You can live in a flat in the best parts of major cities comfortably, you could hire one or maybe even two FT employees to help you to cook, clean the house, take care of kids, etc. If you don't like the city life, you could also rent a small "mansion" in the suburbs (but then you'd suffer a bit with the internet connection, fiber only goes to major cities)
You could dine out at nice restaurants every weekend and travel around by plane every time there is a holiday and stay at 5 star hotels
Taking into account the minimum salary here is 300 USD / month and with 50k per year you are already top 1%, 100k gives you an unimaginable level of wealth. You'd earn about the same salary as the president of the country and more than most CEOs from local companies
But that would be if you spend all your salary every month which is not so smart, what most of us (bilingual developers) do is continue living a standard middle class life and just invest heavily, I invest more than 50% of my salary, mostly in real state and US stocks
I would say I live even further than the suburbs (45 minutes from Medellín, one house every acre / 5000 m2) and we just got a second fiber option maxed out at 300mb so that may be changing.
As an American who moved to Colombia, I can highly recommend it. That said, there’s a lot of downsides not mentioned here. First off, your foreign earned income and your US credit score mean nothing here. You will not be able to get a loan and if you want to buy property, you’ll be paying cash. I had to pay 8 months of rent into a bank deposited escrow just to rent a fairly cheap house for one year. That also involved (literally) about 6 trips each to a physical notary office and banks). Things that would be unheard of in the US are common place, like constant physical signatures and finger prints to authenticate documents and asking for your national id number in order to do anything and everything.
A small empty lot in the nicer parts outside Medellín will be at least $225,000. Not bad and beautiful land but again you’ll have to pay cash for everything. Taxes are very high and you can expect to pay 30% - 80% more for many foreign products (“nicer” cars in particular seem to be ridiculously high priced). Tech product selection is terrible, everything lags way behind or simply isn’t available. Amazon does ship a selection of lighter weight items here but you’ll pay a VAT tax of 20% plus an import tax of 10% on the total including shipping. It usually works out to be a 40% premium. Electric vehicles essentially do not exist unless you want a Twizy. I just had my radiator fan go out on my car and was quoted $900 for the part alone which is available in the States for $200. With shipping and taxes I can order from the US for about $550 but it will take about 2 weeks to get here.
There’s a lot of unnecessary friction in daily life, just trying to do “simple” things like an online purchase.
Still an amazing place, lots of great things but as someone trying to actually make a long term life here it can definitely be frustrating.
