Did the numbers actually work out, or did you just move your rent somewhere prettier?

The costs nobody puts in the spreadsheet, from my own painful list: proper medical insurance rather than travel insurance, which is a different and more expensive product; the overlap month where you pay for two places; the flight home for a family thing that you cannot decline; visa fees and the occasional border run; and the fact that you eat out far more than you think because a lot of rentals have terrible kitchens. Individually small, collectively several hundred a month.

Two full years, tracked to the pound because I was curious about exactly this. Accommodation was cheaper than home almost everywhere, and everything else was more expensive. Flights and buses between bases, medical insurance, coworking because a hotel room is not an office, storage back home, replacing gear that gets broken or stolen, and the visa admin. My all-in came out roughly level with what I had been spending at home in year one and about fifteen percent below it in year two, once I stopped moving every month. The savings show up when you slow down, not when you go somewhere cheap.

Run your first three months as a trial while keeping your flat, if you can afford the overlap at all. Expensive, and it turns an irreversible decision into a reversible one.

Mine did not work out financially and I would still do it again, which I think is the honest answer for a lot of people. I spent slightly more than I would have at home and I got two years I think about constantly. If your case for going rests on it being cheaper, you may be disappointed; if the money merely needs to be a wash, it very probably will be.

Budget for a return. Mine cost a deposit, a month's rent up front, and buying back most of the furniture I had cheerfully sold. That was about two months of my old rent, and if you have not saved it, coming home becomes a decision you make for financial reasons rather than the right ones.

Disagreement with the it-all-evens-out consensus. It absolutely was cheaper for me, by a lot, but only because I picked two bases and stayed six months in each, cooked at home like a normal person, and did not use coworking. The expensive version of this life is the one that looks like a holiday. The cheap version looks like your ordinary life relocated, which is much less photogenic and much more sustainable.