About Us
Hi there! We’re Sandra and Jeff—a couple who, in 2022, decided to trade a predictable life for an unpredictable adventure. We packed up our carry-on, sold almost everything, and dove into our new-to-us lifestyle as Americans living abroad, one country at a time. Our plan; figure out where in the world we could actually afford to live without draining our savings. Spoiler alert: It’s not where we thought it would be!
If you’re dreaming about retiring overseas but think you can’t afford it, following along as we share with you what we learn along the way.
Where we’ve lived and traveled
Our Backstory Story: From Overpacked Closets to Carry-On Freedom
Jeff’s a veteran, Sandra grew up as a military brat, and together, we’ve lived and traveled everywhere-from small towns in the USA and villages in England to the Caribbean and beyond. After 20 years rooted in one place (Oregon), we realized we missed the excitement of discovering new destinations. So, we sold our home, parted with nearly everything we owned, and hit the reset button.
Armed with determination and a tight budget, we set out to live overseas-one country at a time-choosing places that aren’t too hot or too cold, and that research says are truly affordable.
Now, we’re sharing everything we’ve learned about living abroad on a budget-no sugarcoating, no gimmicks, just real talk.
Why We Hope You’ll Love Our Blog
We’re not here to sell you a dream or paint Instagram-worthy-yet-delusional pictures of what it’s like to live abroad. We’re here to help ‘paint’ a realistic picture of what is like to live abroad, as a nomad, on a budget. Our blog is for anyone who:
- Wants to explore affordable places to live abroad and hasn’t quite reach the threshold for retirement residency status for the places you might want to live (just like us)
- Needs practical advice on full-time travel
- Enjoys stories that are as honest as they are entertaining.
Here’s what you can expect:
- Budget-Friendly Relocation Advice: From cost breakdowns to cultural insights, we’ll show you how to make the leap without going broke.
- Destination Spotlights: The good, the bad, and the weird—every place we’ve stayed has a story.
- Relatable Tips: We’re figuring this out as we go, so you’ll get advice that’s fresh, practical, and occasionally hilarious.
Curious about the thought process that went on behind the scenes before we left the United States?
Follow along (click the down arrow to expand the stories)…
Why Nomadic Retirement?
Our original plan? A tropical paradise retirement in Panama. But the more we talked about it, and the more that Sandra bought into the idea, the more I realized that buying a beach house and living out the rest of our retirement days in a tropical country might not be a satisfying plan. Health concerns, political anxieties, and a growing wanderlust pushed us to rethink everything.
Redefining Retirement Goals
So we started by defining our true retirement goals. What truly sparked joy? (I’ve been reminded through this process it’s also important to recognize that your understanding of what your goal actually is may change as you attempt to define it more clearly. )
We had initially made a decision that we would retire at age 67. We had planned on settling in Panama unless a visit there changed our minds and so we had tentatively formed a plan to spend a couple weeks there in May. A friend of mine was retired to Coronado so we at least had a shot at some inside scoop on how the process should go. We also decided that we would rent first before committing to a purchase so that we could be WAY more familiar with the country.
Downsizing and Preparing for an Affordable Retirement
Step one was going to be downsizing from our current property. We have 5 acres with a 1,680 sf 3 BR house, a 1,000 sf ‘shop/storage’ space that was the original house on the property, plus two 40′ Conex containers we used as storage and workshop space. I’ve been collecting tools and shop equipment for decades as an auto mechanic and woodworker plus we have so much art; paintings, prints, dimensional pieces, glass, the mind fairly boggles at the scope.
The original plan starts with selling off most of our stuff, sell the house and use the proceeds to buy a motorhome or 5th wheel and a small piece of land. Then we could continue to work but be debt free and stacking money away while we prepared to retire. Oct 2022 we were laying out the timeline for early summer 2023 to sell the house, still with an eye towards working until 67.
Between personal property, project cars and equity in the house we’d be starting with a decent chunk of cash. We figured on spending maybe as much as $100k to set up a small acreage with an RV and use the rest to buy a rental property somewhere cheap to start developing a passive income. With no mortgage or debt we’d be able to live on maybe around $2,500 per month so anything we earned over that would go towards more rental properties
Adapting Retirement Plans Based on New Information
But then a couple of things happened in November 2022 that caused us to start having a much more serious discussion about what retirement looks like for us. First thing was that I went in for a routine follow up at the end of October (I have had some issues with my heart and actually have an ICD to improve my odds in case of a 3rd heart attack) and they started me on a blood pressure medication. When I went back 3 weeks later to see how that was working out my BP was 228/122 so they sent me to the ER. I had been monitoring it at home for a couple of weeks and 202/103 wasn’t an unusual reading, the systolic number was seldom below 180. This was explained to me as being bad and wrong and liable to result in a stroke so I wound up being admitted to the hospital for hypertension. Change to the medications and more monitoring but ya know, stress is a thing.
This was my third admission to the hospital because “this is the kind of thing people die from” situation, so it got me thinking very seriously about retirement sooner rather than later. Like, I have always wanted to travel more and I’m apparently running out of time to get that handled.
Around this same time, 45 announced he was going to try and become 47 and we were both uncomfortable with what we imagined the campaign was going to be like having already dealt with 2 years of “I didn’t actually lose; the Dems cheated”. I follow politics casually but it’s enough to cause significant stress because I can’t even believe we’ve gotten to this point in our country. Even if 45 isn’t a contender it looks like Desantis would be the GOP nominee and that’s hardly an improvement.
The Plot Twist: Affordable Nomadic Adventures
That’s when we stumbled upon the idea of affordable nomadic retirement. I had been reading up on various cheapest places to live aka affordable retirement destinations with an eye towards where in the world a couple could live on our anticipated Social Security of about $3,000 a month. During the process we learned more about SS benefits, and that by being strategic about our destinations and living arrangements, we realized we could explore the world while staying within our budget.
Or as our family would say “You’re doing what??!?” I was going to call this post ‘Episode IV-A New Hope’ but I didn’t want to deal with lawyers, soooo…
Scrolling through retirement blogs, we stumbled upon a question that hit us like a ton of bricks: “Do we want to have a home or do we want to have a life?” It got us thinking. How much cash would we really need to retire right now and enjoy life before Social Security kicks in (which, for us, is still 90 months away)?
$4,000 per month means we’d have to have $360k in the bank. Hmmm, that’s a lot
If we set our sights on retiring in June – which would make the selling of the house happen on a much more tolerable timeline for me – then it’s 83 months to SS so we’re down to $332,000.
Okay, what if we could live on $3,000 per month? Now we only need $249,000 to retire early. That’s not as big a number as it sounds, though. I mean, it’s a bunch of money but it’s not out of reach.
We had also just switched brokerages to work directly with a friend of ours and Sandra reminded me that we had committed to a year with Christina. So that means starting this grand adventure more like November/December. Which then means the window to collecting SS payments is 78 months and the required capital is down to $234k.
Hmmmmm. We had some money saved and we’ll get a decent chunk from selling the house so retiring early is suddenly looking like a pretty doable plan.
Making the Retirement Math Work on $3,000 a Month
The big question was, could we swing this financially on $3,000 a month? Traditional retirement wisdom tells you that you need a small fortune saved up. But what if we could create a fulfilling retirement experience without needing a mountain of money?
So What does a $3,000 a month Nomadic Retirement lifestyle look like?
I’d been reading up on other countries and was pretty confident that $3k per month would allow us a decent standard of living in a lot of different places. But the residency visa appeared to be an issue.
We couldn’t get a resident visa anywhere just based on having a pile of cash in the bank and having $250k invested won’t generate the required $2k per month income to qualify to get a pensionado visa in Panama. Well, it would in rentals but we’d have to show that income stream for 2 years prior to moving so that’d mean we’d be homeless in Oregon with $2k/month to live on unless we kept working. (Update – that was bad info; in order to qualify for the residency you need to have a guaranteed-for-life pension from the government or a major company)
That’s when we discovered the magic of affordable nomadic retirement. By being strategic about where we go and how we live, we realized we could explore the world for less than the cost of maintaining our house in the States. Think about it – no more property taxes, no more expensive lawn care!
Affordable Retirement Travel and Living LIKE a Local
So what if we didn’t ‘move’ to a country, what if we just maxed out the 90 day visitor privilege and became senior nomads? 3 month rentals seemed to be readily available in most countries I looked at and the whole point of getting out of Oregon was to avoid snow and cold.
We both have enjoyed our limited travels but always felt rushed – 10 days in France, 10 days in New Zealand, not enough time to really enjoy the country except on a very superficial level. The 4 years we spent in England was an awesome time but we had young kids, we didn’t have much money and 4 years is soooo long that we never felt any pressure to get things seen so we wound up missing quite a lot.
The question then became, could we reduce our lives to a big suitcase and a backpack each then just be nomadic seniors? 90 days per country should be long enough to really get a feel for a place but short enough that we would feel some small pressure to see what we wanted to see. I was pretty confident that I could do that and she’s game to give it a try.
Is the Affordable Nomadic Retirement Life Right for You?
Listen, senior nomadism isn’t for everyone. It might not even be right for us. But if you’re like us and craving something different out of retirement, and you’re open to exploring the world on a budget, then this might just be the perfect path for you.
Planning this adventure has been an eye-opening experience, and guess what? There’s lot to think about! This post tackles some of the practical questions (and potential solutions) we’ve encountered so far.
Can We Earn an Income While We Travel?
Turning our travels into a side hustle is tempting. Can we monetize the affordable traveling retirement concept at all to help subsidize our senior nomad travels and maybe not skate into SS completely broke? Could we get jobs in foreign lands to supplement our savings? She’s good with tech and I’ve got a big personality so perhaps we could establish ourselves as a ‘hints and tips’ resource for folks interested in affordable retirement travel or extended vacations.
The Cost of Living Challenge & Affordable Retirement Travel
For cost of living and convenience reasons we are looking at cheapest countries to live in and had our eyes on Montenegro and Croatia. Studio and one bedroom apartments were plentiful in the $500 to $600 per month range. But wait….
Affordable Retirement Travel: How Long Can We Stay In a Country?
One appealing option was the idea that we could do 90 days in Croatia then take a bus and do 90 days in Montenegro.
I looked into visa requirements and restrictions and it turns out we would not need a visa for short trips to the European Union (EU) or countries in the Schengen area if we were staying for 90 days or less in a 180-day period.
This means that someone can enter the Schengen Area as many times as they want, but only stay for a total of 90 days, every 180 days. (This rule applies to every state of the Schengen Area.)
So could we do 90 days in the UK (not in the EU) then go to Croatia (in the EU) for 90 days, then go back to the UK for 90 days and then go to Montenegro for 90 days?
(Update: Montenegro is not currently in the EU or the Schengen zone – yet – but it’s also really tiny (slightly smaller than Connecticut!) so 90 days might be too much)
We’ll also need to schedule occasional trips back to the US to visit family. Is that annual trip?
Healthcare on the Move: Prescriptions and Sleep Apnea
I was really struggling with how my prescriptions could be handled and Sandra suggested that perhaps they could be shipped to the US Embassy wherever we were living. That might could work because we certainly aren’t liable to move anywhere that doesn’t have a consulate at least (Update – Apparently non-narcotic prescription drugs are much more readily available pretty much anywhere outside north America. Whodathunkit?)
My sleep apnea therapy is another healthcare consideration; the CPAP machine I have is pretty bulky but I know there are smaller, more portable options available – that’s another expense to consider.
You might also be interested in our post Prescription Refills – Planning an extended period overseas? What You Need To Know About Prescription Refills Abroad
House sitting and Pet Sitting: A Short-Term Affordable Retirement Travel Solution?
House Sitting or pet sitting gigs could be a way to stay in one place for a bit and explore locally. Plus, caring for a furry friend wouldn’t be too demanding if the only responsibility is to feed and walk Fido twice a day. First glance at this sort of side quest are generally going to be a week or at most a month at a time (Update: Pet sitting and House sitting while traveling internationally is proving to be more complicated than we first imagined…. some countries view pet sitting, house sitting and even volunteering abroad to be “unauthorized work” and deporting or denying entry to travelers who are doing this.)
The Pet Quandary: Can We Travel with Them?
Speaking of petsitting, another challenge is what to do with our 2 cats? We love them and they are an important part of our home life. Seeaytee was a rescue from the animal shelter and when we first got her it took 3 days before she came out from under the bed. She’s around 10 years old now so another rehoming would be pretty traumatic after 7 years with us. Anathema was a barn kitten we turned into an indoor cuddler. Well, not really that cuddly, there is a reason I sometimes call her “Razor Floof”. Traveling with them fulltime is complicated due to quarantine requirements and the logistical nightmare of managing food and litter box issues. It would limit our access to rentals as well as making spontaneous changes in plans problematic. Can we rehome them?
So, what are we going to do?
We’re still figuring it out! This blog is all about sharing our journey, the challenges we face, and the solutions we discover along the way. Maybe you’re a soon-to-be retiree with wanderlust too, or perhaps you’re just curious about affordable retirement travel. Either way, join us as we navigate the world on a budget, and who knows, maybe we’ll inspire you to chase your own retirement dreams!
Where Do We Land in our Full-Time Retirement Travel plan
Today’s post dives into a recent conversation with Sandra about our ideal retirement destinations, expat bubbles, population density and setting a target launch date for our full-time retirement travel adventure
While a beachfront paradise sounds tempting, Sandra wants a bit more. She’s drawn to the idea of being near, but not within, American expat communities.
We both understand the appeal of expat bubbles – a sense of familiarity and support. But we also agree it can hinder feeling connected to the locals and their community.
When surrounded primarily by other Americans, we risk missing out on experiencing the local way of life – the vibrant festivals, the delicious (and sometimes unfamiliar!) cuisine, and the enriching interactions with people from different backgrounds.
Living in an expat bubble can also discourage us from picking up the local language, a key to unlocking deeper connections and navigating daily life confidently.
Ultimately, we want our retirement to be a journey of continuous learning and growth, and that means embracing the unique culture of each place we call home, not just recreating a piece of America abroad.
It reminds me of when we were stationed in England. We purposely rented a house far from the American base to truly experience life in a new country. I vividly remember telling the military housing office, “Sorry, I didn’t travel 5,000 miles across an ocean to a foreign country to spend the next 4 years surrounded by Americans.”
Full-Time Retirement Travel plan: Avoiding Crowds and Finding Balance
Sandra also emphasizes avoiding overwhelming crowds. k. I’m completely on board with that.
Neither of us has much interest in spending significant time in Asia or the middle-East (preconceived notion of high population density) so we’ll stick to Central America and Europe as we research destinations
I’d really like to golf more in retirement but most of the places we’re looking at have a dearth of courses. There’s like 9 in the whole country of Panama, same with Puerto Rico. England should be good, I feel like there’s probably a lot of muni’s.
Full-Time Retirement Travel Plan: Rethinking the Timeline
And then today, 12/6/22 she tells me she isn’t comfortable with a 1 year timeline to drop everything and go. She isn’t ‘done’ working yet. Alrighty then, so we’ll be talking about that…
Exploring Options and Setting a New Target Date for Launching our Full-Time Retirement Travel Plan
Much of our discussion centers about the various moving parts and various “what if” scenarios to determine a new quit date; when we plan to bail and travel full-time informs the decision of how we handle the money from selling the house. Because we both agree that getting off this property is a necessary first step to retirement planning and that should happen in the spring this coming year.
Originally, we envisioned November 2023 as our departure date. With Sandra’s concerns in mind, we’ve pushed that back to October 2024.
This extended timeline means our “transitional period” is now 17 months instead of 6. We’ll need to carefully plan for this extended period, especially since it includes another winter in Oregon.
Remember our ever-evolving timeline? Well, Sandra recently surprised me by saying, “I’m not so sure I want to face another Oregon winter. What if we revisit our original fall 2023 target date?”
Alrighty then, let’s talk about that…
Adapting and Planning for the Transitional Period
We’ve already committed to a timeline for selling the house and downsizing. But the question of “where will we live” during the “transitional period” – the time between selling the house and embarking on our nomadic adventure – is a subject of some discussion.
Sandra keeps coming back to buying an RV as temporary housing. However, logistics get tricky. Would we sell it before flying out and need temporary lodging? Or find a place to store it in case the nomadic life isn’t quite the right fit?
The truth is, the answer to “where do we live after selling the house?” will likely become clear once the house is on the market and things feel more real.
Building Our Online Presence: TheMobileRetiree™ is Born!
In the meantime, we did score a major win – locking down our domain and social media handles! We debated “bigasssuitcase.com” (because, let’s face it, packing light for a multi-year trip abroad isn’t exactly my strong suit), but ultimately landed on TheMobileRetiree™ and snagged the matching social media handles.
This website thing is important for a couple of reasons. Apparently, the magic internet monetization fairies require a well-established website before we can monetize our retirement travel diary. Plus, the sooner I start tinkering with this writing and video thing, the better. Practicing on local attractions and nearby golf courses means way less pressure if I mess up. Besides, who wouldn’t want a do-over on a bad Oregon day trip, right?
Join Us on the Journey!
So, stay tuned as we navigate this ever-shifting path to mobile retirement. We’ll keep you posted on our latest decisions, challenges (because let’s be real, there will be challenges), and maybe even some travel tips along the way. Cheers to a new year, and who knows, maybe even a (slightly) more settled retirement timeline!
As we excitedly plan our nomadic retirement, one crucial aspect threw us a curveball: medical insurance for fulltime travelers. Budgeting for this seemed straightforward, but the reality for nomadic retirees like us is quite different. So much so that we did a blog post to explore the the different types of “travel” insurance and discuss the differences and similarities of travel insurance vs medical insurance for fulltime travelers. We’ll also share the alternative solutions we discovered to ensure affordable health coverage for our globe-trotting adventures, helping you navigate this essential step in planning your own mobile retirement!
All about the Benjamins
I worked up a preliminary travel budget for this adventure based on information gleaned from various travel bloggers, my own research and a little bit of caution. Virtually all of the countries we plan to visit are on someone’s “You can retire here for $1,500 per month” list so I’m allowing $3,500 per month to include travel between locations as well as the fact that food and housing expenses will almost certainly be higher based on frequent travels. You can secure a 12 month lease at a significantly lower cost than a 1 to 3 month lease and moving to a new country every 90 days means A) there will always be new restaurants to explore and B) there will be significant travel expenses, especially on inter-continental moves
We’re starting off with the proceeds from selling our house and selling almost everything ‘stuff’, so there is an investment strategy in the background to maximize return on that money, but this whole thing is predicated on not having any ‘actual’ income; just what we get from investments and the cashflow needs to be managed because we will be living out of that pile of cash we start with. This not a situation where we have millions to invest and we can just live off the return; we need to really make the most of every opportunity so the money doesn’t run out before our SS benefits kick in.
By the same token, we don’t want to be living on beans and rice in a 5th floor walk-up somewhere just to escape the rat race, it would make more sense for us to keep working in that case.
What’s in our Travel Budget?
Housing
Based on the numbers I’ve heard from various travelers (mostly folks in the ‘digital nomad’ category) I had budgeted $700 per month for housing. Since my search for rental apartments had turned up numerous options in the $350 to $600 range in most of the countries I explored options for online I’m pretty hopeful we can do that. I checked out AirBNB for the first time this week and monthly rentals under $700 aren’t hard to find at least in Panama and Costa Rica which are our two starter countries. I also found a 9 bedroom villa for $26,511 per month that is not a finalist.
Activities
I’ve got $400 per month assigned to ‘transportation and entertainment’ because we’ll certainly want to do things wherever we go.
Relocation
I budgeted $600 per month for relocation assuming a change of countries every 90 days – $1,800 per trip. The first trip will be to Panama and if we were booking tickets right now it would cost about $1,200 so there is carryover to future travels. And the second target country is Costa Rica; we can get from Panama to Costa Rica for $50 by bus or maybe $450 if we fly so there will be additional carryover for the 3rd relocation which takes us to southern Europe. Looking at future destinations there are a few that may be over my baseline budget depending on the starting point so it will be important to keep a reserve in that account.
Food
Ah, my favorite reason to travel; I love to eat. Again based on what I’ve heard from various travelers I $400 for groceries in our travel budget, which should be plenty since our grocery bills here in the US in a pretty high cost of living area run $500 to $600 per month. At present I am NOT a careful shopper and we have several ‘prepared food’ meals each month. I budgeted an additional $450 per month for meals out assuming 15 restaurant meals at an average $30 each. Mostly I hear you can eat in a decent restaurant for $10-$12 per person in most places at dinner prices and less for breakfast and lunch prices so I feel good about that number right now
Insurance
I have travel medical budgeted at $350 (see my post about that _here_) Life insurance right now is listed at $225 but we are discussing ways to reduce that since we really won’t need the amount of coverage we currently have once we sell the house. Policies for us really just need to cover the “Shit, he died now I have to get his carcass back to the states” level of expense. I’ve included $30 per month for prescriptions because I am on several daily medications that currently cost about $50 every 90 days. This is actually one of the more stressful parts of the planning, i.e., how do I get my meds when I live overseas?
You might also be interested in Prescription Refills – Planning an extended period overseas? What You Need To Know About Prescription Refills Abroad
Communications
I threw in a travel budget line for cell phones/internet at basically a random amount of $200 per month. If we go the ‘local sim card’ route and take advantage of WhatsApp and wi-fi calling that’s realistically probably going to be closer to $75 – $100.
If you did the math you’ll see I’m actually a little under, that all totals up to $3,405 per month out of my $3,500 budget because, better to have a little headroom in our travel budget than try and find ways to scrimp. I figure we’ll track as we go and reevaluate quarterly.
Important factors to consider in the budgeting process include a level of ‘cushion’ in that Sandra will probably continue some of the administrative work she’s doing which will generate some cash and we can certainly create an entertaining and informative enough YouTube channel to monetize it to some extent. I’ve based the budget on zero income, completely living off of savings for 7 years. Also important is that if it all goes pear-shaped we can call the whole thing off and go back to residential real estate sales or car sales.
So, there you have it – a peek into our initial travel budget. We’ve factored in what we’ve gleaned from other nomadic travelers, along with some healthy skepticism (gotta have that cushion, folks!). While living on beans and rice might seem quaint for a hot minute, it wouldn’t exactly jive with our vision of this adventure.
The good news? Our research suggests this budget is doable in most of the places we’re considering. We’ll definitely track our spending as we go, with adjustments made quarterly to keep things on track. Remember, there’s always the possibility of some income down the line – Sandra might keep doing some freelance work, and that YouTube channel idea has some monetization potential (fingers crossed!).
The bottom line? This budget allows us to ditch the rat race and explore the world, all without burning through our savings before Social Security kicks in. Here’s to living life on our terms – stay tuned as we continue to refine our plans and share our journey with you!
Ah, the modern age of convenience… We all have a handful of electric or electronic devices we just can’t (or don’t want to) live without. Well, the good news for travelers is that most modern small electronics are dual voltage by default – thank goodness for the global marketplace – so you only need an electronic adaptor for the plug rather than a voltage convertor. read on…
But when you’re traveling around the world you’ll find there is no global standard for the electricity supplied to homes and businesses. Various countries primarily use either 120 or 240 volts AC but 110/220 means the same thing since the voltage varies in real-life. 60 hertz* is common with most 120V systems while the majority of 240V systems alternate slightly slower at 50 cycles. Check out this chart if you want to see who does what.
TheMobileRetiree.com is supported by its audience. We may earn a small commission from qualifying purchases made through links on our website. Thank you. Learn more>
So you may find yourself shopping for a converter but what do you actually need ? Well, the good news is that most modern small electronics are dual voltage by default – thank goodness for the global marketplace – so you only need an electronic adaptor for the plug rather than a voltage convertor.
The acceptable voltage range is determined by the manufacturer based on their intended market. If they plan to sell a particular item only in the US market – or never in the US market- then they’ll save the $1.49 additional manufacturing expense and not build in a voltage convertor chip
Three numbers that matter
There are 3 numbers that matter when we’re dealing with electricity:
- Voltage
- Frequency and
- Wattage or amperage.
Wattage is a measurement of how much electricity is being pulled through the wire to power the device – you can think of it like water flowing through pipes if you imagine watts as being like gallons per minute; a small hose can handle a little bit of water but if you need a lot of water then you need a bigger hose or way more pressure.
Amps are determined by dividing the wattage by the voltage (and that’s transitive – voltage multiplied by amps gives you the wattage) so your 3 amp cell phone charger is drawing around 350 watts; your 1750 watt hair dryer is pulling around 15 amps at 110 volts. That’s why the outlet gets warm to the touch if you run it for an extended period – the circuit it’s connected to is probably only rated for 20 amps so you’re pulling almost as much electricity through that outlet as it’s designed to safely handle.
Look at the power supply for your device (the brick or box part for plug-in chargers) and you’ll find a label or engraving somewhere on it that indicates ‘120VAC/60Hz’ or ‘240VAC/50Hz’ or, far more commonly these days “110/220VAC – 50/60Hz” There will also be either a wattage or amperage number – 1500W or 1.5A – that lets you know how much current the device needs.
That set of numbers and your destination informs whether you need an adaptor, a convertor or both. Areas that use 110/60 power also usually use the same type of 2 bladed plug so no adaptor or converter is needed to take your US spec devices to, for example, Panama. 220 volt systems are super random. Your UK spec 220/50 device will be fine in India except the plugs are different.
If you’re curious, here’s a link that shows who uses what plug types
Generally speaking, the more power is required, the bigger the voltage convertor needs to be. Not only does more current require physically larger wires – remember that water hose analogy – but the conversion process generates heat so the convertor needs a larger mass to dissipate the surplus heat. A 1,000 watt convertor will easily handle a laptop and a couple of cellphones but might melt down when you plug in your curling iron
The power supply for my laptop, phone, electric toothbrush and electric razor all indicate they are essentially universal – ‘110/220VAC – 50/60Hz’ or ‘120/240VAC – 50/60Hz’ but my beard trimmer is marked ‘120VAC/60Hz’. So the majority of my electronics will only ever need a plug adaptor to be used anywhere in the world. My beard trimmer will need to be replaced because I have very little interest in buying a voltage convertor just for that one device.
*********************UPDATE July 2024*******************
I decided to carry the beard trimmer with us and use it as long as the battery held out. Since it only gets used for 5 minutes or so, once a week, I thought it would last until we got to Europe and I’d be able to easily source a replacement there.
As it turns out, the battery held up very well and then in England we ran into a thing I had forgotten about –
the hotel bathroom shaver outlet. These outlets include a transformer to reduce the voltage from 230 to 115 allowing people from the Americas to use their electric razors. I was able to put a full charge into it and by the time it needed a boost, we were back in North America.
*********************UPDATE the Second October 2024*******************
That beard trimmer was several years old and the adjustable guard no longer stayed securely in place so I dropped US$19.99 on a new one that is not only universal voltage but also is designed to cut hair. It came with about 11 different length guards and, through trial and error, I have figured out which 3 need to travel with me. The voltage adaptor block is smaller, too, so I’ve saved 3/4 cubic inch of space and easily 8 or 10 grams of weight 😉
************************************
Stay safe with electricity by not overloading circuits or adaptors/convertors and by using the appropriate device to get the job done.
Just because you CAN connect the charger to the outlet with two paperclips and a car key doesn’t make it a good idea. When in doubt, get advice from a qualified electrimagician
*‘Alternating Current’ refers to the fact that the voltage actually ‘pulses’ between zero (ground) and 120 or 240 volts (supply voltage)
If you’re curious here’s the travel adaptors we chose to purchase
This adaptor will convert to virtually any plug type and also has a high current USB-C port that can be used to charge my laptop
The countdown is officially on! With February’s chill clinging to the air. We’re selling the house, brushing up on languages (well, mostly Spanish for now!), and strategizing our nomad retirement departure – it’s all part of the thrilling (and sometimes overwhelming) process of transforming our retirement dream into reality. This blog is our way of sharing the journey.
Random thoughts on a cold February day: I was today years old when I learned that ‘waterfall rappelling’ is a thing that exists. I was watching a video about countries where you can buy residency / passport and in the bit about Dominica they mentioned it. My sister-in-law confirmed they do it in Costa Rica as well and it’s fun. Hmmmm, gonna have to bear that in mind. I’m intrigued but have some trepidation
I’ve also just recently learned that one of my brothers-in-law is very interested in retiring to Costa Rica or Portugal because of the lower cost of living. He also has similar concerns to mine as to the state of politics in the US.
Today I learned that my wife is developing a pretty serious case of short-timers disease as we approach the time to sell our house. Pretty funny to me since when I proposed leaving in November this year she initially wanted to put it off for an additional year; now she’s hot to go, like, soon. I, on the other hand, am struggling somewhat with the ‘getting rid of stuff’ part of the process so, baby steps. I photographed all my Subaru and Harley Davidson branded shirts to post as available and started looking at donation programs for the ‘professional’ clothes I’ll be getting rid of. Looks like the local college has a program so I feel good about that
I also learned today that English is apparently widely spoken in Croatia. I’m excited about that because I started looking at some common phrases and Croatian is a tongue-twister of a language. Not crazy confident of my ability to become conversational in a year of occasional study. Since we’ve been working on Spanish I think we’ll be okay for casual conversation by this fall and Italian has some common roots so I wasn’t worried about being able to pick up enough to get around.
I’m beginning to wonder if maybe we should do our time in Italy as stop #3 (April/May to June/July) and then up to England to finish out summer. It’s hard to plan in 3 month increments to avoid anyplace they have an actual winter while minimizing travel expenses – once we hit Europe I’d like to stay at least a full year and that requires bouncing in and out of the Schengen zone. My original thought was 90 days in Croatia, then get out of the zone by staying in Montenegro for 90 days then 90 days in Italy and get back out of the zone by going to the UK but I don’t think we can avoid sub-50 degree temps with that routing. Still a lot of work to be done to get the scheduling right; it’s starting to look like maybe we do 2 or 3 segments in Europe then escape back to the Caribbean or Latin America for the winter months, LOL.
Between waterfall rappelling in Costa Rica, navigating Schengen zones in Europe, and my wife’s case of the pre-departure jitters, February is proving to be a month of unexpected twists and turns as we gear up for our mobile retirement adventure!
(part… 6? 7? I don’t even know anymore….In our never-ending series of uncategorizable posts…) As we accelerate down the runway towards our grand adventure – just about 7 months to go – I find that we are already making significant modifications to the travel plan. Weird, right? We learn new things and adapt our plans to accommodate this new knowledge? How bizarre….
Anyway, when I started mapping this thing out last year and budgeting and all that fluff and folderol I had it in my head that moving from country to country would be the biggest expense after accommodations so we should do it as infrequently as we could get away with. Tourist visits can be 90 days virtually everywhere so we could split the countries up into 3 parts and REALLY see the country. Like, for Panama, spend some time in Panama City, then spend some time around Coronado/Chame area then up to Boquete for a few weeks before removing on to Costa Rica to do a few weeks on the Pacific side then a few weeks in the interior then a few weeks at San Jose. Reasonable, right? Or for Croatia maybe a month in Zagreb, then a month near Split and finish up with a month in Dubrovnik.
That gives us the opportunity to really get to know every country we visit, lessens the chance of suffering from FOMO, and minimizes the country hopping expense…. All good…..
However, the reality is that once you get to a region it’s not that expensive to jump around. In the overall scheme of things, the cost to relocate from Zagreb to Split is only infinitesimally less than the cost of moving from Zagreb to, for example, Pisa, Italy or Ljubljana, Slovenia.
My initial budget allowed for $600 per month to be set aside for travel between countries because I was thinking in terms of expensive airline tickets every 90 days. The thing is, though – even the intercontinental tickets aren’t that expensive if you are flexible with your schedule and you strategize departure and destination points. And moving within Europe or within Latin America is nothing. Maybe $150 each at most. Zagreb to Pisa, for instance, is something like a 30 Euro bus fare to the coast, a 50 Euro ferry across the Adriatic and then another 30 Euro for the train across Italy. It’s all day and we’ll likely have to buy two meals en route but we were going to have two meals that day anyway.
The more I research and learn about Europe in particular, the more appealing the idea of making larger moves every 30 days becomes. I mean, we’re planning to do this for an absolute minimum of 2 years so maybe the first leg of our European adventure hits 30 days each in Croatia, Italy, Slovenia, England, Portugal, Montenegro and then next time around we hit different cities in some of those same countries.
30 days seems to be the magic number for affordable accommodations so I don’t see shortening that up but my original ‘90 days at a time’ plan is looking less interesting as time goes by.
Maybe that’s driven a little bit by FOMO? There are so many amazing places to see and I’m getting that ‘kid in a candy store’ feeling about it. I’ll bet that once we get out there and start really traveling we’ll change the plan again. And again. Because it’s OUR plan and we can do whatever we want with it.
I also find myself considering the order of visit based on what I am learning about the various destinations. You don’t necessarily plan around festivals and activities except when you do – like going to Dublin for St Patrick’s Day or to NOLA for Mardi Gras or Rio for Carnivale – but if you have no set schedule and you learn about something cool that you want to check out then you have the freedom to just reorder your plans. My ‘for instance’ in this case was a mention in a FB group about a Food Tour in Split, Croatia that sounded pretty cool. And then someone made a comment stating that it only runs May to October…. hmmmmm…… I had a plan that looked like being in Split in April…..
This is a ‘catch up’ post in our adventure of downsizing and embracing a nomadic lifestyle since I’ve been a bit distracted of late. We’re at day one of the ‘nomadic’ part of the adventure (still in Central Oregon for now) so I’ll add my thoughts on that this evening.
(11 April 2023) The past couple of weeks have seen a flurry of activity towards the sale of the house. There were several projects that had been on hold due to design questions (the railings on the deck) or motivation (a 75’ trench to properly bury an electrical cable to the hay shed) or weather (finishing up staining the skirting on the deck and refinishing the deck on the old house).
Scheduling a real estate photographer to take listing photos and having a published ‘go live’ date for the listing put the pressure on to get those things sorted. Getting organized enough to have a professional come in and do an estate sale so we don’t have to waste hours and hours of our time as well as stressing out about pricing things we’ve become somewhat attached to. That’s a bigger burden for me than her, emotionally, but I came to a place of peace last week – basically, I said to myself “If you lost everything in a fire, what would you actually miss enough to replace?” If it ain’t on THAT list it’s going away in the sale.
We had been trying to get a load of gravel delivered and they kept blowing us off; finally on Thursday we got 10 yards of gravel. Photographer was scheduled for 10 a.m. on Monday so, no pressure, LOL. A combination of crap weather and a hydraulics problem with our tractor meant we wound up relying on our neighbor to come over with his skid steer to finish spreading it. Which was fine except he couldn’t do it until Monday morning and finished about 20 minutes before the photographer showed up.
Then on Tuesday we got a full-price offer. Which is ‘yay’ but also ‘Dude, we literally just spent $500 for photos YESTERDAY which I might as well have set on fire, LOL’
Presuming this goes forward – and I have no reason to think it won’t at this point – now we have a real deadline to not only get rid of 40 years’ accumulation of random stuff but also find someplace to live. Based on the way the offer was written, they are understanding of the fact that we need a little flexibility with the closing and moving dates so, that’s a positive. Realistically we have 6 weeks, maybe 8 at most, to find someplace to live for some number of months until we hit the road. The timeline for going nomadic is still flexible; our only ‘commitment’ is that I booked us a place to stay in Panama City in mid-November and told my friend that lives down there we’d be coming out to his area of the country after Thanksgiving weekend. Truly though, we could leave as soon as the sale of the house closes if we decided to. It would only require that we make that the plan and divest of the last of our stuff a bit sooner.
I’ve reminded both organizations where I am a board member that my time is running down; our local road district is the shortest notice because once we move out of the neighborhood I’m no longer eligible to be on the board.
In the process of getting ready to move we have sooo many small things to take care of. Particularly in my case, since I have several cars in the project stage that need some level of work done in order to sell them for actual money. Our extended crummy weather is to blame, in a typical year we would have already had quite a few days of decent weather (above 50 and dry) so I would have been comfortable working outside. Since I am not at all okay with working outside when it’s below 45 and/or raining/snowing there are a lot of projects that got pushed back so now I’ll have to crunch.
_________________________________________________________________
We had a bunch of showings when the house went ‘live’ but the initial offer stayed in play and we are now under contract. We’re actively trying to find a rental now since we will need to be out of here absolutely no later than June 1st. Lots of stuff to take care of in the next few weeks, too.
Since we are downsizing our lives to ‘a suitcase and a backpack each’ we need to deal with 40 years accumulation of random possessions. The boys have been over and picked up stuff they want and we hired an estate sale company to come in next weekend and handle the majority of it.
There are a few things of special sentimental value we’ll be hanging onto so we picked up a couple of 27 gallon totes yesterday. Number one son already agreed to store them for us until we eventually settle somewhere. With full understanding that it could be 2 years or 10 before that happens.
____________________________________________________________
So. Much. Stuff.
Over 40 years of traveling I have spent literal thousands of dollars on mementos and reminders that appear to have never actually meant anything or reminded me of anything because it was stored away in boxes. Now we have to deal with it. I have never owned a Harley but I had collected 26 HD shotglasses from dealerships around the country (not a thing they do internationally, it seems. I always look but I’ve only found t-shirts. That’s another troubling collection). Most of those shotglasses were in a box and wrapped in newspaper from Aug 2006. I think if I haven’t even seen a thing in almost 17 years it must not have been that important to me.
______________________________________________________________
We had the estate sale over the weekend. We hired a company to do it and their normal mode of operation is to open the sale Thursday and Friday from 10:30 to 5 and then on Saturday everything is 50% off. They called a couple days ahead and announced that they didn’t think we had enough stuff to justify all 3 days so we told them that was fine but they weren’t getting a half price day and to go ahead and advertise it for three days anyway.
We spent Saturday with the hardcore bargain hunters who love the final day of a sale. The good news is that we actually moved a lot of stuff to neighbors. The hard part was that since we just really want the stuff gone we were making some crazy deals. Next door got a 22’ extension ladder, an 8’ step ladder and a bunch of other stuff for $100.
What I found most interesting but probably shouldn’t have surprised me was the number of people who wouldn’t bite on ‘I don’t know, make me an offer’ so there were a few things that sold higher than I expected because people can’t or won’t negotiate. Someone had built a pile of stuff and wouldn’t make an offer so I’d say “I don’t know. Is that worth $100?’ and they’d agree to pay $100. I would have been happy with half that because I really want the stuff gone.
Also, it’s kind of fun to haggle a little bit. I had a router table marked at $75 and this guy asked if I would take $30. I said ‘Dude, there’s a router attached to it’ he replied ‘Yeah but it’s a Ryobi’ ‘Still, either item by itself would be over $100 new.’ We settled at $40 and it was fine.
I had a couple of ‘what’s the least you’d take for <X>?’ to which I always – ALWAYS – reply “What’s’ the most you’d pay for it?” and it locks people up. That response is somehow super hard to deal with
__________________________ _________________ _____________
This week has been all about water. We lost water on Monday. Not the first time it’s happened over the 7 years we’ve been here, we had an issue when we first moved in with the cistern pumps – we share our well with our neighbor and apparently his pump sat (past tense, LOL) lower than ours in the cistern. He left a high pressure hose running all night and our pump was uncovered, which led to it burning up because they’re poorly designed. Seriously, who designs a $1,500 pump with no thermal protection? It’s water-cooled and if the pump runs dry it just continues to run until it burns up?
This time we both lost water because the well pump stopped running and we had to have the professionals come out. They did all their basic testing and decided that either A) the well pump failed or B) we ran the well dry. So, best case scenario (replace the pump) is like $8,000 and worst case scenario (drill a new well) is closer to $100,000 (we’re already over 700’ deep) with a small but non-zero possibility of an in-between solution where the well might be able to be drilled deeper.
As it turned out, the water level was okay and the pump had failed. Phew. They went through all the data with us and we were able to work out that the level in the well had dropped by like 25 feet since 1979 and at the current level we had 13 feet of water. But the well was also drilled deeper than the pump was set so we opted to spend an extra few hundred bucks to have them drop the new pump another 10 feet. So if the trend holds steady it will be okay for 30 or more years. I mean, I truly only care about the next 6 weeks or so, but it was the right thing to do.
With all that said and done we got the full damages this morning for replacing the pump and going deeper – Just a fast food meal under the $9,000 mark which is super irritating but not debilitating.
_______________________________
(2 May 2023) We have business cards now. Oooooh, FANcy, LOL. They’re very cool and include some blank space on the back for notes which is a thing I would have hoped for but probably not thought of.
In other news, Sandra has set up a Google map specifically for our travels so if you want to follow along you’ll be able to get a lot of info in a single place – The map will include layers for specific categories like countries, cities, restaurants, museums/galleries, attractions and then the pins will be color-coded to indicate the ‘trip status’ of that place. Orange for places we plan to visit, for example and then for restaurant/activity places once we DO visit they will be color-coded to indicate whether we think it’s a ‘must do’, a ‘cool if you aren’t pressed for time’ or “don’t bother, we weren’t impressed’. So you could pull up the map, display just the restaurant layer and see where we ate and whether we enjoyed or recommend it. There is room for notes on the pin so when you select a specific pin you’ll see our comments or a link to the corresponding blog post. I’m frequently amazed at the way she can make the technology sing and dance.
I’m super excited to get going; have I mentioned that yet? We’re 3 weeks from officially downsizing – moving out of our 3 bedroom house on 5 acres and into a tiny little studio in Redmond. From there we’ve got about 6 months to complete the downsizing into a fully nomadic lifestyle. 6 months from getting on a plane and leaving our old life behind. Like, a couple weeks away from actually buying tickets.
I also got more serious about mapping out the travel schedule to get a better grip on the search for accommodations. Aside from the first stop in Panama City, everything is a placeholder. We won’t be traveling on the 1st of every month and we won’t be staying a calendar month in each location but it will be closer to that than not
| Nov 15, 2023 | Nov 28th | Panama City | Panama |
| Nov 29th | Dec 28th | Coronado | Panama |
| Dec 29th | Jan 25th | Boquete | Panama |
| Jan 26th, 2024 | Feb 28th | David | Panama |
| Mar 1 | Mar 30 | Costa Rica | |
| Apr 1 | Apr 30 | Hopkins | Belize |
| May 1 | May 30 | Dubrovnik | Croatia |
| Jun 1 | Jun 30 | Tuscany | Italy |
| Jul 1 | Jul 31 | Lisbon | Portugal |
| Aug 1 | Aug 31 | Scotland | |
| Sep 1 | Sep 30 | England | |
| Oct 1 | Oct 15 | Portland | USA |
| Oct 16 | Nov 30 | Panama |
(18 May 2023)
The schedule above is probably super inaccurate now, LOL. Looks like we will be able to find pet and house sitting gigs; she’s already applied for two in England in April/May next year. That would be very awesome especially since they are near the Weymouth area so we’ll be able to do some of the genealogy research either right before or right after.
We signed all the paperwork for the sale of the house; that was a bit of a goat rope and we’ll be closing late but at least not as late as their mortgage broker was trying to get us to sign off on.
During this research phase for our next major adventure I have run across any number of ‘retire in paradise for $xxx per month’ or ‘Live like royalty for only $xxx per month in this Island Paradise’ type of posts. There are a number of countries that come up pretty regularly so I have some faith that you actually CAN live on the given budget in those countries. $1,500 is a common theme as the budget; every now and again you see someone saying $1,000 and there’s an occasional $2,500 but by and large, $1,500 seems to be the threshold.
I suspect two things are going on here. On the one hand, I see that the average Social Security benefit for retirees is $1,500 and on the other hand, it certainly appears to be cheap AF to live in a lot of places outside the US of A. Like, most of them.
What isn’t focused on so much is that the budget really needs to be plus or minus, based on your definition of comfortable (That’s a different subject; I see similar questions all the time that sound like ‘can I live on $xxx per month in <country>?’ and the answer is almost always going to be a qualified ‘Maybe?’) as well as being an accurate reflection of the total cost of living.
My real concern is that I have seen quite a few posts about the low cost of living in a particular place that seemed suspect to me. I hear digital nomads say things like “I live on around a thousand or so Euros each month” and think “Wow. That’s pretty amazing. I mean, if he can live on $1,150 a month just imagine how nice a lifestyle we would have on a $2,500/month budget”
Mostly it appears that maybe we aren’t all using the same definition of ‘cost-of-living’ but since hardly anyone shares an actual breakdown, it’s hard to say. There is sometimes a tangential piece of evidence – like comments about paying a certain amount for rent – If you tell me that you live on $1,150 per month but then later you mention that your rent is around $700 per month… Hmmmm, all of your expenses aside from rent only totals $450 per month? Seems unlikely to me. If you’re somewhere that rent is €350 per month and you live on €1,000, that’s much more believable.
This idea that we’re using different definitions came into sharp relief the other day when I saw a post where someone stated that their cost of living was 1,575 Euros ($1,725) for the month and then went on to say that their highest expenses were €1,030 ($1,1,28) for rent, €362 ($397) for food and €127 ($139) for gas. For the math-impaired I’ll save you the trouble – those three items add up to €1,519 (($1,664) which means that all other expenses total €56 ($61) per month. The math was also made suspect by the mention that costs ‘were up almost €300 over 2 years ago so obviously food costs had gone up considerably’. I feel like food costs couldn’t have been that big a contributor to the increase because of the relative scale. Overall it’s 20% more expensive so I think probably rental pricing was a big issue
If we presume that the figure given for gas means petrol (and I’m sure it was; it was from a warm climate so it wouldn’t be LPG for heating and cooking) then they have a car and, we hope, insurance for the car. The post was made on Twitter so odds are super high that they have a cellphone with a data plan. If they did anything other than sit around all day then there would be some additional expense to go to a museum or zoo or something at least once during the month. No health or life insurance of any sort?
Just, in order for their cost of living to be €1,575 then, based on what we know from the info provided, we need to believe they own their car outright, drive it uninsured, pay less than €50 for their cellphone/internet bill and had literally no expenses aside from rent, food and fuel. That’s an unfathomably boring existence. Or, more likely, they are providing us with a misleading cost of living assessment.
That’s an issue if you are actually trying to be an influencer, a blogger, a vlogger, something like that. People are using the information you provide to help them make decisions. Part of the challenge will always be human nature, of course; everyone wants to believe – or at least present to the world – that they are more skilled than others at some thing and living cheap is a popular theme these days.
We’ll be hitting the road this fall and I intend to share the totality of our budget and have as few things as possible categorized as ‘other expenses’. Our intent is to live on a set amount monthly and have a separate budget for travel between countries; that money is currently budgeted as a monthly expense but it will be used at relatively random intervals so I will track it as its own category.
Our budget is based on specific ideas we have about the project as well as what I’ve been able to glean about the actual cost of living in various places around the world. We’ll have overspend months and underspend months; we’ll have super touristy months where we get out and do a bunch of things and we’ll have ‘sit around and read’ months because the travel both is and isn’t the point of this particular project/adventure/whatever. We are retiring almost completely. In order to be able to afford to live on our savings and also being not be bored out of our frickin’ minds, we’re going nomadic but we’ll have to exercise SOME restraint in our spending.
Also, the reality of the situation is simply that the places in the US where we could have something like a reasonably comfortable lifestyle on a $2,500/month budget aren’t places that are attractive to us. When I see articles about ‘where to retire in the US for less than $2,000 per month’ I never think “Oh, that’s cool; I’ve always wanted to go to <whatever city>” More typically I think “Wow, I cannot even imagine living full-time in someplace so <hot/cold/wet/dry/MAGA>”
Don’t take that as some sort of judgment; I’m happy that there ARE people who want to live in those places; just like I can’t even imagine being happy as a firefighter but I’m very appreciative that there are people who WANT to do that.
Anyway, I guess this is mostly a shameless plea for folks to follow along on our travels once we hit the road this fall.
In this post we are going to touch on some of the things we had to take into consideration as we planned our nomadic retirement. Deciding to retire is a jumping off point. Deciding to go fully nomadic is a jumping off point. Deciding to do that internationally throws an extra twist into the half-gainer of research.
One of the first, I guess I’d say, awkward, things we found, is that this thing that Sandra and I are doing, this grand experiment to sell off everything and travel the world, is harder to put a name to than it should be. We’ve kind of settled on ‘nomadic retirement’.
We’re essentially quitting our jobs. We will no longer have either a fixed business address nor anyone supervising us. Most of our generation would define that as ‘retirement’ – “the action or fact of leaving one’s job and ceasing to work.”
If we were working full-timeish remotely while traveling then we would be ‘digital nomads.’ Defined as: “a person who earns a living working online in various locations of their choosing (rather than a fixed business location).”
What do we call you….?
This sort of hybrid thing isn’t, apparently, a named and defined thing. We are calling it nomadic retirement because everyone needs us to have a label. We plan to mostly live off of savings but supplement our income with remote work and interwebz magic. Sandra will continue doing part of her current job remotely at least for the short-term. I will be developing our YouTube channel and the website. Sandra will focus on affiliate marketing and adsense or something on our website. While our budget is $3,500 per month, we don’t need to earn that much to support ourselves so it’s pretty low pressure – like retirement. But we’ll still be working, a little bit – like digital nomads.
Retiring abroad is relatively common; almost 600,000 US citizens get their SS checks as residents of a foreign land. Expats, they call them. They move to a different country and settle in. This is not that. It started out with that as a sort of core idea but we don”t know enough about enough different countries to even pick a place.
So, we decided to go visit a bunch of countries and stay a month or two or three to see if they felt like ‘home’. Remember, the original driver to the whole plan was Sandra asking me “What would it take for us to retire to Panama right now?” All the research, all the planning, all the math, all the conversations, started from that assumption that we wanted to someday ‘retire to a tropical paradise’.
Two concerns arise consistently when we talk about our plans:
1) What will you do for money?
2) ‘But you’re so young’
The money thing is a concern for a lot of folks and I totally get it. Most people haven’t ever done the math to figure out what it would actually cost to bail out on the American Dream. Most also don’t have a big pile of cash available to do it. If you’ve only ever traveled for vacations then you have an expectation that it’s really expensive to travel. We hope to prove our theory that it’s really not. It’s wicked expensive if you stay exclusively in hotels and only eat in restaurants. We’ll show you how to stay longer for less
What about other people’s concerns?
The age concern is consistent, as well. Part of that is not being able to condense our plan to a word or two so we say ‘retiring’. If we say that we’re becoming digital nomads, 90% of our friends group wouldn’t have a clue what that meant. So the question is typically some variation of “How can you retire at your age?”
To me, ‘retirement’ has always meant ‘having the freedom to work, or not, based on my desire to either work, or not’. That’s what this feels like to me; we will need to generate some income simply to stretch out our savings. We have no obligation to generate enough income to support our monthly budget each and every month. There is no looming threat of foreclosure for missing a couple of mortgage payments. There will be no need to own a car in order to get back and forth to work. Here in the US we could probably move somewhere that a car isn’t a necessity but the cost of that convenience is a significantly higher housing expense so there isn’t any savings to be had, it’s just spending the money differently.
That level of freedom to choose where and when is not a function of age – it’s a function of money.
The ‘What ifs’
We actually had a pretty in depth discussion about the ‘what if we get cold feet’ scenario. This was from either angle – ‘what if we get closer to our time to leave and chicken out’ as well as ‘what if we get out on the road and hate it’
The good news is that I had already considered both of those scenarios rather extensively in my over-worked and feverish imagination so we were able to hash out the concerns.
Avoiding regret
Firstly we are committing – we are selling out and leaving the US. We will figure out a way to keep a few things that are essentially irreplaceable – we have some artwork in particular that we have sentimental attachment to and that simply could not be duplicated. Most everything else is on the block. We are reducing our house and property and belongings to cash. The majority of the cash will be invested in one way or another with a scheduled plan for liquidation. That schedule is flexible enough to allow for increased income or significant reduction in expenses. For example, we are looking at petsitter or housesitter type services. Using that option will bring our housing expense to zero for 2 or 10 or 18 weeks out of the year. We’ll withdraw less money for living expenses. If we can generate more income then our savings will stretch even further.
Secondly by accepting that there may be changes to our long-term plans. We are going on the road with the intent to stay nomadic throughout our retirement. Maybe it doesn’t work out for some reason. If we wind up starting over again back in the US 2 or 3 or 6 years down the road it’s not a failure; it’s experience gained. For myriad reasons we HAVE TO get out so we will go until we can’t stay gone.
Will it work out?
I am under no illusion that this is a guaranteed success or that we won’t struggle with some aspects of the budgeting or the routine moves. Not doing this guarantees failure. I would then be left to wonder if we could have had a more satisfying lifestyle.
We spend a lot of time researching airline ticket prices and trust me when I say Airfare is the most mysterious thing to shop for, especially since it probably the most or at least second most expensive part of their travel budget
I totally understand why the airfare pricing would vary based on time of year and day of the week. From the company’s shareholder perspective, It just makes sense to charge more during the times your service is in higher demand. As a consumer and business owner I’ve always thought it was bullsh!t
It’s called ‘Surge pricing’….. <or> ‘dynamic pricing’…. <it’s actually> ‘profiteering’
What I really struggle with, though, is the apparently random variance by ROUTE.
Flying from Nashville, TN to Panama City, Panama, you can buy a ticket for $158 with one stop in Atlanta, GA.
If I fly directly from Atlanta, GA to Panama City, Panama (PTY) on the same date the cheapest flight is $217. Seriously, though, it’s the same airplane that the people who started in Nashville are on. The seats are somehow more expensive because you aren’t going as far?
Distance means nothing to these people
Flying out of Miami, FL I can get a direct flight for $362. Now, on the map I’m looking at, Miami is significantly closer to Panama than Atlanta is. And, to top that, I can save $100 if I take a flight out of Miami that includes a 14 hour layover in Bogota, Colombia. So I go PAST Panama and then come back for less $$’s ? It’s also cheaper ($162) to fly from Austin, TX to Panama City with a layover in Miami.
Shopping from our nearest international airport wasn’t any more logical. I found Portland, OR to PTY seats as low as $295 depending where the layovers were
Real world experience
Bizarre. Reminds me of a trip I took to Oshkosh many years ago where I flew from Portland, OR to Salt Lake City, UT then to Atlanta, GA, then to Minneapolis-St Paul, MN and then finally to Appleton, WI to save the company a few hundred bucks compared to the direct PDX-MSP-ATW routing. I did a cross-country one time for super cheap but had a layover in Detroit from like 11 pm to 7 am. That was a one and done experience. Not a great airport to be stuck in overnight. At least not back in the early 2000’s.
Something useful
I can offer you one helpful hack I have seen in several places – when shopping for airfare you should use a VPN and clear your cookies regularly. Otherwise the systems increase the prices each time you look at the same route.
I ran some tests on this theory using flights to places we would never go – at least not directly – and was able to watch the prices increase by almost 100% in a few days using 3 of the larger ticket consolidator sites.
Sorry, couldn’t help myself. Yesterday we moved to our first temporary home in this new nomadic journey. It was interesting because we loaded up a moving truck with the things we’ll need to get us through the next 6 months but we aren’t ‘done’ with our former property yet. Now we need to go back and deal with donating and junking everything we haven’t been able to sell.
After we finished loading yesterday Sandra sat on the rear bumper of the truck looking at the house. I asked ‘Do you have a sad?’ and she said that yes, she kind of did. I get it. I’ve been having small sads occasionally for a couple of weeks as we get rid of stuff. At the same time, though, I’m way more excited about the retirement part of our new journey.
Working for it
We got unloaded pretty quickly once we got to Redmond. This place is hotel room sized, so, we didn’t bring that much with us anyway. Plus, we are sharing a property with Sandra’s sister and her hubby so he jumped in and helped carry a few things. Which was VERY awesome; made moving the bed a lot easier, too.
Our first temporary home is a backyard ADU, extremely fortunate that Holly and Kevin were moving at the same time and happened to find this place.
Remember not to forget
Some things were left behind unintentionally, LOL. We got settled in a little bit after we got back from dinner and I went (wifi) ‘Router?’
“sunovabitch”, she says “It was up high so I completely spaced it”
That’s on my list for when we go back out to the old place today. Well, okay, NOW it is…
We have a serious lack of storage here in the new place but I think that a couple of pieces we haven’t sold yet are going to wind up here. There’s a dresser in her office that will become my new nightstand as well as providing a spot for socks and t-shirts. There’s a little wardrobe included here that will hold a few things and probably will help me reduce my clothing stash to travel-size. One of our unsold shoe cubbies is going to get dragged out here, as well.
Big adjustments to be made settling in to our our first temporary home
Our living room space is now outdoors, very happy that we had invested in the adjustable bed frame so it can double as a sort of pseudo-couch allowing me to sit here and work indoors. We also have the option to invade Holly and Kevin’s space when needed and apparently a lot of the meals will be happening there. Our kitchen is equipped but it’s also maybe 30 square feet and with a queen-sized bed there is no space for a table.
Our Ikea chairs and footstools are okay to live on the covered patio and we should be pretty close to comfortable outdoor living weather.
TIL…
Sort of today, but kind of yesterday…? I thought that I would write about the day at the end of the day. That’s not a thing.
So, yesterday, after I typed out all the bits above this, we went out to the old house to get a few more things. A couple storage solutions things we originally didn’t think we had room for and the foodstuffs. We also had some cleanup help that we hadn’t completely anticipated
A small gesture
Last week we met a gal who had lost everything in a fire last fall. Purely a chance encounter but we asked if there was anything else she needed – furniture and such, especially, because we had stuff that needed to be donated or junked and if she could USE any of it, that would be preferable. Yesterday morning Sandra contacted her about coming to see what we had that she could use and arranged a time.
We told her that of all the stuff there – we had set our remaining items aside – if she could use it or she knew someone who could use it or if she thought she could sell it and use the money; just take it. She had a helper show up with a trailer and said they would take it all. I pointed out some things that maybe were just scrap and she said ‘Nope, we’ll take ALL of it’. They loaded up the trailer and both pickups with stuff from the main house and coming back today to get everything from the old house.
Super excited about her taking so much stuff; other wise I was going to have to make a truckload run to the SuperThrift and then another one to the landfill.
Tuesday’s plan
I’ve been lazing around in bed all morning; now it’s already 8. Need to get on with our day pretty quick. We ran out of steam loading the truck yesterday so it needs to be UNloaded this morning and then head back out to pick up the last couple boxes of food and the stuff from the fridge.
On a weird and unrelated side note, I seem to be sleeping better the last 2 nights and I’m not sure if it’s just due to physical exhaustion or the new environment of our first temporary home of what we presume will be many.
It’s been just over a week now since we moved into our new temporary abode, marking the ‘for reals’ start of our transition to nomadic retirees.
We’ve been back out to the old house to clean, sort, discard, etc., a couple of times now but the 14 days post-closing occupancy has been SUPER as a stress reduction tool. We need to make one more trip to the old house to load up the last of the recycling and junk, basically a pickup load. Probably get that handled tomorrow.
On Saturday we had our first official interview as nomadic retirees for a pet & house sit opportunity. We rocked it, of course. This success solidifies our commitment to head to England in April 2024, providing a great anchor for our travel plans. Now our focus is on lining up a few more house sits, although it’s likely that we’ll be in Panama by the time we make significant progress due to the fact that most people don’t plan their travel dates that far ahead.
Speaking of Panama, I think I’ll be booking our flights this week. There is a PDX-PTY flight with a few hours layover in Houston that looks good except for the fact that it’s Untied Airlines and they’ve left me high and dry in the past. On the one hand, a single stop is appealing. On the other hand, of all the airlines that make me nervous about their ability to meet their commitments…..
There isn’t a huge variance in fares, really; we’ll fly economy so the range is sort of $230 to $350 pp. I hate being rushed in airports and there are a disturbing number of flight options with a 40 minute layover at one stop and like 9 hrs 52 min at the second stop. Maybe give me a 4.5 and a 5.5 ? <sigh>
I also have a little decision constipation about booking almost 6 months in advance so I need to work through that. I know I will feel better once the tickets are purchased. I also know I will probably wind up just taking the single hop through Houston because minimizing complications is good.
The other big project for this week was switching the budgeting and bill paying responsibilities over. Sandra has been handling our money almost exclusively for like (10? 15?) years now and with the switch in roles to her being the ‘primary earner’ and me being the gadabout, we swapped the money duties.
As we prepare for our departure, we stumbled upon a problem we didn’t know we had… Imagine you’ve arrived at your destination and are faced with somewhat of a dilemma – It’s 10 am and you can’t check in to your rental place until 4 pm. It’s a beautiful day to have a wander around and get familiar with your travel destination but you have this luggage to deal with…….
Or like us, you’re traveling by train and you have several hours between connections. You’d love to go check out the town square and the market, maybe have a pain au chocolate and an espresso at a sidewalk café while doing some people watching… but you have this luggage to deal with…….
Merde. I guess the only practical way to avoid this is to have staff to deal with the logistics or be a member of the idle rich. Just carry a credit card to buy whatever you need everywhere you go rather than carrying around a suitcase like a commoner.
But wait, maybe there IS a better way?
Enter ‘Radical Storage‘ into the equation; a network of over 5,000 locations around the world where you can drop your bags and go do that thing you want to do.
Radical Storage is built on a network of ‘Angels’ who will keep your bags safe at a reasonable cost – currently it’s €5 per bag per day (except, apparently, in NYC where the rate showed as US$6.90 which is about €6,20 right now) Size doesn’t matter, I mean, I presume you have to be able to pick it up and move it around without a forklift or assistance, so, luggage rather than freight. A 2 liter fannypack and a 55 liter mountaineering backpack are the same price – a bag is a bag.
A ‘day’ in Radical Storage terms is 00:00 to 23:59 so if you want to drop your bag off at 7 pm and pick it up at 7 am you will be paying for 2 days.
How does it work?
Open the app, search for a location near you and make a reservation. easy-peasy. Online booking is required; there is no provision to just show up and drop off your stuff. I can see the logic; you don’t want people just randomly showing up with expectations if you have limited space. The network is comprised mainly of restaurants, cafés, local shops & hotels rather than ‘storage’ places. You can see a general location in the app as well as the type of business but you won’t get an exact address until you’ve made the reservation. Prebooking and paying through the app also allows a measure of control for the company – you pay Radical Storage and they then pay the location.
While YOU can go unburdened into that sidewalk café and enjoy your pastry in peace
Where are Radical Storage locations?
These are just a few examples, and Radical Storage has a widespread network of locations in various popular travel destinations and cities around the world. It’s always best to check their official website or app for the most up-to-date information on specific locations. That being said, some of the popular travel destinations and cities where Radical Storage have had locations include:
Rome, Italy
Paris, France
Barcelona, Spain
London, United Kingdom
New York City, USA
Amsterdam, Netherlands
Berlin, Germany
Tokyo, Japan
Sydney, Australia
Bangkok, Thailand
Remember to verify the current locations and availability on the official Radical Storage website or app before planning your trip.
Now that we’ve been at this for a while – developing the plan to start our international, fully nomadic senior lifestyle – there have been some significant revisions since our last update.
The first major change I think I talked about before; doing 30 days per country rather than 90 due to Schengen restrictions and our desire to visit so many different countries.
When we first started mapping this out we were planning Panama for mid-November through February then Costa Rica for March/April and then Croatia after which the plan got much more fluid. It was over a year out at that point and we didn’t know what would strike our fancy after a month in Dubrovnik.
Well, for starters – not a month in Dubrovnik. More likely a month in Split with a couple of day trips to Dubrovnik. Split is more central and, from everything I’ve read, more of an actual city rather than being primarily a tourist attraction.
The timing got a significant adjustment with the addition of Trusted Housesitters into the mix. We (well, Sandra) managed to schedule three basically back-to-back petsits in England for April and May (first one starts Apr 6th and the 3rd one ends May 28th). We have a few days in between each one so we’ll be able to do some unencumbered sightseeing. The last one is essentially a suburb of London and apparently the dog we’re caring for loves to ride the train so they said if we want to do some day trips into town it would be fine.
We decided that after England we’ll head to Italy for the month of June – going to make it more than just a jump, though; we’re going to make that journey into a mini-adventure.
The story for that planning exercise will be part of a new ‘series’ of posts to capture the initial planning process and then we can revisit those afterwards and talk about what happened and what didn’t, what worked and what flopped, etc. They’ll be tagged as (Time Capsule).
I tasked Sandra with picking at least one activity for each of our stops on the England – Italy journey and it seems geocaching will become part of our routine. So, if you’re into that sort of thing, maybe follow along as we explore.
Factoring in the Schengen zone restrictions is proving a little bit of a challenge for me. We may only get 2 countries covered for long stays this time around. I’m going to start looking at 3 week stays rather than 4 due to transit time between countries. I really don’t want to fly any more than we have to and sitting on the train for 15 hours at a time is pretty unappealing for one of us. With our current itinerary we only have 16 unused Schengen days So do we add time to Italy and/or Croatia? Do we spend 2 weeks somewhere?
I don’t think we’ll be answering that before springtime but it’s part of the conversation.
September was significant for two major customer service stories in our preparations for our international senior nomad travel planning process. One of them actually took place over several months but finally got resolved over the past week.
Random flight adjustments
The first experience I learned some caution from. We booked our flights to Panama City in June to fly in November. For a variety of factors I chose to book a flight with 2 layovers. I hate flying, primarily because of the ‘sitting in one place for hours at a time’ part of it. I had an option to fly PDX-DFW-MIA-PTY with 4 hour layovers at DFW and MIA pretty cheaply so I went for it. Booked through Expedia because I’ve never had any issues with them before.
Ah, but this time… THIS time…. We had some issues. In July and August there were a couple flight change notifications. No big deal, typically; airlines adjust their schedules all the time. One of the changes gave us a negative 29 minute layover over at Miami so I had some concerns. I mean, if our MIA-PTY flight is scheduled to depart 29 minutes before our DFW-MIA flight lands…. Not for sure how they were going to incorporate time travel into the process… But it got adjusted the next day to allow for 50 minutes at MIA. No harm, no foul.
A couple of weeks ago I went to Expedia to check our PDX departure time and there wasn’t one. There was literally no record of us having the PDX-DFW flight; it just showed us leaving DFW for Miami then on to PTY.
Okay, well, time travel was ruled out so now I guess it was teleportation? Huh.
I spent about 40 minutes on the phone with Expedia ( Do Not recommend, LOL) and eventually was told that they ‘no longer had control’ of my tickets and I needed to contact the airline directly. Merde.
I lucked out and got an absolutely fabulous agent at American Airlines – Jade. It took a few minutes for her to grasp the entirety of the situation. I was explaining and she was typing but her eventual understanding came with a ‘They did what? Oh. No. Now you hold on I need to look something else up’
It was about 10 minutes of her trying different lookups – she was really good at letting me know what was going on – before she explained what she found. In the process of changing flight times, at some point there was no way my PDX-DFW flight would arrive in time to make the DFW-MIA connection so they just dropped it from the itinerary. Tickets existed for a 6 a.m. departure out of DFW to MIA then on to PTY arriving at nearly the same time as my original schedule.
After my explaining that the departure time was totally unimportant, what mattered was that we arrive in Panama City on the 15th, she found an earlier flight PDX-MIA that connected to the original MIA-PTY flight. Not super excited about the whole ‘PDX-MIA’ part due to the length of the flight but at least we got exit row aisle seats so I can stand up occasionally.
Healthcare shouldn’t be so stressful
The second customer service issue to get resolved this month actually started in February. I’ve been on C-PAP therapy since 2015 due to obstructive sleep apnea. In February this year my C-PAP machine started making unsatisfactory noises. Loud, distracting ‘keeping the wife awake’ noises. I took it in to the distributor to have it looked at and after keeping it overnight they decided they was nothing wrong with it. Well, there IS definitely something wrong with it. Some minutes of discussion about how to get it replaced led me to believe the system is borked.
Agent “It’s outside the 5 year warranty so you’ll have to contact your insurance company”
Me “Yeah, let’s file that under ‘things that probably won’t happen’ but what does the rest of that process look like”
Agent “You’ll have to get a new prescription”
Me “Because…?”
Agent “The one we have on file is too old”
Me “Right. Because obstructive sleep apnea frequently self-resolves so it makes sense that the prescription would expire.”
Agent “…..”
Me “Okay, well as long as I’m here let’s talk about my getting a travel C-PAP since the regular machine would be a total hassle to carry around the world with us.”
Agent “Insurance won’t cover a travel machine”
Me “Okay, can I just buy one?”
Agent “They cost about $1,000”
Me “Okay, let’s assume that’s not a gating issue”
Agent “……”
Me “If I had $1,000 and wanted to buy one, how would I do that?”
Agent “You’d need a prescription.”
Me “aaaaggghhhhh”
Agent “We’ve also been having some supply chain issues so it might take 3 or 4 months to get one.”
Sooooo, off I went to pursue that process. Slowly, because, well, procrastination is a problem for me. I eventually got in touch with the sleep center where I was originally diagnosed and they told me that my prescription was expired because they are only issued for one year. Sure. Because, again, obstructive sleep apnea frequently self-resolves. <sigh>
I could get a new prescription. All I needed was a referral from my doctor and to go through the sleep study again so my insurance would cover the cost of the machine.
“If you give a mouse a cookie….”
In researching options someone told me that they had gotten a new prescription from their PA and got the travel machine that way. Hmmm, that sounds like it has possibilities, I needed to schedule my annual visit with my cardiologist anyway.
Seemed easy enough, PA said she wasn’t sure exactly how to write it up since it was outside her purview but she was pretty sure her nurse could work it out with the distributor to get the details right.
Two weeks and multiple fruitless phone calls later put the lie to that idea. Total wasted time thus far? Maybe 10 or 12 hours over a couple of months.
Auntie Google to the rescue. Turns out that you can do the whole thing online. I paid $35 and filled out an amazingly comprehensive survey, spent a couple minutes on a video chat with a doctor, got an email an hour later confirming my prescription was added to my profile and 3 days later the new machine was delivered to the house. Total time used – about an hour.
You might also be interested in our post “Prescription Refills – Planning an extended period overseas? What You Need To Know About Prescription Refills Abroad“
I wrote an update several weeks ago about changes to the itinerary and there’s been still more changes since. Most had to do with the first European leg of our journey, I’ll briefly talk about those changes in a minute (Unless you’re a slow reader, then it may be two minutes) but the previous update post goes into much more detail.
The new changes are mostly because October happened. We’re leaving in November to start our fully nomadic journey and that isn’t much time at all.
Due to the Schengen visit restrictions we had already modified our expectations of which countries we’d visit and when. Then as we did more research into the impact of ‘tourist season’ on various locations we made the decision to essentially throw out every plan aside from starting in Panama and going to England at the beginning of April.
We stayed with the original dates in Panama City – Nov 15 to 27 – but we bailed on the Nueva Gorgona beach house stay for a couple of reasons. One was that it’s pretty isolated and we won’t have a car. Originally that isolation seemed perfect as a way to settle into our new lifestyle; hang out at the beach and just relax. The closer we got to departure the less appealing that idea sounded. More importantly, our friend who lives at Coronado had been keeping an ear to the ground for us and led us to a smoking deal for the month of December.
It’s good to have friends
Friends of his who were planning to leave town for three months wound up not having a tenant for the month of December so he sweet talked them into giving us their condo for the same price we had been planning to pay for the beach house. This is a super nice 2 bedroom unit on a high floor in the Coronado Golf Tower that we never would have even looked at because the normal monthly rate is almost US$4,000. He convinced them that some income is better than no income and since he could vouch for us personally as ‘quality people’ (his words, not mine) we had a brief video chat with the owners and locked down the deal.
A little (mostly civil) unrest
Then. Oh, yeah, and then….. Did you know that Panamians are mad at their government for the latest mining contract that was signed? Mmm-Hmmmm. Protests and demonstrations galore. Road closures all over the country. Protests in the city. It’s kind of a mess. Areas to the west and north are having supply chain issues with food and fuel and there is no way to predict how long this will go on.
We are active members in several Panama-specific Facebook groups so we were seeing both sides of the argument to cancel a visit… Multiple conversations about whether or not to go ahead and visit Panama right now or skip it and start somewhere else, we even started investigating alternative destinations. We have bookings in Costa Rica starting Jan 8th so maybe we skip Panama and go straight to Costa Rica? Or what about Nicaragua, Ecuador, Dominican Republic…? South America instead? Argentina is supposed to be nice…..
Having taken in all available information, as of today, Nov 2nd, the plan is to go ahead with the flight to Panama City arriving the 15th and play it by ear from there. We did make a change to our hotel due to the original hotel being in between two metro stations that keep getting shut down due to the protests. We moved closer to the financial district. On the down side, i tcost an extra $13 for the stay but on the plus side – rooftop pool.
Protest activity could derail the plan to stay in Coronado in December if it prevents the condo owners from making their planned trip to Boquete. Failing that, it could impact our planned stay in Boquete in January and possibly even ground transportation from Panama to Costa Rica. We had planned to take the bus from David to San Jose but that is shut down right now. And getting from Coronado to Boquete and then to David looks problematic at present. However, as a wise man once said ‘Time wounds all heels’ so we’ll press on until we have to adapt. The good news is that we have resources to rapidly pivot so it really is a ‘First World Problem’.
A little update to the previous update
The most significant adjustment to the itinerary – made before the situation in Panama got weird – was a decision to visit Portugal in between Costa Rica and England. This was partly to maximize what we could see in Europe while keeping the ‘90 days out of 180’ rule for visiting the Schengen Zone in mind. After a lot of waffling and meandering around the idea of when and where I finally just went ahead and purchased tickets from San Jose to Lisbon for a random Tuesday in February. We’ll stay a couple nights in Lisbon, head to the Algarve for a month and then spend nearly two weeks making our way up to England by train.
As it stands right now we’re planning relatively short train journeys with 3 nights in Madrid, 2 in Barcelona, 4 in Paris, 2 in Calais and then hit England a couple days ahead of our first scheduled pet-sit to check out Portsmouth. It would be far less expensive to stay longer in Portugal and hop a flight to London but neither of us actually LIKES to fly. Alternatively, we could do Faro to London as one long trip via bus and train but the idea of nothing but travel for 30+ hours is also unappealing. I figure that a couple of nights each in some major stopover cities will give us a better idea of where we might like to spend an extended period in future.
We’re already booked for pet-sits in England from Apr 6th to May 28th so we’ll need a plan after that; originally we were thinking of Italy and Croatia for the summer but, tourist season. July and August will be hot everywhere in Europe (and more expensive) so the best we can do is find someplace that isn’t also overrun. Albania and Turkey are the top contenders right now but Scotland and Ireland are in the mix, too. We may still try to do Croatia in June but more likely it will be September.
Almost like Swedish death cleaning
In related news, we have been finishing up the process of discarding stuff we won’t be taking with us and practicing packing. The downsizing process has been interesting because of the stages we’re going through. We got rid of the vast majority of our stuff in April/May when we sold the house. But, we kept stuff that we would want for the 6 month transition period of living in a studio apartment. We’ve been thinning that out over the past few weeks but now we’re at the real crunch.
We managed to sell Sandra’s Subaru Baja to someone who promised to give it a good home. That was probably the only thing we’ve gotten rid of that she really had a serious emotional attachment to. Raj was with us for 9 years and she had really personalized him to suit her personality; right down to the purple LED’s for the dash lights and painting all the boring silver interior trim in a pale aqua blue. My broken Jeep went on the same day. We got exactly what I expected from the Baja and I lost a little bit on the Liberty. (Sort of. My internal accounting method for cars is that over the course of ownership it shouldn’t cost me more than $100 per month and in this case, over the course of 2 nearly identical Jeeps, it worked out to about $115 per month for 11 months of driving. The Baja worked out to about -$25 per month over 9 years of driving)
Less than a week from now we will be fully mobile, moving from Redmond to Portland – we’re staying with my mom for a week prior to departure – so we have a few things we’ll still need for that week but won’t be carrying with us to Panama. This morning Sandra told me she woke up at 3 am. Apparently it was strong anxiety about her ability to get all of her stuff into a backpack. And how in the heck was I getting all my stuff into a backpack?! “I have no idea. I was planning to figure that out this weekend but the worst case scenario, in my mind, is that we have to go to the thrift store and buy a small suitcase for the overflow on our initial departure” We know that it’s possible to do this with carry-on only. There are a lot of people already doing it. However, we are still packing for contingencies with no actual experience to base our decisions on. So, we’ll see how THAT goes.
The important takeaway
For anyone who plans to ‘follow in our footsteps’ I would suggest that the two most important things to having a successful launch are going to be flexibility and clear communication. Upon reflecting on the conversations and discussions we engaged in this year, the decisions we made and the process by which we arrived at or agreed to them, I am aware that some couples likely would not have been able to navigate this. This project is rife with potential landmines that could destroy relationships.
Parting is such sweet sorrow
Update to the update: I’m not a fast writer so now it’s Nov 9th and we are in Portland with less than a week to go and it’s exciting but a little bit nervous making. This is a HUGE change to our lifestyle. The final clearout of the ADU we’ve been in since May was a very concrete feeling step in the process. Everything we own fits loosely into the bed of a full-size pickup truck and everything we are taking with us would fit in the trunk of a mid-size car.
Turns out mom has some extra storage space in her basement so we won’t need to impose on number one son to donate part of his garage to store the 4 big totes. He’s excited about that, too.
Traveling Soon?
Checkout these helpful resources!
👉Don’t forget to grab your Free Itinerary Checklist
Support independent travel writers
Love our travel stories? Be part of our journey! Help us brew up more travel tales and support independent content creators like us, Buy Us A Coffee. We’ll give you a shout out in one of our videos! Click the cup to show your support!
