The idea of super commuting isn't new and it's the practice of living far from your workplace often in a different city or even country and traveling long distances to work, sometimes weekly or just a few times a month. These commutes can involve hours-long drives, train rides, or even flights and it’s often a strategic lifestyle choice where super commuters endure the long hours of travel to leverage the wage and cost-of-living gap between two locations. It’s a way to “game the system” by combining the best of both worlds: strong income and affordable living.
There are already numerous videos or articles of people chronicling their super commuting experience. One example is Mr Chen Shao Chun, a 39-year-old Singaporean who used to work at Google. When he was retrenched, he decided to move to Chiangmai to escape the rat race, and he is currently employed as a lecturer at NUS and he commutes one day per week from Chiangmai to Singapore for work. He is also a content creator and I find his youtube videos pretty insightful, you can check out his videos at this link.
His one day per week job translates to a high per hourly rate which he states is achievable by leveraging on your expertise in a field and becoming a recognized Subject Matter Expert (SME). A high per-hourly rate means you can work considerably fewer hours while still earning enough to cover all your living expenses. But there is no free lunch in this world, he had to spend years of dedication and planning to improve his skills in sales and marketing before he managed to get this job at NUS.
As I dove deeper into stories of geo-arbitrage and extreme commuting, I couldn't help but reflect on a chapter of my own: a six-month training stint in New Zealand. While it wasn’t a textbook case of geo-arbitrage or even remotely feasible for super commuting, it offered some surprising financial and lifestyle upsides.
New Zealand isn’t exactly cheap and flying back and forth to Singapore weekly was out of the question. But thanks to corporate housing, my rent was fully covered. With no major living expenses and a stable SGD-NZD exchange rate, my take-home value (if not my actual salary) got a meaningful bump. More than that, the hidden gem was lifestyle arbitrage: I clocked in early, knocked off before 5 p.m., and actually had time to shop for groceries, cook real meals, and explore the country on weekends without a whatsapp notification in sight.
This wasn’t about retiring in Chiang Mai on $30 a day. It was about extracting lifestyle gains and mental clarity, returns rarely discussed in traditional financial models. Even though I wasn’t technically saving more, the quality-of-life "dividends" paid handsomely.
Opportunities like this aren’t common, and today’s tight labor market and mobility constraints don’t make things easier. But if the chance to work overseas, even temporarily knocks, think beyond just dollars and cents. Sometimes, the highest ROI comes not from boosting your income, but from radically rebalancing how you spend your time.
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