Millions of Americans are quietly packing their bags and trading skyrocketing rents for beachside apartments, crowded ERs for walk-in clinics that cost next to nothing, and rush-hour traffic for cobblestone streets. A Harris Poll survey of over 6,300 Americans across three waves revealed a growing wave of interest in moving abroad, with roughly four in ten Americans having considered or planned to relocate outside the U.S., believing it could improve their quality of life and financial stability. The promise is real. On $2,500 a month, you can rent a sun-drenched apartment, eat out every night, and still have money left over. Many Americans are already enjoying life on Spain and Portugal’s coast for less than $2,500 a month, with those regions offering unmatched opportunities to cut costs, improve quality of life, and embrace a completely new way of living.
But here’s the thing nobody warns you about before you book the one-way flight. The good life abroad comes with a very specific, very American ache. No matter how many fresh espressos you drink on your terrace or how much money you save each month, certain things from back home quietly gnaw at you. Let’s dive in.
1. Family and Close Friends
Honestly, nothing hits harder than this one. You can romanticize the adventure all you want, but the moment your sister’s birthday rolls around and you’re 5,000 miles away, reality lands like a punch. Surveys of American expats found that nearly two thirds miss family and friends most about the U.S., making it far and away the top answer, while the second most missed thing, convenience and services, didn’t even come close.
It’s not just the big milestones you miss. It’s the casual Sunday dinners, the spontaneous phone calls that turn into a two-hour laugh fest, the people who just know you. Moving abroad is described by expats as emotionally difficult, particularly when saying goodbye to loved ones, with the challenges of missing friends and family back home among the most significant adjustments anyone faces.
2. The Sheer Convenience of American Shopping
Here’s something you never appreciate until it’s gone: being able to buy ibuprofen, paper towels, a phone charger, and a rotisserie chicken all in the same place at 11pm. America has turned convenience into an art form. America is a consumerist culture to the max, and that comes with enormous options for anything you might want to buy, with convenience and variety essentially acting as the national religion, even in relatively small towns.
Abroad, you learn to adapt. The pharmacy is closed on Sundays. The grocery store shuts at 8pm. Bulk buying at something like Costco is simply not a thing. The second most missed category among expats is practical: about one in five miss convenience, services, or infrastructure, while food and culture account for roughly one in ten. Small frustrations, sure, but they stack up.
3. American Food Culture
Let me be clear: food abroad is often magnificent. But there comes a day, usually around month three, when you would absolutely trade a plate of authentic pasta for a proper rack of BBQ ribs or a real New York-style bagel. In 2023, the average U.S. household spent $6,440 a month on living expenses according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a figure that rose 5.9% from the prior year, and inflation has likely made things even pricier since, but the food options that spending buys you remain unmatched globally.
The diversity of American food is wildly underrated. You can get world-class Korean, Ethiopian, Peruvian, and deep-dish pizza all in the same zip code. That kind of culinary democracy is rare. Expats frequently cite the informal American backyard BBQ as something they genuinely grieve, noting that the unstructured, relaxed social eating culture simply doesn’t translate well abroad, where mealtimes are more rigid and structured.
4. The U.S. Healthcare System’s Speed and Specialist Access
I know this one sounds ironic. American healthcare is notoriously expensive, and that cost is a major reason people leave. Americans spend the most on healthcare of any country in the world, and in 2025, a family health insurance plan averaged at nearly $27,000, a 6% increase from 2024. So yes, the bills are brutal back home.
Yet once you’ve waited weeks to see a specialist in a foreign country, or struggled through a medical appointment in a language you barely speak, you start missing certain things about the American system. The speed of emergency care, the advanced diagnostics, the sheer density of world-class specialists, particularly in major cities. Accessing healthcare services and understanding insurance systems in a foreign country can be surprisingly complex, with expats often facing real challenges in finding providers, understanding coverage options, and dealing with language barriers in medical contexts.
5. Fast and Reliable Internet Infrastructure
You don’t notice how good American broadband is until you’re trying to take a Zoom call from a charming but digitally neglected village in southern Europe and your screen freezes mid-sentence for the fourth time. Relocation data from Expatsi shows that Americans moving abroad prefer top-tier infrastructure above almost everything else, with respondents specifically prioritizing the top 10% globally for fast Wi-Fi, high-speed trains, well-maintained roads, reliable electricity, and similar services.
Remote workers feel this one sharply. The U.S. may have its problems, but in most metro areas and suburbs, blazing-fast, consistently reliable internet is simply assumed. The growing acceptance of remote work has further influenced migration patterns, with many Americans opting for destinations with lower living expenses and flexible residency options, though reliable connectivity remains a central concern for this group. When the Wi-Fi goes down abroad and your work depends on it, the American infrastructure you once took for granted suddenly seems like a luxury.
6. A Culture of Customer Service
American customer service has a reputation for a reason. The “customer is always right” mentality, the enthusiastic greetings, the ability to return nearly anything without a fight, the fact that someone picks up the phone when you call. It sounds trivial until it’s not there. The famously generous return policies at American retailers, where members can return items for up to a year regardless of condition, represent a level of consumer protection that simply does not exist in most other countries.
Abroad, you learn to be patient. Bureaucracy moves slowly. Complaints are met with a shrug. The concept of “I’d like to speak to your manager” often translates into a blank stare. It’s a different philosophy, not necessarily worse, just very different from what generations of Americans have grown up expecting as baseline normal.
7. The Sense of Scale and Space
America is enormous, and that size creates a particular freedom of movement and thinking that expats genuinely miss. Wide roads, massive supermarkets, huge apartments, sprawling national parks you can drive to on a weekend. The sheer geographic scale of the country is something you only fully appreciate once you’re living in a compact European city. Americans are accustomed to super-sized living, from their homes to their cars and belongings, but in other countries homes tend to be smaller, meaning you won’t have as much space or need as much stuff.
There’s also a mental openness that comes with that space. The frontier mentality, the “go big or go home” attitude toward dreams and ambition. Roughly seven in ten Americans believe the U.S. is the most lucrative country for work, even if the same share also feel they are surviving more than thriving within it. That career energy, that relentless optimism about what’s possible professionally, it’s uniquely American and notably absent in many places abroad.
8. Familiar Holidays and Cultural Traditions
Thanksgiving. The Fourth of July. Halloween, the real American version with the carved pumpkins and the candy and the neighborhoods transformed into something magical. These are not just dates on a calendar. They are identity. Adjusting to a new culture poses significant challenges for expatriates, with studies highlighting issues such as language barriers, differing social norms, and unfamiliarity with local customs as primary obstacles, while the importance of social support and openness to new experiences is consistently emphasized as key to adjustment.
It’s hard to say for sure, but I think the holidays hurt most during the first two or three years. You can host a Friendsgiving abroad, sure, and your fellow expat friends will cheerfully show up. But something is still off. It feels like a performance of a memory rather than the thing itself. The traditions that shaped you don’t fully survive the relocation, and that quiet loss is something many Americans abroad quietly grieve for years.
9. The Ease of Doing Business and Banking
Starting a company, opening a bank account, getting a credit card, signing a lease. In America, these things might be frustrating, but they generally work. Abroad, simple financial tasks can turn into weeks-long ordeals, especially for Americans who carry the extra weight of U.S. tax obligations everywhere they go. Americans living abroad face real legal and regulatory hurdles, including the burden of FATCA and FBAR reporting, U.S. banks cancelling accounts with little notice for residents overseas, and the strain of being caught between two conflicting tax systems simultaneously.
This is one of the most underestimated struggles of the expat life. The vast majority of expats, roughly five out of six, find U.S. tax filing requirements from abroad stressful, and from 2024 to 2025, the share of expats seriously considering renouncing their U.S. citizenship jumped by nearly two thirds, rising from roughly three in ten to roughly half of all expats surveyed. The financial bureaucracy alone is enough to make some people genuinely reconsider the whole adventure.
10. The Raw Energy of American Cities
There is something about New York at midnight, or Chicago on a game day, or Austin during a music festival, that is completely impossible to replicate anywhere else on earth. American cities pulse with a specific kind of electric ambition. Unlike earlier waves of emigration often driven by singular causes, today’s expat trend is multi-faceted, with hidden drivers such as political estrangement, cultural curiosity, and global connectivity combining to push Americans abroad in ways few anticipated, even as many still deeply miss the energy they left behind.
Expats often describe cities abroad as more livable but less thrilling. The streets are walkable, the cafes are beautiful, the pace is humane. A significant share of surveyed U.S. expatriates cited the pursuit of a better quality of life as a primary reason for moving abroad, with improved healthcare, enhanced work-life balance, and access to superior education systems among the contributing factors. Yet somehow that quieter, gentler pace can feel like something is missing, especially for Americans whose identity is woven into the relentless forward motion that defines their home country’s spirit.
The Bottom Line: Two Places Can Both Be Home
Moving abroad to live well on $2,500 a month is genuinely possible, and for millions of Americans right now, it is becoming a reality rather than a fantasy. According to the U.S. Federal Register, there was a staggering jump of over 100% in Americans formally expatriating in the first quarter of 2025 compared to the last quarter of 2024. The financial math often works out beautifully. The lifestyle upgrades are real.
The homesickness is real too. Not for a political system or even an economy, but for the specific texture of a life you built somewhere, the people, the food, the glorious inconvenient messiness of American culture. The emotional story of being an American expat is fairly universal: expats build big, fulfilling lives abroad, but homesickness is almost always about relationships and the familiar, not grand cultural abstractions. That tension, between the freedom of a cheaper, slower life and the pull of everything familiar, is something every American expat carries quietly, no matter how beautiful the view from their new terrace happens to be.
So, if you are weighing the leap yourself: go in with open eyes. The $2,500 lifestyle is real. The longing for home is just as real. What would you be willing to trade?