I moved from SF to Zurich, so just to add another data point to corroborate this, you can live relatively cheaply here while I really couldn't in SF because hou

I moved from SF to Zurich, so just to add another data point to corroborate this, you can live relatively cheaply here while I really couldn't in SF because housing doesn't really have a cheap (and adequately safe) alternative. Meanwhile, here the "everything else" is actually not very high if you limit or more carefully plan eating out, buy groceries with some consideration of cost (budget variants are often less than half the price of "standard" ones), etc. Health insurance can be expensive while for many of the people on HN it would be included in employer benefits in SF, but it's still not that bad. Last time I checked, the average payment in Switzerland for adults was $250 USD or so.