems above?

I left my small city, a place where the air smelled like orange cake, quite early. By going to live in another continent, I committed mistakes. Here I will tell you how to avoid these mistakes and save hundreds — or even thousands — of dollars.

How to forecast your living costs and plan the perfect budget

There are two exceptional websites that I have been using since I moved out of my country a decade ago: Numbeo and Expatistan. Both sites use the concept of user-generated content and online collaboration to create massive price databases of everything:

Food, including stuff like 12 eggs, 1 liter of milk, or a combo meal in a fast-food restaurant.

Housing, with details like rent in both expensive and normal areas, as well as utilities.

Clothes

Transportation: Price of gasoline, monthly transport ticket, taxi trips, etc.

Personal Care: Medicines, deodorant, shampoo, etc.

Entertainment

Users input in the websites the price for each item in their locations. With the growing number of consultations, the tool gains great precision. Numbeo has more than 6 million values divided between almost ten thousand cities on the planet. In Expatistan you can consult the cost of living in more than 2 thousand cities.

Using those tools I can verify that my previous city, Doha, is 99% more expensive than my current one, Warsaw. This goes in line with my memories of paying unrealistic prices for a beer.

With this load of information, it is easy to compare living costs between your new destination and the former place. You will discover if your budget is enough to live a frugal lifestyle, in a relaxed manner or lavishly.

Appointments you must do before leaving.

Once a friend of mine from the health sector explained how important is access to the past information of a patient. By the past, he meant previous exam results, diagnostics, and similar information. The world-renowned Cleveland Clinic affirms it on their HealthEssential page:

When doctors treat you for years, they get to know your medical history inside and out. That helps them make accurate diagnoses, watch for red flags regarding medications, and monitor changes in your health through the years. But the “family” in family doctor matters, too. Seeing multiple generations of a family can help a doctor record an accurate, in-depth family health history. For example, if I know you had cancer at a young age, and so did your mother, that’s a red flag.

For this reason, even if you are moving to a country with universal healthcare services like Canada or the UK, it is wise to make an appointment with your local doctor and dentist.

This is especially critical if your destination is a place with exorbitant medical costs (yes, I am looking to you, USA). Nobody enjoys unpleasant news from health specialists, but you will prefer to know if there is any problem before you move out and before you need to use your international health insurance.

In my family country, dentist prices are smaller than in Europe. For this reason, when I visit my parents, even for a short time, I try to schedule a visit to the dentist. He can do small repairs and warns me if something is not going right.

Schedule a visit to your local dentist, a medical checkup, and a blood exam. Take a look if your vaccination card is updated. Those things may not be the most amusing part of a travel plan, but it can save money and even your life.

Research your prescription prices

There are not many things in my native country, Brazil, cheaper than abroad. Electronics or wine cost more than nearly anywhere else. The only place that I found worse prices for alcohol were in the Middle East, because of the sin tax on drinks. There is, however, one product that is relatively cheaper in Brazil:

Drugs.

I mean, pharmaceutical drugs.

The reason is that, years ago, the government stimulated the development of national labs producing medicines with broken patents, called Genéricos. A Genérico doesn’t have a brand name, you buy it by the active ingredient. The most important thing: It may cost less than half the price of its branded counterpart.

I take one of those genéricos, called Finasteride. It avoids hair fall and Hollywood celebrities already know it for some time — like Bradley Cooper. In Brazil, the monthly cost of taking finasteride was around 30 reais. Roughly 8 dollars at that time. When I moved to Poland, I simply forgot to check the price before boarding the plane. I took my 1-month box with me, my prescription (since it needs one), and moved to Europe.

After the first month, I needed to buy more. If you stop taking finasteride, your hair starts to fall again. In Poland, there are no genéricos, and finasteride is sold by the name of Propecia (the same as in other markets like the USA).

At that moment, the cost for 1 month of treatment is (hold your seat): 180zl. 43 dollars. 537% of the price of Brazil.

I stopped taking it and my hair started to fall. Fortunately, I had a trip scheduled to Brazil a few months later. After a visit to my dermatologist, he made a prescription of finasteride as a continuous usage drug, allowing me to buy and take with me to Europe many more boxes.

I still have my curly and black as an obsidian hair, over my head. Victory.

Concluding the lesson: