Quote from Algorithm:
Will probably be married next year, future wife is hip to the idea. She even did a Spanish language immersion study for a month in Costa Rica and lived there with a family.
It's not that hard to do, you just have to be able to make a living off your trading and detach from the consumer/materialistic culture of the U.S..
As long as you have low debt, steady income and a healthy savings amount what is stopping anybody from doing this? It's just a matter of what you want.
Most Americans from my experience (I am U.S. born and bred) want the 2.3 cars (of which 2 are gas guzzling SUV's), 1.5 kids, a 3500 sq. ft. house and Starbucks coffee every morning on the way to the cubicle. All the while they send their kids to daycare for somebody else to raise and so their spouse can go to work in order to afford the payments for somebody else to raise their kids at the daycare. Also they want everything now and are willing to go into enormous credit debt to get it. Oh, did I mention that there is no saving going on either. Well, if this is the case then trading from another country probably isn't going to work anyway.
It's all about priorities and if you don't have a spouse that's hip to it then it will never work. Personally, I wouldn't even rule out having a kid or two and putting them into school in Costa Rica to learn Spanish as well. Not like Spanish isn't a good skill to have here in the U.S.. You just have to make it a priority in order to make it a possibility.