>>513375056
>you can earn an American salary but pay Russian living costs, then sure, compare dollars
Last year, in a thread such as this one, I got to chat to an American working remotely from Belarus (while pretending to be located in the US), his situation was exactly like the one you described here and he was obviously living the dream.
What's more interesting to me however is whether I could hypothetically live on $2000-2500/mo in rural US assuming I'd purchased property there.
Probably yes, for a while, despite bleeding money left and right on various taxes and fees, until hitting the age when the lack of free healthcare would lead to doctors leaving me for dead after seeing the socia~ I mean, credit card rating.
>how many hours do you need to work to pay for X
That's the thing though, first of all most people work the same 40ish hours a week, though some jobs obviously have weird schedules; plus we're all mandated at least 4 weeks of paid vacation per year.
Yet none of these fluctuations in hours worked really matter because the real disparity comes from what kind of job you do and who is the employer.
A rural area store clerk can be earning $400/mo while another would be doing the same thing in a boutique in a city and bringing home 5 times as much.
And, of course, there's jobs where you actually have to work overtime unpaid just not to get booted, while other jobs have you chill all day until something breaks or an occasional request arrives.
Food and utility prices here are more or less the same across the country however, barring some extreme outliers, which is why I lumped them together.
Rent varies which is why I mentioned it separately.