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- [00:03]
Dan
Welcome back, Borderless Real estate investors.
- [00:08]
Dave
That was a good one, I'm gonna be honest. Yeah, dude, I like that one a lot. Where we got an exciting day today, actually. I know that you guys won't see the full day all at once, but this first episode, we're going to talk about work life balance in the cities, globally, that have the best and worst work life balance. Touchy subject. I feel like it's changing. I feel like hustle culture is like a thing of the past.
- [00:33]
Dan
You're not a grindset guy. I feel like you are a grind site guy.
- [00:36]
Dave
I'm a big grind guy. I'm a big, like, work, work, work person. But I. But this is. If you, like, do.
- [00:42]
Dan
Yeah, like, that's the thing. And. And I do think that, like, a lot of the people who are like, big grind set people.
- [00:49]
Dave
Like, you're a grind guy.
- [00:50]
Dan
Yeah, of course I am. I'm obsessed with work. I love it, like, but I also love my family and I love hanging out with them. So, like, I have. I'm just fortunate. I have a very full life. Right. I don't know. Jeff Bezos talks about this, like, he talks about this concept called work life harmony rather than work life balance. You know, I mean, for you, like, your. Your fiance works with you. My. My partner works with me. My kids, like, you know, when I sponsor community events as a real estate professional, my kids come and help me and they like it. I'm not, like, afraid to. For them to see. I mean, Covid really broke this, right? Like, you're working from home. The kids are like, you know, coming into Zoom meetings and whatever, and it's hard, man. It's really hard. But I think it's. I don't think it is a bad thing to show your kids how, like, the value of hard work, like, especially if you provide them a good life.
- [01:43]
Dave
Agree.
- [01:43]
Dan
They can see, you know, the input and the output. Oh, that's what it takes to have those things.
- [01:49]
Dave
I think it's like you go through seasons, you know, you go through seasons of. And depending on where you are in your life and what you're trying to accomplish, it's like, do I think as a 20 something year old, you should be concerned about work life balance? Probably not, but, you know, Dan and I are not that old. But, like, you know, we're. We're. We're. We have partners and we're families or looking to have families. And we've worked so hard to get to this point that it's like now I think people that are a bit more established are trying to learn that, that balance. But I think it's just seasons, you know, like to be honest, I'm just in a big. Well, sorry, you and I are both in a big grind season right now.
- [02:27]
Dan
Yeah.
- [02:28]
Dave
But it's fun. We like that's a cool thing. Dan and I work together a lot so like our main, like the fourth.
- [02:36]
Dan
Time we've been on a, on a call today, it's 10 o'.
- [02:40]
Dave
Clock.
- [02:41]
Dan
@ some point we'll be annoyed with one another, but it's not today. Not today. Yeah. So like why does it matter where the countries are that have the best work life balance in 2025? Well, I think for the most part a lot of people leave the US like the US is a highly productive place but it comes at a cost. Right. There's disparity and it's, it's for, it's definitely. It rewards the grind set people but it, it punishes the non grind set people, I think. Right. And so there are a lot of. Not everyone wants to be a grind set person. Right. Not everyone wants to be Hormozi or Gary Vee or Dave Hutch. Right. Like really?
- [03:24]
Dave
No, I love where you're going with this. I know where you're going to love it.
- [03:26]
Dan
Most people don't. So they go. So it's like, okay, well what are they going to do? They are probably going to go move to a place where, you know, they said, I don't want to be, I don't want to be a 100 millionaire business builder. Right. Like, I just want to live a decent life and I don't want to have to suffer a super high cost of living. And in the US like quite frankly, with all due respect, most of the cheaper places, there's not a super high quality of life and there are some consequences associated with it. Right, of course. But there are other places on earth that people can go to have like a pretty established, you know, kind of first world experience for far less money and a better quality of life. And I think that that seems to be one of the big driving factors. What I would say is like most of the people who listen to this show and we're going to read, we're going to read a little bit first piece of like fan mail from someone we didn't know. Like most of the people listening to the show are people we know, right. Who came to listen to us because they, they follow us on stuff exit like prior, but somebody who you know is interested in moving to Spain And I think a lot, I think the biggest group of people is people who want to move somewhere. Right. There are some investors, but more and more people are people who want to move places.
- [04:43]
Dave
And especially like there's so much work, like a lot of people are figuring out that they can, they can work online, you know.
- [04:48]
Dan
Yeah.
- [04:49]
Dave
There's so much opportunity out there to earn, to earn income online. And it's like if you're not tied down geographically, why, why not, you know, go check out some of these places? Like it's just, it's the world. This is so, and this is why we made this show. We made the show not just for investors, for people to move, for people to learn and understand that this is an obtainable thing with the right information. And it's, it's, it's becoming less and less risky or, or nerve wracking because of the show. Because what we're doing is just providing value and information on, on how to actually obtain moving somewhere, investing somewhere globally. And I think this episode's so super cool because it's like, like you just said, you know, in Canada in the US we work a lot, you know, and, and even if you work a lot, it's like, I'm not going to lie, it's a lot nicer to work in the sun than in your 400 square foot condo, you know, when it's dark at 3pm in November, you know. So. Yeah, maybe we should cover this list.
- [05:52]
Dan
Yeah, well, Canada is relatively high on this list, but we'll first cover the things that are on it because seasonal effects disorder like you just described is not on the list. And it should be maybe. Right, because like there are three months of the year in Canada where you, you just get depressed because it's overcast for 90 days at a time. Right.
- [06:12]
Dave
And that sucks dark at like 4pm Literally.
- [06:14]
Dan
Yeah, yeah. So let's caveat that that's not included in this analysis. The best countries for work life balance because it's not quality of life or amount of sunlight, it's work life balance index score is based on four categories. Number one is statutory annual leave. So I, I would say that this isn't a very wide scope of analysis by the way. Like this is really, this is more for like social, like, like social safety net benefit things for. Anyway I'll get to a statutory annual leave. So the number of days that you can you get off work, paid maternity leave, minimum wage converted to US dollars and the health care system. So New Zealand is at the top of the list. With a score on the index of 86.9 with 32 statutory annual leave days, 26 weeks at 100% pay, maternity leave, $16.42, minimum wage converted to USD and a universal healthcare system.
- [07:21]
Dave
Which is curious what they mean by universal health care.
- [07:25]
Dan
That basically means like everyone gets it fair.
- [07:27]
Dave
Okay. Because they have Canada's. Oh, universal too. Okay, never mind. You know, you know what's interesting about this, the thought that came to mind is a lot of people like a question that I get asked actually quite frequently because I do sell in Mexico is like, what are the, what are the job opportunities like there? And it's interesting because I don't think, I would say like 98.9. I'm making that number up. Percent of people when they're relocating, likely are already financially stable from some source of income from their home country. You know, I don't think a lot. Like, it's interesting they have the minimum wage in here because obviously I understand that's a part of this, but I mean, if I was visual capitalist, you know, I would probably switch out minimum wage ratios and prices to like sun exposure or something, you know, because, yeah, I feel like people that are moving here, they're not moving here for employment, I would assume.
- [08:24]
Dan
Yeah. And I think you're thinking more quality of life. Whereas like, again, this isn't a soup. This is a pretty narrow scope, I would say.
- [08:30]
Dave
Yeah.
- [08:31]
Dan
Where it's really just, this is basically just work life balance, which is in this context is kind of what's the wage that you can get for basically entry level work? Is your health care paid for and do you get maternity leave and, and time off? Right. So true. Again, pretty narrow scope. We'll go, we'll burn through this list and then we'll hop over to another topic. But the interesting thing that I found here was that, you know, you would think that in a place like New Zealand where you can get 26 weeks off at 100% pay if you have a child, your fertility rates would not be in decline. Yet they are and they have been for, I don't know, almost a hundred years. Right. 1960, they peaked. Right. So New Zealand's fertility rate is 1.66 births per woman. So it's not necessarily translating to, I mean, I'm making an assumption here that a policy outcome for a government would be that they want people to have more kids because why else would you make it easy to have easier to have kids? Right. I guess maybe because it's the right thing to do for Parents, but it hasn't translated to that as an outcome. Anyway, let's move on here. So just behind New Zealand, Ireland, 30 days leave, 26 weeks at 70% maternity, $13, minimum wage, $14. Let's say it's a little. And then universal health care. Belgium and Germany, pretty close. Belgium, 30 weeks annual leave. 30, 30 days. 30 weeks would be. Yeah, that wouldn't work.
- [10:05]
Dave
I think I remember I was actually looking it up. Germany, Germany banned after our work emails. France enshrined a legal right to disconnect and New Zealand is trialing four day work weeks nationally. I'm going to try to look up some more of that as we go, but I didn't know. I'm sure we have something like that in Canada, where I don't know if it's banned to, to send, but I remember there was something that came up. Isn't there some sort of rule like that where you can't bug people after work hours or something?
- [10:34]
Dan
Well, yeah. Like the problem was, you know, all the, like, like work from home was supposed to create like a better work life balance and it actually created a worse work life balance because the time that you used to spend commuting now is getting baked into your work day and you were supposed to be accessible at all times. Right, Right. So, you know, a lot of people are pushing back where they're saying, oh, hey, like we need you to come in the office because that's the place to work. And they're like, okay, cool, well then I'm not going to respond to my. Anything outside of office hours. Cool. Yeah, okay. That's because that's a consequence, like, because it used to work like that. Like again, Covid really, really broke this whole work life balancing. So here's, here's my challenge with this work life balance thing. Like grind set. The whole grind set thing that we've been talking about, it produces results fortunately or unfortunately. Right. Like if you look at real GDP per capita, the US has like vastly outpaced pretty much everyone else on this list. Like, and a bunch of the countries that you just discussed and the work, work life balance countries. So you've got like Italy flatline, GDP per capita, France rising, but pretty slowly, UK sideways, Japan sideways, and Japan's kind of starting to climb because their population's dying off. And that's the reason that Italy's is growing, by the way, because fewer people means more GDP per capita. If the, if the economy doesn't change, Germany's is, is falling and is expected to see one of the lowest economic growth in the next little while, Canada's is falling massively. But a lot of that is because we've added so many people, which makes our GDP per capita smaller. But why is the US producing such economical economic exceptionalism? Well, it probably has something to do with the grind set thing. It could be that. There's one other thing that I do think it could be, which is that that Basically in the US I think something like 4 million illegal immigrants came since the beginning of COVID like the whole Biden thing, I don't know, they quantified it in a couple of different ways. And those people don't exist in the economy, right? Like they don't exist on paper. So they don't, they don't appear in per capita data. And that's only 1% skew on the population, right? Like 4, 4, 404 million of 330 million or whatever it is, 350 million people in the U.S. but they're, but they're out there. They're working jobs, right? Cash under the table. You know, they're landscaping, they're cleaning houses, whatever it is. So they're producing in the economy and that materializes in, in economic production. But they're not, they don't show up in the per capita stats. Not to say like there's some skew from that. Not a lot, but there's some. So that's the other thing. But, but the, the other one is like the grind set. It's the American dream. It's building a business. And you know, like everyone is there. Well, not everyone. Some people were, you know, born there and don't want to participate in that thing. But like a lot of people, and a lot of people move to the US because they want that. What's called upward mobility, right? The ability to move from the lower or middle class to the upper middle class. The opportunity to have to do that.
- [13:48]
Dave
Right? I, that's actually, that's really, that's a good point. The one thing that I'm like, I'm question, not questioning, but it's like I, I wonder because I'm seeing here, it's, there's a stat. I don't know how true it is, it's from a random website, but it's like future talent magnet. Okay, so by 2030, Gen Z and millennials will be 2/3 of the workforce. And surveys show that they would trade salary for flexibility. Now it says like countries nailing this balance could dominate tomorrow's talent wars. And it's interesting because it's like is that going to attract top talent? Like is the flexibility going to attract the top talent or is being, having that culture of being like we work hard going to attract the top talent. You know, it's interesting, right?
- [14:38]
Dan
No, yeah, it's a good, like I, I don't know. I mean I guess when they, when you. It really depends. Right. So it depends on the way that you're thinking about it. I think that one is going to attract the top employment talent employees. Right, right. Which isn't necessarily like the, you know, those are people who are working jobs. Their employer extra extracts what's called a surplus value. I'm not going to try and get too communist here. But that's how like Marks kind of came up with this idea that you know, you go work for a management consultant, they bill you out at 250 an hour and they pay you 100 bucks an hour. Well, anything on top of that is called surplus value. Right. That's money that they've made off of you, their ability to you better than you could market yourself and other things obviously. But so that's number one. And I think that some of those, these high work life balance countries are going to attract those people better. But then you get yours. Yeah, I guess like the, the builders, right. The people who want to take the economic risk. You know, the Alex horosis of the world. Like I see a very easy like people, guys who do that. I don't know why I use the word guys. I was, that was just like. Because he was a guy. Lots of women do this and they do a very good job at it. So. But people who do that stuff I think are more attracted to what appears to be in the US A the most efficient way of, of seeing that, that, that upward mobility, that class mobility from middle class to an upper class. Where am I most likely to go from being a, you know, entrepreneur startup with no money to being 100 million or a billionaire? Probably the U.S. right. I think some markets like China are very good at that as well. But there's the threat that, I mean they are in a socialist economy and that, that event, you know, you do too good, it becomes nationalized. Right. Like there's many company companies that they get too big and the country takes it away. And it's not to say that like they steal it.
- [16:40]
Dave
Right, right.
- [16:40]
Dan
You know, like they, they compensate you for it, but they want to own the means of that production. So like.
- [16:46]
Dave
Right.
- [16:46]
Dan
You know, you know, people who are building large businesses and other economies have that risk. Whereas America has like the freedom, right?
- [16:55]
Dave
Yeah, I agree. That's interesting. I, I, it's funny because, like, I, I think like you just said, I, I, it's tough because I don't know if, if advertising is like, we have the best flexibility and you know, come work here, you get, you know, the best work life balance. I, I don't know if that would attract like elite employers.
- [17:17]
Dan
No, I don't think it'll attract elite entrepreneurs. I think it will attract like, you can't sell an, you can't sell an entrepreneur work life balance because they're going to be like, I sure, I can work an insane amount of, and take a ton of risk in anywhere in the world. Like, I could do it anywhere. It doesn't make it better for me to do it in Spain because, you know, the, that, that's not the market that I'm selling for. Just, oh, it's beautiful. Cool. You know, like, unless I'm like working on my computer the whole time, which a lot of guys are. I keep saying guys. That's the wrong word. A lot of people are.
- [17:51]
Dave
So wait, so just to like, because I, I get, I think what, I'm, I'm picking up what you're putting down. It's like you and I agree, you think more entrepreneurs are drawn to that like, hustle culture. Whereas, like, yeah, nine to five people will be like, you know what? This is my career and like, this is what I do. And if I also can do what I do with a better work life balance, I'm gonna go there.
- [18:13]
Dan
Yeah, well, you're, you see in a lot of these places, they do have the ability to attack. When they're talking about top global talent, they're talking about employees, right? They're talking about engineers. And you know, like the, the employees who are building the, whatever the, the hot new thing is for the business world, where they want that top talent. Right now it's like AI engineers as an example. Did you hear this? Like Facebook just paid somebody, Bill, offered somebody a billion dollars to work for them. Yeah, a billion. For like four years. But that like, and that, but that's like almost like corporate espionage, right? Because they're basically trying to steal IP intellectual property from like open AI or they're hiring some ex open AI guy who, I just keep saying guys. Dave, I gotta, I don't know what's going on right now. I'm sorry, gals. For the gals out there. Sorry. I'm like, that's not, I'm not, I'm not, maybe I picked it up from you.
- [19:08]
Dave
No, I don't think, I don't say guys. I say guys. Like the group.
- [19:12]
Dan
It's like the colloquial. Yeah, but I think that that's like, I think that's considered like a microaggression or something like that. You know, people are, people are throwing those things around. So I'm going to try and use the more inclusive language here, the people. Because one of the individuals who was actually offered these jobs was a woman, very talented woman in the AI space. And then it ended up going up to 1.25 billion. But what they're trying to do is they're trying to take the, the intellectual property is in their heads. Like that's the crazy part, right?
- [19:39]
Dave
The ip, trying to extract it.
- [19:40]
Dan
Well, kind of like they're hiring the person because they, they want to get that ip and there's really. No, you can't. There's no document that you can just steal from open AI that. It's all in these people's heads. It's kind of fascinating.
- [19:51]
Dave
But yeah, that is interesting. I, I'm trying to. Look, I was doing as much research as I can. It's about this like life first policies to become, you know, the way to attract super magnet. But I also realized we didn't even finish the list. Maybe we should crush that list out.
- [20:08]
Dan
Sure.
- [20:09]
Dave
Okay, so we got New Zealand, number one, Ireland, Belgium, Germany, Norway, Denmark, and, and something that stands out here. Norway, paid maternity leave is 49 weeks at 100 pay, which is crazy. But they have a minimum wage of $0, which I'm trying to, to be honest, I was trying to look into that. I, I believe I pulled something up here, but I just don't want to be like overly wrong it had here. Norway and Denmark have zero statutory minimum wage, which is a high collective bargaining coverage that keeps real wages strong and inequality low. Which is interesting. And I don't really understand that if I'm being fully honest. So maybe that's something we can dive into. But do you know the answer to that? Like why this means like it's, there's no set minimum wage and it's just. You decide.
- [20:54]
Dan
Yeah, I mean there are a lot of countries that do this. You'll see like all three of the countries in that area have a zero dollar minimum wage. Norway, Denmark and Finland.
- [21:05]
Dave
Interesting.
- [21:06]
Dan
Yeah. And those are some of the best places for quality of life on earth other than they, they do winter as well, like us. So that's not cool.
- [21:14]
Dave
Yeah, that isn't cool. Well then you have Canada right after. So, so 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Canada's number seven on this list with a score of 73.5. Interesting. Then after that, Australia, which I don't know, man, maybe I've never been. So Australia.
- [21:31]
Dan
Australia is basically just like warm Canada, right?
- [21:35]
Dave
Should be. I feel like, what a place. You know, there's just too many sharks and bugs there. That's why it's down the bottom there. You know, every. You can't go outside with them.
- [21:42]
Dan
You can't work or do life because you're at risk at all times.
- [21:45]
Dave
It's just a continuous risk. I got it. Spain's underneath that. Then you got Finland, the UK, Netherlands, Portugal, Argentina. Portugal's got $5.60 as their, as their minimum wage and they're one of the low, if not the lowest paid maternity leave with only six weeks, which is interesting. I think it's just the, the lifestyle in Portugal, I guess, from what we've been talking about over and over again on, on this show. But the thing that's interesting to me is like, I don't know, Canada being way up there, I'm more biased. We live in Canada, but in Australia being under Canada, it depends. It really depends on, I guess, what you're looking for and what that, that work life balance means to you. Not everybody like me is trying to find some sun destination so I can work more for my computer. You know, that's not the same for everybody. So this is, this is very different. And we're also pretty curious like what people would consider as work life balance. You know, like what's important to each individual person would be cool. So we'd love your feedback on that because it's honestly something that we could, could use for future episodes, which would be kind of interesting. But yeah, I think this is a cool list. I mean if you're looking to explore again, we, we have a pretty cool system set up here right now. We're just trying our best to, to give value and knowledge the best that we can. If you're like, obviously we work with a lot of investors, but we equally work with a lot of first time people exploring options outside of their home country, whether it's Canada, the US to explore these other places. And the cool thing is we're trying to be as connected as humanly possible to professionals in each of these areas so that we can do the research for you and take care of all that, that question work that you have to do. We already have those answers and the people to Put you in the spots where you want to go. So if there's an area you want us to cover, if there's an expert you want us to have on, or if you're the expert, honestly, please reach out to us. We'd love to have you on the show. We'd love to discuss, you know, why your area or where you want to go is a place to consider and.
- [23:53]
Dan
We can kind of go through. That's a good, good spot for me to actually read this message that we got from. Oh yeah, our first fan mail. It says, I just want to drop a thank you note for the real Estate Without Borders. I am a Spaniard living in Florida now and looking to buy in my native Madrid. A few of your episodes are really helping me with my financial decisions. Appreciate it. And she also suggested that we should do maybe a case study in Madrid on the, on the pod. And I actually think that's a great idea. That's another way that we can really dive in. So we're going to start doing that. Just some, like, case studies on, like, what does a deal look like? What did this, like, how did somebody go. And we'll, we'll talk to a lot of the local experts on what process that client went through to purchase that property. To me, like, that's really what makes it a lot more tangible and like, practical knowledge. We talk a lot about, like, theoretical things and like, high level stuff, which is really like, what can help you guide your decision from far away. But I think to get deeper to actual action, we have to start kind of going through those steps, which is really the natural progression of the show and something we've been really excited to start doing because that's, that's honestly what's next. You know, the way that you want to, you want to buy something in another country, you got to decide first what country you want to do it in. And that's what we talk a lot about these things for. And then you start going, okay, well, I've made a decision. Maybe I've narrowed it down to three countries now. I got to start going to look at deals and examining the process. What do I need to do from a tax structure perspective? What do I need to do from an acquisition perspective? Do I need a visa? Is there all these different things that I need to do to check that box? And that's really where this is going to start evolving. It's going to get, we're gonna, it's gonna get a little crazy. It's gonna get technical, but that's that's like we're gonna have. We have a lot of experts lined up to come on the show, talk about their experiences. We have somebody that we're gonna be recording with later today to talk about their experience about buying and moving to a different country. We have a bunch of real estate experts who are going to talk about how they advise their clients to do that. So if there's a specific country that you bought in or want to buy in and you want to come on the show to talk about your experience, we want to attract potential clients, potential investors, whatever it is, let us know. We want to hear from you like that. We're trying to build a community around people who want to invest in real estate without borders, to not be limited by the country that they live in.
- [26:11]
Dave
Love it with with that. That was a good app. We appreciate everybody listening. Like we just said, if you know anybody that would benefit from listening to this episode, please share it with them. Share it on your social media. If you share it, tag Dan and I happy to repost that. And we really appreciate you listening in and any experts, feel free to reach out. Appreciate you guys. People.
- [26:34]
Dan
See.