I am often gobsmacked by the highly personal and/or utterly impossible questions my Spanish friends put to me. It’s perfectly normal for Sevillanos to ask, “What a nice apartment; how much do you pay for it?” or “Have you gained weight?” or “Who do you think is prettier, me or my daughter?” They expect an answer; evasions are considered rude. Once, out of the blue, my hairdresser said, “You don’t have any children. Is it because you don’t want them or can’t have them?” This was a bit forward, even for a Spanish woman, but it did lead to a discussion more interesting than the comparative merits of mousse versus hair spray.

As a child, I was taught that it’s particularly bad manners to ask or answer questions about money. Lately this has placed me in an awkward position on various occasions when friends, acquaintances, even total strangers who write to me on my blog or Facebook ask how much it costs to live abroad. Since the only figures I can cite with any accuracy are my own household expenses, I often return rather evasive answers to these enquiries and do my best to change the subject.

I was recently giving a talk about my book, Dancing in the Fountain, to a group of retirees in Sausalito, California. Most groups are dying to talk about the Spanish lifestyle, food, wines, flamenco dancing, tapas bars, late-night parties, singing in streets and dancing in the fountain, but this one group was fixated on how much it cost to live in Europe. I explained that’s a “how-high-is-up?” question that depends on factors such as where and how you want to live; yes, a luxury penthouse in London or Rome is astronomical, but if you chose sensibly, Europe can be quite affordable. However they “knew” it had to be terribly expensive, and nothing I said could convince them otherwise.

At the end of my talk, one woman left grumbling, “I could never live abroad. It just plain costs too much.” Later I looked up Sausalito and found the cost of living there is more than twice the national average; the median household income is more than $109,000 and the median cost of a home is more than $900,000. Moving out of Sausalito, whether to another part of California or to, say, southern Spain could cut their cost of living in half. But I’ll never convince those retirees of that.

Once again, my mother has been proved right; no good comes of answering questions about money. Not only is it none of their beeswax, nobody believes a word you say anyway. Luckily, whenever this subject comes up from now on, I can simply refer people to this blog and let it go at that.

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Reprinted with permission of Enjoy Living Abroad / Expatica

Karen McCann moved to Seville in 2004 and writes about her expat experiences in her new book, Dancing in the Fountain: How to Enjoy Living Abroad. "I loved this book,” wrote Lonely Planet. “I must have laughed aloud at least once in every chapter . . . The advice in the book is terrific." Wanderlust has taken her to more than thirty countries, including many developing or post-war nations where she and her husband volunteer as consultants to struggling microenterprises. Today, she spends her time writing, blogging, painting, exploring Seville, and traveling the world.