Hey,
I want to show you something instead of just telling you.
[WATCH: The walk in Phuket → youtu.be/jbsVpoeBKA8]
I filmed that walking through Phuket, doing the math in my head over and over, trying to make the numbers work. I didn't have enough money to keep living there. I wasn't performing for the camera, I didn't have the energy to pretend things were fine, so I just said what was actually happening.
Here's the part nobody tells you before you move abroad. The savings that felt huge back home get smaller fast once there's no paycheck landing every two weeks and no safety net down the street. Just a number that drops every month and a return flight that gets more tempting every time it does.
I wanted to just keep extending the flight but you can see the money is slowly disappearing and you have to make the calculations to make this last long enough for you to keep going. Most people who go home don't go home because they hate it here. They go home because the runway ran out and there was no plan for what happens after zero.
◆ // THE PLAY
Runway Isn't a Feeling. It's a Number.
Most people moving abroad think in terms of "I have enough saved for a while." That's not a plan, that's a guess. Runway is specific: your savings divided by your monthly burn equals the number of months before you're out.
That number tells you exactly one thing. How much time you have to solve the real problem, which is income. And it's not always about discipline, sometimes the country itself just costs more no matter how careful you are. You still have to eat, you still need roach spray, bleach, laundry, and when your shirt rips, you still need another one. So what now? Here's how I think about it.
There are two ways this goes.
Path 1, cut burn. Cheaper housing, slower travel, smaller flexes. This buys time. It doesn't solve the actual problem, and it can only go so low before your quality of life goes with it. I moved into a cheap studio to save money, it had so many roaches and spiders, I dealt with it but it was sort of like torture comparing it to Scottsdale, Arizona. A real lesson in that.
Path 2, build income before the runway runs out. This is the only version where you actually stay long term. Not a job search back home. Not hoping the savings stretch further than the math says they will. An actual income source, built while you still had time to build it calmly instead of in a panic like three weeks before your flight home.
For me, the moment that number stopped being scary was the moment I stopped guessing and actually calculated it. Once you know your real number, you're not spiraling anymore, you're planning.
◆ // THE NUMBER
3 months
That's roughly how much runway most people have left by the time they finally admit the savings won't last and they need another income source.
Three months sounds like a lot until you're actually trying to build something real inside that window. An online business is pretty much the only real option here, you won't have a work permit, so it has to be something you can run remotely. But building an audience, ranking a blog, earning trust on a new account, all of that realistically takes 90 days minimum before anything starts moving. If you're starting completely from zero with the clock already ticking, that timeline and your runway are fighting each other.
If you already have a following or an existing online business generating something, you're playing a different game entirely, you're speeding up what's already working, not building from nothing. That's a real advantage, and it's worth knowing which version of this you're actually in before you make any decisions.
There are real shortcuts to skip past that 90-day wall though, specific lead generation strategies and a process for validating customers before you've built any audience at all. I don't lay that out in a newsletter issue, it's the kind of thing that needs your actual numbers and your actual situation in front of me, that's exactly what the consulting calls are for.
Compare a 3-month runway to a 12-month one. Same task, completely different experience. You're building calmly instead of building scared, and you actually have room for the ramp-up to play out instead of racing against it.
The math doesn't change. The amount of time you give yourself to work it does. This is exactly what I'm doing on consulting calls, figuring out how much we can actually stretch your runway, and showing you the shortcuts that can compress that 90-day wall, so you have real room to build from Southeast Asia instead of panicking through it. And if you're doing this in reverse, moving from Southeast Asia back to America, your runway matters even more, you'll be spending too fast to afford many mistakes.
◆ // THE TOOL
Digital Nomad Monthly Budget Planner
The math in THE MOVE gives you your number once. This is for building it into an actual monthly plan instead of a one-time calculation you never look at again. It's USD anchored, income in dollars, spending in whatever local currency you're actually dealing with, and it tracks actual versus planned every month, so you catch it the moment your real spending starts drifting from what you thought your runway would hold.
It works wherever you land, not just here, so if your plans shift country, the tool doesn't need to → expatbuildr.com/shop
◆ // THE MOVE
This week, calculate your actual number.
Take your current savings. Divide it by what you actually spend monthly, not what you think you spend, what the bank statement says.
That's your runway in months.
If it's under 6, you're not early anymore, you're on the clock. Not panic. Just start building something now, while you still have room to build it right instead of building it desperate.
If you're staring at that number and wondering what actually solves it, that's the real conversation. Sometimes it's a mindset shift. Sometimes it's a $300 strategy session. Sometimes what starts as "how do I stay" turns into "how do I actually run my business from here," and that's a completely different, much bigger conversation. Either way, I want to hear your real situation first, no fixed pitch → expatbuildr.com/consulting
DM me on Instagram @ExpatBuildr with your runway number. Saying it out loud is usually the first real step.
◆ // ONE MORE THING
Sometimes going back home is the solution, and it gives you a new runway. Now that you know what it was like, you can go back to your home country and regroup. It's not the worst idea. A few different studies on expat life, not specific to Southeast Asia, put the return rate somewhere around 40% within the first three years, this is genuinely common, not a personal failure. Even if you go back, the goal is the same: build a longer runway, a larger savings, and keep building your business online, so you can eventually get to real freedom and location-independent income, wherever you decide to base yourself.
None of the tactics in this newsletter mean anything without this number underneath them. The currency plays, the time zone setup, the cost comparisons, all of it only matters if you've got enough runway left to actually use it.
That's the whole reason this newsletter exists. Not just information, the actual math that tells you if you can stay.
— Galaxy (Tony Long II) 🌏
Building from Cebu. Earning in USD. Sharing the math.
P.S. — Free forever → newsletter.galaxyarbitrage.com/subscribe
P.P.S. — Watch the full walk in Phuket → youtu.be/jbsVpoeBKA8