Living like royalty

Everybody arrives with a version of this picture. A house with room to breathe. Someone to drive so you never sit in Lagos traffic with your own hands on the wheel. Help in the kitchen. Weekends that feel like weekends. All of it on money you earned in pounds, dollars or Canadian dollars, in a country where those go further.

Some of that picture is completely real. The rest of it quietly costs more than where you came from, and the gap between the two is where returns go wrong.

What genuinely is cheaper

Labour is the honest part of the fantasy. A full-time driver runs somewhere around one hundred to one hundred and sixty dollars a month. Domestic help sits lower still. If you are earning abroad, you can afford a level of everyday support that would be unthinkable in London, Houston or Toronto, and it is not an illusion.

Food from the market is cheaper, and better, if you learn where to shop and accept that convenience costs a premium here exactly as it does everywhere. Getting things repaired rather than replaced is normal, and there is somebody nearby who can do it. Your money buys more human time and more human skill. That is real, and it is one of the genuine pleasures of being back.

What is not cheaper, and often costs more

Housing, in the neighbourhoods where you actually want to live, is not cheap. A three-bedroom in Ikoyi runs from around four and a half to nine thousand dollars a month furnished. That is not a Lagos discount on a Western city. In many cases it is a premium.

Schooling is the one that reorders budgets. International school fees run from roughly fifteen to thirty-two thousand dollars per child per year. Two children at the upper end costs more than the rent.

Then there is the part that has no equivalent abroad, and it is the reason so many budgets break.

The infrastructure tax

You become your own utility company.

Power that arrives reliably is something you buy and maintain: an inverter, a battery bank, solar, a generator, diesel, servicing, and someone who can fix it at ten at night. Water that is safe is a borehole, a tank, filtration and testing. Internet that holds up for a video call is Starlink at around six hundred and sixty-nine thousand naira to install and fifty-seven thousand a month, usually with a backup line because one connection is not a connection. Security is an estate fee, a gate, and often people.

None of these appear on a payslip abroad because the state provides them and you pay through taxes without noticing. Here they are line items, they are yours, and they break.

This is what people mean when they say the cost of living is low but the cost of living well is not. You are not buying luxury. You are buying the baseline you had without thinking about it, and buying it retail.

The staff question, honestly

Having people work in your home is the part of the fantasy that turns out to be a relationship rather than a purchase.

Pay properly. The going rate is the floor, not the target, and the difference between the floor and generous is small money to you and life-changing to them. Pay on time, every time, without being asked. Put the terms in writing even when nobody expects you to. Vet properly, with references and guarantors, because this is your home and your children.

Treat this as employing people, with the obligations that carries, and it works. Treat it as buying convenience and it curdles, usually slowly, and usually in ways you find out about last.

The obligation you did not budget for

Nobody warns returnees about this one, and it deserves saying plainly.

Visible foreign money creates visible expectations. School fees for a nephew. A contribution to a burial. Capital for a cousin's idea. Some of it is family, and it is right, and you will want to. Some of it is the tax on being the one who left and came back with something.

Decide before you arrive what you can give annually, treat it as a real budget line, and say the number out loud to your partner. The people who struggle are not the ones who give. They are the ones who never decided how much, and so said yes until it hurt and then said no in a way that damaged something.

Where the real luxury actually is

It is not the driver, pleasant as that is.

It is being unremarkable in your own country. It is your children knowing their grandparents as people rather than as voices on a video call. It is weather that does not need to be endured for four months of the year. It is walking into a room where nobody is quietly working out where you are from.

That part is genuinely priceless, and it is the reason people stay. The house and the staff are just the setting.

The version of this that works

Earn abroad or from assets, in a currency that does not erode while you sleep. Spend locally where local is genuinely better value, which is people, food and craft. Buy the infrastructure properly once rather than cheaply three times. Decide your family obligation number in advance.

Do that and the picture you arrived with is largely true, sustainably, for years.

Skip the infrastructure maths and it is true for about eight months, which is roughly when the first year of rent runs out and the generator needs replacing in the same month.

Work out your real number before you commit to a neighbourhood. It takes a minute and it is the cheapest hour of planning you will ever do.

Figures current as of September 2026 and subject to change.