Which Country Fits Your Retirement Budget? and Income
Which country actually fits you?
Nine questions. No email required. The result shows you the ranked shortlist and the reasoning, including the countries you were filtered out of and why, because a recommendation you cannot interrogate is worth nothing.
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Who is moving?
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What can you comfortably spend each month?
Everything: housing, food, healthcare, transport, fun. In U.S. dollars.
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What monthly income can you document?
Social Security, pensions, annuities, rents, dividends. This is what visa thresholds are measured against, and it is often a different number from what you spend.
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Is your income a guaranteed lifetime pension?
Social Security and defined-benefit pensions are. A 401(k) or IRA drawdown is not, and several Latin American programs require the guaranteed kind.
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Will you still be earning?
This matters more than people expect. Spain, Italy and France all prohibit work, including remote work for a U.S. employer, on their retirement visas.
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How important is each of these?
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Any health conditions that need reliable specialist care?
If yes, we weight healthcare heavily and flag countries where serious care means an evacuation flight.
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How do you feel about currency risk?
Panama, Ecuador and Belize remove it entirely by using or pegging to the U.S. dollar.
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Anywhere you want to rule in or out?
Common questions
How does the matching actually work?
It scores every country on eight axes against the weightings you set, then applies your budget and income as adjustments rather than as hard filters, so you can always see why a country ranked where it did. Nothing is hidden: each result lists the specific reasons it scored up or down, including the ones that count against it.
Why did a country I like score badly?
Usually one of three things: your stated income is below every published threshold there, your budget is below a comfortable local budget, or you weighted an axis heavily where that country is weak. Open the expandable list under your results and it will tell you which.
Is my income the same as my budget?
Almost never, and conflating them is the most common planning error. Your budget is what you will spend. Your income is what a government asks you to prove. In Mexico the visa threshold is roughly double a comfortable local budget, because it is pegged to a domestic benchmark rather than to what a foreigner spends.
Does this leave anything out?
Yes: whether you have family somewhere, whether you speak the language, and whether you have actually visited. Those matter more than any score, and no tool can weigh them for you. Treat the shortlist as a research list, not an answer.
Authoritative sources
Where anything here disagrees with one of these, the official source is right. Tell us and we will correct it.
- SSA: Your Payments While You Are Outside the United States
- SSA: Payments Abroad Screening Tool
- SSA: Totalization agreements
- Medicare: coverage outside the United States
- IRS: U.S. citizens and resident aliens abroad
- IRS: Foreign Earned Income Exclusion
- IRS: Foreign Tax Credit
- FinCEN: Report of Foreign Bank and Financial Accounts
- IRS: United States income tax treaties A to Z
- Federal Voting Assistance Program
- Smart Traveler Enrollment Program (STEP)
- U.S. embassies and consulates directory
- European Commission: Entry/Exit System
- European Commission: ETIAS official site
- HCCH: Apostille Convention status table Which countries accept an apostille, and from what date.
- U.S. Department of State: Records and Authentications Federal document authentication, including the Office of Authentications.
- U.S. Department of State: country information Entry, exit, safety and local law, country by country.
Verified Sep 7, 2026 Primary sources: travel.state.gov, www.hcch.net
Email this to yourself
We will send your plan and document checklist as a plain-text email you can forward to a spouse or an attorney. No account, no drip sequence.
This resource is provided free by Federal Apostille as an educational tool. It is not legal, tax, immigration or financial advice, and no attorney-client relationship is created by using it. Immigration rules, income thresholds, fees and processing times change frequently and often without notice, and consulates apply them differently. Always confirm current requirements with the official government source and the specific consulate that has jurisdiction over your U.S. state of residence before you act. Every figure on this site carries the date we last verified it and a link to the primary source.
