Retirement Without Borders

Ever since we, your authors and guides, passed a certain age, we’ve been stumbling over retirement books. Retire-on-less books, retire-in-sunny-
places books, retire-and-rejoice books, retire-and-do-work-that-you-love books, retire-in-quaint-places books, retire-overseas books. The business is booming.

Why not? It’s one thing we can absolutely count on. In some form, whether we keep working at something, or kick back, we will eventually “retire”—to another phase of our life. It’s a growth industry. As the man in The Graduate might say today, “I’ve got one word for you, Benjamin: retirement.” We are on the same campus together, all of us, and we’ll begin graduating with the Class of 2010, when 76 million boomers start turning 65. A new adventure begins.

This book is about retiring beyond U.S. (and Canadian ) borders. It is also about retiring beyond the borders of your own experience, to explore how moving to a different culture in your latter years can revitalize, enhance and extend your life. It will examine the fantasy so many of us may have shared: moving to an exotic new locale; creating new interests, new friendships, and a new life; buying or building a house in a foreign land; living the romantic expatriate life. We’re here to help you consider whether you want to take those first few steps. Here, amid the locations we’ve chosen for their potential to stir your inner Huckleberry Finn, you may find a way to strike out for a new territory of your own.

As our baby boom generation begins to trade in what we’ve had to do for what we want to do, we are asking ourselves questions that will affect the rest of our lives–

• How do we want to live the time we have left—which , if we’ve lived this long, will amount to at least a quarter of our lifespan?
• Will we have the funds to live, if not lavishly, at least close to the level to which we’ve been accustomed?
• Do we want to continue living where, and how, we always have—or seek out something fresh, something challenging, something unlike what’s come before?
• If we’re looking for warmer nests, as so many of us do at a certain age, are we fated to become snow birds shuttling back and forth to Florida and Arizona?
• Will we ever have a chance to follow the dream many of us have harbored: to explore other countries, experience other customs, immerse ourselves in other cultures?
• And for some of us, can we find places to live where we can express a new part of ourselves, contribute, or help change lives where the need is greatest?

We say: Try living abroad, grasshoppers.

We did it ourselves. We bought a piece of land in Mexico on the strength—truth be told, on the impulse—of a couple of visits. In the first year we lived there, we built a beautiful home just off the beach. We are famously proud of it. One of us Gringos in Paradise even wrote a book about it. It was exhilarating, thrilling, challenging, fun.

But we wouldn’t do it again. Not that way.

We’ve been part-time and full-time expatriates, we love the life, we love our friends and our Mexican home. But here’s a hard truth: during the year we spent building our house, we didn’t have one stress-free day. Nor did most people we knew who built, or—often—who bought. It was fine for writing the book. We had a saying: Bad for life, good for book. In the retelling, our adventure was both funny and fulfilling. Loved it, got through it, whew! But in life, the toll on our nerves was high.

The dream of moving to an exotic, foreign land is equal parts fantasy and fear.

Here are the fantasies:

• You’re sitting at a café in Provence, sipping Pernod, planning your visit to the local greenmarket before returning home to the old stone farmhouse you’ve lovingly restored, where you’ll set the table for a candlelight dinner with your amusing French friends and favorite expat pals….
• You’re lying on the beach in front of the whitewashed, thatch-roofed house you built near Puerto Vallarta, sipping a coconut drink, and when the fishing ketch pulls up, you stroll over and buy the fresh red snapper you’ll eat tonight…
• You’re on the roof of the villa you rented for the first year in Tuscany, seeing the sun set over the red-tiled roofs of the hill town, listening to the sounds of an Italian mandolin serenade…
• You’re on the porch of your spanking-new bed-and-breakfast in a mountain town of Panama, watching the hummingbirds hover over the hyacinth, awaiting this weekend’s guests…

Here are the fears:

• Where do you go?
• How do you choose?
• Did you do enough research?
• Do you trust the research you did?
• You’ve sold your stuff and moved to an unfamiliar place!
• You don’t know the language!
• You don’t know the customs!
• You don’t know what will happen if you get sick!
• You miss your family and friends!
• You can’t buy the stuff you know and love!
• You want to buy a house, but don’t have any idea if it’s priced right.
• You don’t understand how mortgages work here!
• You’re sinking a big part of your nest egg into this property!
• Are you already too late for rising real estate prices?
• You don’t know who’s taking advantage of you!
• The people aren’t as friendly as you’d hoped!
• You don’t know whom to turn to for help!
• You’ve started to build but have no control over the final costs!
• You don’t know if you have clear title!
• You don’t know if you got the right permits!
• Can the government take it away from you?
• The currency might be devalued!
• Will be able to sell easily if you change your mind?
• Will you owe capital gains?
• You’ve put your savings at risk!
• You’re stuck there!
• You’ve burned your bridges!
• You’re thousands of miles away and just made the biggest mistake of your life!
• In short, you don’t know the drill!

Now here’s a fact: You can live the fantasy without the fear. There’s a formula, a strategy that will make this possible. It will free you to consider more places than you thought possible. If it’s right for you, that is. Because, honestly, it’s not for everyone.

The goal of this book is fourfold:

• To consider the dream
• To explore the dream
• To show you the dream in selected countries
• To tell you honestly what the pitfalls are.

There are wonderful, life-enhancing reasons to consider retiring abroad, and we’ll share those with you. But there’s also a lot of disinformation out there, and the Internet has multiplied it exponentially. If some of you decide after reading this that life abroad is not for you, we’ll be doing our job. Not just for you, but for expatriates already in place. We’ve often heard old hands lamenting the waves of eager, naïve Americans who arrive with stars in their eyes. They believe they can live abroad like aristocrats on just their Social Security; they believe they can transplant their lives intact to foreign soil; they believe they can throw their often-hefty American weight around to change how things are done; they cannot wait to be serviced cheaply by a maid, a cook, a gardener. And so on. They end up disappointed, get hustled, complain a lot, give Americans a bad name, and often end up returning to the United States or Canada, leaving a bad taste in everyone’s mouths.

We’ll talk about this, consider all the pros and cons, and give you the general information you need to make a decision right for you. We’ll offer you that “secret” formula we think can make all the difference. This book will look at the overall considerations of moving move abroad, what countries might be a good fit for you, and what steps you can take to begin the journey.

We don’t try to do it all. We won’t be giving you all the gritty details of tax codes, or the step-by-steps of relocation. (Just some.) The more specific a printed book gets, the more likely it is that it will be obsolete. There are lots of how-to books and informational sites out there. Our main purpose is to get you thinking, to start the conversation.

We have chosen ten countries to cover in depth. Here, we do offer detail with the proviso that you know—and we know—that by the time you read this, some of the particulars will be out of date. Our purpose is to give you an immersive picture of retired life in each country, including prices current in 2008, or residency requirements—the last time we checked. But we need to say it again: you’ll need to update much of it on the ground and online.

Your options are of course not limited to these countries; they are merely a range of venues amenable to North American retirees. Though we’ve spent much of our lives abroad, we haven’t lived in all of these countries. So for these in-depth chapters, we recruited experienced writers who have lived in, and reported extensively on, each country. Old hands on the ground are always the best sources of information—better than official sources, better than tourist organizations, better than commercial enterprises—for the “unofficial,” version of retired life in their adopted countries. (Caveat: When the “unofficial” advice you get is in any way about major financial or legal steps, the very next piece of advice to seek is: who’s a reliable lawyer around here?)

We’ve also talked or corresponded with hundreds of expatriates, interviewing them about their lives, asking them to share their experiences. Scores of them have done just that in the pages following each of our country reports. And beyond these 10 countries, we offer a few observations of other foreign venues you might also consider.

Finally, we have a strong sense that many, if not most, in our privileged generation want to do more than sit in the sun or relax on the porch. We’re looking for ways to give back, to contribute, especially where it can make a tangible difference. From our earliest days in Mexico, the expats to whom we gravitated, who seemed the happiest, were those active in the lives of their local community—sometimes in an organized way, with charities and fund-raising, sometimes in more direct ways, volunteering to teach, organizing trash pick-ups or distributing clothing to the destitute. Repeatedly, expats told us that in volunteering, they got back far more than they gave. That’s the opportunity: Live well, do good. In the spirit of volunteering “without borders,” we’ve listed some of the local and global resources on volunteering practically anywhere your restless feet might take you.

So, grasshoppers: meditate here on your future. And consider all points of the compass.