Expense Lock-In: The Key to Permanently Lowering “Your Number” to Financial Independence…Especially Abroad

Frugality is a tax you pay every day through mental energy and effort, with each additional decision sticking to the plan. “Lock-in” is a single decision made once that pays dividends indefinitely, and living abroad multiplies the possibilities of “locking in” more for less.

There’s a number most people never think to calculate, and it’s one that quietly runs their life and quietly steals precious resources.

It isn’t salary. It isn’t the savings rate. It’s the total price tag on the many individual recurring expenses that exist in everyday life, each multiplied by twenty-five.

Here’s where the twenty-five comes from.

The 4% rule, the foundational math in every early-retirement and FIRE plan, states you need roughly twenty-five times your annual spending invested before you can stop working, with an income that pays out indefinitely. Flip that math around, and every $1 you spend each year becomes a $25 claim against your future freedom, because that’s how much additional capital your portfolio needs — forever — just to keep paying for that single $1 expense.

A $200-a-month habit isn’t a $200 habit. It’s a $2,400-a-year habit, and a $60,000 liability ($2,400 x 25) sitting as an obstacle on your road to financial independence. The gym membership you forgot you had, the additional truck payment for upgrading to the newest model, the Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu streaming stack, the storage unit filled with furniture and clothes you haven’t used for 10 years — acknowledge each culprit’s true price at 25x what you perceive daily, and the small stuff stops looking small.

Most personal finance advice attacks this pile the same way: apply frugality.

Spend less, every day, forever. This frugality approach does work, but it demandingly asks you win the same mental and willpower fight over and over, day after day, for the rest of your life. Just like those seemingly small expenses that stack up, this approach looks small and unintimidating at first, but after 365 days of battling, most people’s willpower gives, and frugality caves to the inevitability of human consumption behavior.

Luckily, there’s a higher-leverage alternative move available, and almost nobody gives it a name.

I’ll give it one. Expense lock-in — permanently eliminating a recurring cost, or freezing it at today’s low rate, with a single, intentional decision and an intentional, calculated investment or sacrifice up front. Not “spend less this month.” Remove the line item entirely, or pin it to the floor, so you never have to fight that financial decision again.

Each lock-in does two things at once: it strips roughly 25 times that cost off your FI number, and it frees the money you were spending to invest and compound somewhere useful.

And here’s the part that makes this idea, and how we live with it as expats and nomads, unique: living abroad multiplies the opportunities available to you by an order of magnitude. Not just gym memberships, streaming services, and latte factors, but homes, healthcare, and hobbies across thousands of cities, like infinite colors available to paint the perfect, yet affordable, existence, on the blank canvas of their mobile life. This is superpowered by how they can find and lock in these advantages to last for years, while inflation, encouragement of the consumption cycle, and planned obsolescence wreak havoc at home.

The expat doesn’t just earn in dollars and spend in pesos. They get the opportunity to geoarbitrage the cost of buying permanence. More on that shortly — first, a distinction that makes the whole idea work.

Why “lock-in” isn’t just frugality with a fancy name

If you’ve visited financial independence forums, read FIRE writing across the internet, then you’ve no doubt stumbled on the many frugality guides. You know how the latte factor leads to squandering large amounts of wealth, how the used Corolla is a savings and wealth-building gem, and how cooking at home is one of the tastiest wealth accumulation hacks. So let me draw the line clearly, lock-in and frugality are different tools that solve different problems with different efficiency.

Frugality is discipline and constant guiding where your money flows. You resist spending or spending more, every time a decision point arises, repeatedly, indefinitely. It does work, but frugality runs on willpower, and willpower is a depletable resource you have to keep renewing. Every day you stay frugal, you pay a small tax in attention and emotional labor. The FIRE veterans who’ve bumped against frugality burnout know this trap better than anyone; the standard solution they recommend is to pick a savings rate you can sustain for a decade, not one driven by extreme and constant frugality that burns you out in two years. Frugality that you can’t sustain isn’t a strategy. It’s a countdown.

Lock-in is a single financial action that pays dividends indefinitely. A single financial decision, made once, that permanently lowers your baseline spending and solves the issue for an extended period or permanently. You don’t need to wake up every morning and re-decide not to buy a new car if you paid a little extra money and time in research to buy the truck that lasts 20 years, and that you’re happy enough driving for the next 20 years. The question of “what car to buy” never comes up again, and you’re never required to answer the question again. Or pay for it. The willpower cost is paid once at the moment of decision, and then it’s done.

That subtle difference is the whole point.

Frugality gives you the savings until the next decision point. Lock-in gives you the savings, removes the cost from your FI number, and never asks you to fight that mental battle again.

Make an investment that eliminates or freezes $1,000 a month of recurring spend, like downsizing a home while eliminating a gas-heavy commute or trading in a leased vehicle for a 2010 Corolla, and you don’t just bank $12,000 a year — you cut roughly $300,000 off the portfolio you need to retire. You also reclaim all the daily attention you’d have spent policing your budget to stay on track.

Expense lock-in isn’t anti-frugality. It’s the higher-leverage cousin. Spend your limited willpower on the handful of decisions that lock in financial savings and financial wins permanently, and you stop having to be frugal about everything else. A thoughtful purchase, an investment, today buys you out of the daily fight.

The expat multiplier: More opportunities for lock-in at cheaper costs

Every lock-in available at home, downsizing a home, eliminating a commute, trading the annual resort vacation for National Parks, is available somewhere great abroad. However, “abroad” offers cheaper, bigger, and in greater supply. This is where geoarbitrage stops being a story about income arbitrage between countries and becomes a story about permanently lowering the floor cost that underpins your life.

Start with the obvious one. Housing.

Housing is the biggest line item in almost every American’s budget, and abroad you can lock it in at a fraction of home costs in the US — perhaps a long lease that freezes your rent, or an outright purchase in a place that’s both cheap and genuinely livable. As I write this, Vietnam, Thailand, the Balkans, Malaysia, and El Salvador are full of these options: places where a comfortable life rents for a few hundred dollars a month and a modest sum buys a modern home outright. One year of rent in the US, $21,000 per year according to Rent Café, could prepay 5 years of rent for a serviced apartment blocks from the beach in Da Nang, Vietnam. The median down payment on a house in the US in 2025, which is actually only the start of the expense stream, was $78,831 according to Bankrate.com, but that same $78k could buy a beach villa in the Thai islands, a country home in Spain, or an apartment in Japan outright with minimal further cost.

By opening your mind to the idea of locking in your expenses, and including replacement options abroad on that menu, you’re potentially fixing your costs at a much lower, geoarbitraged floor.

You’re not just geoarbitraging dollars and basic finances to buy more for cheaper, you’re moving locations to increase the number of options on the table for how you lock in the costs in your life, and the breadth of quality available to you in that upgrade.

Then, if you do swap the “house subscription” in the US for a permanent, or price-locked, housing situation abroad, as a surprise bonus, everything else resets the moment you land. Healthcare that would bankrupt you in the States runs a fraction of the price and is often better and more accessible day-to-day via medical tourism. Transport becomes a simple $1,500 motorbike instead of a $40,000 sedan, and the insurance, gas, and maintenance that follow it. Food, household help, gym, coworking — all of it resets to a lower number with that move abroad. In short, a simple move abroad to the right location locks virtually every expense or luxury in your life to a lower average price. The second you step off the plane into Colombia, the Italian countryside, or Tbilisi, Georgia, you’ve effectively “locked in” a lower cost of living, as long as you have a plan in place that allows you to live there indefinitely.

The runway for the same kind of life in your new home country is effectively cheaper, and the same budget buys more runway. A novel idea of prepaying six to nine months of your entire life costs a fraction abroad of what the same stretch of living costs in a desirable city in the US. That single fact is what turns the most powerful lock-in of all from a remote fantasy into a Tuesday decision.

Put it together, and the expat isn’t just arbitraging the exchange rate or the buying power of their income. They’re arbitraging the cost of buying their current standard of living, at the lowest price it will ever be, permanently.

There are three mechanisms, each an individual approach to how to lock in. They’re not interchangeable and can be combined in action as each is a tool in your financial toolbox with distinct value.

Mechanism One: Eliminate (the need to buy again)

Most people unknowingly treat cars, boots, jeans, tools, and gear as subscriptions. They buy cheap, replace them on a cycle when they’re “supposed to”, and ultimately pay repeatedly forever. The first lock-in approach flips that completely: treat each purchase as a one-time investment that kills the replacement cycle.

My 2003 Toyota 4Runner is the cleanest example I own. It’s more than 20 years old. It starts on the first turn of the key every morning, and in the two decades I’ve driven it, it has saved me the cost of every car I never bought. Americans get a new car, on average, every ~4 years, with the average price tag in 2025 being ~$50,000. Given that math, I have saved myself at least 4 cycles of buying a new car, or $200,000. Even accounting for the national average $15,000 trade in value, I saved $160,000, just by keeping my car, which I love by the way, a little bit longer.

Tens of thousands of dollars in payments, depreciation, and “upgrades” that never happened. That money didn’t just stay in my pocket. It went into a brokerage account, where over those same twenty years it has compounded into a six-figure sum. One decision, made once, eliminated a recurring expense and funded investments that grew on their own to finance my own financial independence.

That’s the double compounding effect of an expense elimination, and it’s why the math runs opposite to how it feels at the register. Spending a little more once for the thing that lasts decades feels like the expensive choice. In reality, it’s the cheap one. The genuinely expensive choice is the cheap purchase you have to make again, and again, and again. Each replacement disguises a fresh dip into capital that could have been compounding as smart investments instead.

The move, from here, is to audit your current recurring replacement costs — the things you unconsciously buy on a cycle rather than once. Vehicles, clothing, footwear, tools, luggage, electronics. Find the high-churn ones and convert them to durable, buy-it-for-life versions that serve you faithfully and quietly over decades. You won’t do this with everything, and you shouldn’t. But every item you “lock-in” is a cycle you break and a line-item expense deleted from your life permanently. Every item you lock in is that dollar amount X 25 that you remove from your FI number, plus that dollar amount added to your brokerage account each time you avoid buying it again.

Mechanism Two: Freeze (the cost at today’s price)

You can’t eliminate some costs. You will always need somewhere to live, something to get around in, and some food on the table. But you can do the next best thing by freezing the cost at today’s low rate. This way, a decade of inflation and rising local prices never touches it.

This is a different mechanism from elimination, and the difference matters. In this case, a fixed cost is still recurring and hasn’t been eliminated — you still pay rent every month — but the rate is locked. You’ve taken a single volatile, inflation-exposed expense and pinned it to a number that can’t drift upward on you.

You can plan based on this. You can budget based on this. You can allocate based on this, without compromising your FIRE plan.

Housing is where this pays off most, because housing is 30 to 40% of a typical budget. According to Zillow, the average American’s rent has increased 36% since 2020. That subtle erosion requires 36% more cash to achieve financial independence, with no increase in quality of life, happiness, or opportunities. But lock in your rent with a long lease, or buy a low-maintenance home outright in a cheap, livable area, and you’ve stabilized the biggest variable in your entire financial life. Do it abroad, and you’re not just freezing the cost — you’re freezing it at that geoarbitraged floor, commonly ½ to 1/3 the cost in the US instead of the already stifling rent costs in the US.

What does this “frozen cost” life look like in reality? A two-to-five-year lease in Da Nang, Tbilisi, or Tirana, signed at today’s price, locking in $500 or $750 a month apartment rent, is a wall between you and every future rent increase in that market and globally.

Why doesn’t everyone lock in a cheap home abroad then? Moving to a new country feels risky to virtually everyone at first, especially if they haven’t seen the gold of opportunity on the other end of the flight. Getting to Tbilisi and finding an apartment available takes getting offline and talking to people, which could be daunting but also softly conceals opportunities. Buying a farmhouse in rural Italy comes with infinite unknowns, but some of those unknowns could be the unknowns that you didn’t know you needed. And, most importantly, this is a single piece in a strategy that does require other moving pieces in a life abroad, so this approach requires diligence in your entire move abroad to be successful.

This mechanism matters because it lets you know what is possible, and that possibility very well could be worth it.

The instinct most in personal finance is to chase ten small savings opportunities. Often, the smarter play is to freeze the one big number and stop worrying about the rest. Freezing your housing cost in the face of ten years of coming inflation is usually worth more than shaving the small expenses of avocado toast and a Saturday morning streetside latte — and it only asks for one signature…and perhaps an exploratory vacation.

Mechanism Three: Forward-fund (parts of your life)

This is a high-value approach I default to at every major transition in my life, and it’s the one almost nobody writes about. Instead of saving up toward some vague future, I save forward to cover a defined, open stretch of time — and then prepay the whole thing.

For instance, in celebration of achieving financial independence, I prepaid six months of rent, gym memberships, and motorcycle rentals, along with an expense budget to go along with my move to Thailand. While the act took a deliberate year of planning and saving, it freed me, financially, mentally, and professionally, into an irreplaceable period of “FAFO.” Because the entire period’s expenses are “locked in,” even if nothing comes from this but a clear head, I end the time with no loss and a nearly priceless intangible net gain.

Here’s the actual method. When I’m approaching a real inflection point in life — a move, a new major project, a season where I want to go deep on my health or write a book that requires intense focus — I set aside enough money for a defined window, usually six to nine months. I lock in as many of the expenses as possible up front. I prepay for the apartment. I prepay the rental car, or the motorbike if I’m in Asia. I lock in the essentials that keep me sharp: the gym, the coworking space, the recovery center. I budget out the monthly food and set it aside, with plenty of extra for sushi. Then I step into a self-funded sabbatical with every expense already handled.

What happens next is the part that doesn’t show up on a spreadsheet. Because the costs are prepaid and locked, the money stress simply disappears. There’s no monthly anxiety about runway, no creeping math in the back of my head, or guilt that I should get to work. There’s no decision fatigue about whether I can afford it this month. When that financial pressure lifts, focus floods in to fill the space. The window becomes mine to spend on whatever the season actually calls for — rebuilding my health, building a project, writing, or just decompressing after a hard stretch of experimental work. Because the runway is already paid for, every gain that comes out of it — financial, physical, creative, emotional — lands as pure profit.

That’s the reframe that makes forward-funding different from ordinary saving. You’re not stockpiling money for an undefined and ambiguous future. You’re converting a pile of cash into a stress-free, locked-in stretch of time fully immersed in your one and only life. You’re buying time and focus, in bulk, at a fixed price. If you have eliminated and frozen costs in the process, you’re buying back your life at a discount.

You may have heard the phrase “buy back your time.” Dan Martell wrote a good book by that name. But that’s about buying back hours by delegating tasks. This is something else. This is buying back whole seasons of your life by prepaying them. And it’s exactly the kind of move that’s painfully expensive in the most desirable places in the US and Europe, which just so happen to be high-cost cities, but it is almost trivially cheap abroad, where six months of a good life can cost less than a single month back home. The payout multiplier of an expat life and the forward-funded season of life are made for each other.

While I apply this idea to seasons of life, you can apply this lock-in to planning to countless worthwhile experiences to “buy back” in life: to your retirement, to make the transition to FIRE easier mentally and emotionally, to transitioning into a new profession, to an experimental year abroad, to a nomadic year around the world, to being a stay at home mom/dad for a year, or any other “season” of experience that feels out of reach in our subscription based world.

The Flip Side: What not to lock in

Lock-in is powerful precisely because it’s permanent. However, this means locking in the wrong thing is permanent, too. Two kinds of commitments should make you stop before signing a contract.

When the total cost is a mystery, be wary.

Call it homeowner fever. The dream house seduces you with a single number, the purchase price, and then quietly attaches a tail of costs nobody warned you about: hidden maintenance costs, property taxes, the unsolvable roof, the special assessment, the permits, the emotional weight of a thing you now have to manage and stay close to, the opportunity cost of the capital frozen inside it. That’s the opposite of a clean lock-in. Compare it to renting, where the cost is knowable, bounded, and printed in the lease, and the headaches are “locked-in” as outsourced to the owner from the beginning. The rule is simple: if you can’t pin the total cost of a commitment before you make it, be careful about making it permanent.

When the upside is a mystery, be warier still.

Watch for commitments with a sharp, concrete upfront cost bolted to a vague, hand-wavy promise of return. “Just get the degree,” with no clear line from the tuition to a paycheck with a dollar figure or a job title you can actually name. The business or investment “opportunity” for a bar from a friend with a precise price tag and a fuzzy story about what financial returns will come back to you, and when. When the cost is concrete, and the upside is a mystery, the asymmetry is quietly working against you under the guise of politeness and tradition, and locking in only deepens the potential hole.

Good lock-ins share a silhouette: a defined cost now and a clear payoff in a foreseeable future. The trap is locking in a knowable cost against an unknowable one.

An Honest Caveat: A lock-in is a commitment, so keep in mind that the ground moves more in some places than others

This whole strategy rests on one assumption – that the thing you lock into stays worth locking into. It doesn’t always.

Lisbon is my standing reminder.

Back in 2018, Lisbon was an off-the-radar paradise for nomads and expats: you could buy an apartment for $150k and lock in a home base in one of the best little big cities in the world, cheap – and I almost did. The Portuguese locals were charming and welcoming in their characteristically reserved way. The small restaurants serving fresh cod were accessible, and the waitresses recognized you after two visits. The bars felt more like warm Irish pubs far outside of Dublin, where everyone knows everyone, and they know you, too, within a few minutes.

Fast-forward to today, and Lisbon sits in the shadows of a housing crisis, intense overcrowding, and an immigration shift aimed at slowing or stopping the inflow of new residents. All the while, these factors continue pushing the city’s costs up and changing the feel of what were its best neighborhoods.

The potential Lisbon lock-in that looked perfect in 2018 came with strings that only revealed themselves as the tides shifted post-pandemic.

Does that make Lisbon a bad place? Absolutely not. I still love the city, and so do plenty of my friends who chose to stay. If you don’t mind more people around and your budget can absorb the cost of living increases, the city is still a win. But it’s also a warning worth taking seriously about the long-term, hard-to-reverse nature of lock-ins.

Be warned that when you buy property or a large asset in a place, you’re committing to a trajectory you don’t control, while local, global, and personal tides keep moving underneath you.

Because of this very real downside to locking in expenses, use the tool the right way. Lock in aggressively where the commitment is reversible enough, and the downside is bounded — buy-it-for-life gear, a one- or two-year lease in a place that has been contently peaceful for the last 10 years, a prepaid sabbatical. Be cautious with the irreversible ones, like buying property in a market you’re new to, or that is experiencing a “boom,” and weigh every lock-in against your larger FIRE strategy, life plans, and real needs, not just this month’s savings and this moment’s whims.

Lock-in is a tool, not a religion. The art within the discipline is knowing which commitments to make permanent and which to keep loose.

A Truth to Internalize: Freedom is fewer claims on your future

Run the math one more time, because the compounding is the whole reason this works. Lock in or eliminate $1,500 a month of recurring costs — $18,000 a year — and you’ve done two things at once: cut roughly $450,000 off your FI number ($18k x 25), and freed $18,000 a year of cash flow to compound from this point forward. Stack a few of these expense locking and cost saving actions across housing, transport, and a handful of buy-it-for-life decisions, and the finish line of financial independence doesn’t just creep closer – it comes toward you at a run.

That’s the engine. And it slots straight into a larger financial independence plan. Lock-in reduces expenses, leading to a lower FI number, and means a smaller portfolio can carry your entire financially independent life. Freezing expenses keeps the bar for expenses low. Geoarbitrage makes sure those frozen expenses buy a genuinely good life instead of just a frugal one. Three moves, one machine.

Here’s the reframe to leave with. Financial freedom isn’t only about how much you earn or how hard you save. It’s about how few recurring claims you let attach themselves to your future. Every lock-in is one claim removed, and one less thing that can reach into your pocket next year and the year after and pull money out of your life.

I think about this every time I see a 4Runner, and every time I walk into a prepaid season with nothing owed and the whole stretch of time wide open in front of me. Nothing is reaching in. The day is mine. That’s what you’re actually buying when you lock in – not just a lower number, but a future with fewer hands in it.

This is strategy and mindset, not individualized financial advice. Weigh any major lock-in against your own situation, and when a commitment is large or hard to reverse, run the numbers with someone who knows your full picture.