Travel widely enough, and you'll notice something about the Americans you encounter abroad. While the people I know in the States are too often shackled to dull jobs or lukewarm relationships, the entrenched expats I've met while visiting nearly 150 countries rarely show evidence of boredom, worry, or regret. Nearly all seem to embody what a quintessential Outback man -- twice my age and hitching in the opposite direction on an Australian backroad -- yelled across the pavement: "Don't spend time; enjoy it."

If you're thinking of starting up somewhere else for the YOLO of it, don't let cost stand in your way. The US government pegs the poverty line a bit beyond $12,000 a year for a childless person. That won't take you far in Oakland (or even Omaha), but it will buy you a full year of wonders in one of these 10 countries. In any of these, $1,000 a month covers housing and food, as well as access to adventures that chumps with much fatter salaries can only imagine. The price of a beer, I've found, works as a pretty reliable stand-in for almost any cost-of-living survey you care to enlist; those are included here.

This list could dig deeper into hardcore steals, but unless voluntourism is your goal, risky places like Nigeria or Pakistan aren't wise choices. And a note on budgeting: If you're working abroad, you'll blow less money, simply because you'll stumble into fewer budget-wrecking binges while on the clock. If you're earning even a few American dollars a month, you can stretch a trip to any of these spots indefinitely. (And if you need a handbook for these sorts of life-changing jaunts, A Better Life for Half the Price by Tim Leffel is the bible for bargain-hunting wannabe expats.) Life is short, as they say. So go long.