And interesting thing in the personal finance community is that there is a lot written about global arbitrage, which is where you make money in one place (usually the US, UK or Australia, in a lot of these PF stories) and then go live in a really low cost of living place to make it stretch longer than it would at home.

A cool thing about working in the arts, especially if you tour internationally, is that we can do a bit of that too.

Once more, I’m going to harp on my favorite touring perk, most of the time your housing is paid for, which give you an instant savings there.

But to examine this international money idea, I’m going to use a show I worked on as an example.

A while ago, I worked on a tour in the U.K. and Middle East. My best friend on that tour was part of our props department and our scenic charge artist.

We were both working on the same tour making kind of similar money.

I am America.

He is Brazilian.

His dollars went a lot farther than mine did.

He would mention that from time to time but I didn’t fully understand until I went to visit him for a week this year and spent like nothing. The entire only cost a few hundred dollars.

We actually fought over Ubers at one point and he was like, “you have to let me pay for some of them” and because they were going on my credit card, I was like, well ok, and when I got home, I seriously expected to see like $400 of Uber charges on there.

We Ubered everywhere. The equivalent distances and times in the U.S. would’ve been about that. The total I paid when converted to U.S. dollars on my credit card was like $50.

If you have managed to build up your career where you regularly work for gigs that fly you out to them and they don’t care where you’re coming from, you can save a ridiculous amount of money by moving to a foreign country.

Of course, there are times in touring when this works against you. My American money always makes me sad against the British Pound. The Euro usually isn’t much better – however, even that varies from country to country.

On vacation with my cousin in 2019, we went to Prague, Budapest, and Vienna.

Vienna was quite pricey. It took up a sizable amount of our travel budget to stay there for 4 days.

We probably paid almost as much to do that as we spent on 8 more days in Prague and Budapest – just because local prices can differ so much. You can get a (delicious) 2 Euro chimney cake in Prague but pay 5 Euros for a tiny slice of cake in Vienna.

The main thing as a traveling artist is to watch what currency your contract is negotiated in. If you know you’re the only one on a team from a place with lower valued currency, I would try to negotiate my contract in the same currency as the rest of the team or the home office.

If the company insisted on keeping it in my local currency, I would check what the going rates seem to be for people from the country doing the same job and request the equivalent. Even if they say no, it may result in a raise from your initial offer.

One other thing to consider is looking into side gigs that a based online in countries where that currency will stretch further in your country. Some freelance writing gigs pay through PayPal to freelancers anywhere in the world. Some tutoring companies accept anyone who can fluently speak the language and has a college degree. These options are worth exploring.

And with that, I sincerely hope we’re all back to international touring soon enough and this pandemic quickly becomes a distant memory.