Utilize your financial knowledge, give your answer or opinion to the input question or subject . Answer format is not limited.

What are the downsides that prevent more people from working in high-income countries, and then retiring in low-income (and cost of living) ones?
There are two parts to the hack you describe.  One is moving to a high-cost, high-pay country to work, and the other is moving to a low-cost, low-pay country to retire. As Dilip mentioned in a comment, the first part is not so easy in many cases.  You can't just take a plane to the USA and start making big bucks immediately.  In the first place, it's illegal to work without special visa permissions.  Even if you manage to secure that permission (or take the risk of trying to work illegally), there's no guarantee you'll get a job, let alone a high-paying one.  The same is true in most other high-paying countries. As for the second part, that takes considerable willpower as well.  After spending X years getting used to a country, investing time and money, you must then have the resolve to uproot your life a second time and move to another country.  For the most part, countries are expensive for a reason.  Even if you in principle reject the cost-benefit tradeoffs of a particular country, it can be difficult to give up some of those benefits when the time comes (e.g., trains running on time, reliable electricity, donut shops, or whatever).  You might "get soft" or become co-opted by the rich-country rat race and find it difficult to extricate yourself. All of these problems are compounded if, as in many cases, you happened to start a family while in the expensive country.  At the least, moving would require uprooting not just you but your family.  Also, quality of education is often one of the main reasons people immigrate permanently to expensive countries.  Even a person who personally would prefer to retire to a cheaper country may be unwilling to transplant their children into that country's education system.  (Of course, they could wait until the children are self-supporting, but that makes the wait longer, and may result in them living far away from their children, which they may not want.) As JoeTaxpayer notes, the same reasons may work on smaller levels, even within a country.  In theory it's perfectly possible to power through a brief, lucrative career in Silicon Valley and then retire to Idaho, but it doesn't seem to happen as often as the plain numbers might suggest.  A simple way to put it might be that the kind of person who would be happy living in a cheap environment often cannot or will not endure a lengthy "tour of duty" in an expensive environment.  Either you like the expensive environment and stay, or you leave, not as a planned lifehack, but because you realize you don't like it.