The retirement / vacation conundrum

Yesterday Sandra said “When you post the video of this trip to the beach you should probably also mention that we aren’t going out adventuring every day.” Hmmmm…….

That makes a lot of sense, actually; I put together videos about our activities to share on YouTube and we post snapshots on the Book of Faces page and the ‘gram and that’s what people see. The video will be a few days but in the meantime….

What you see on social media isn’t the sum total of our life on the road. One of our primary goals of sharing our story is to be transparent and helpful in case others want to pursue the same kind of mobile retirement plan so it might be time to go a little more ‘day in the life’ for y’all.

Like most people, what we present on social media is a distorted view of our lives and primarily captures the noteworthy rather than the mundane. Looking back over the last week we had two ‘adventure days’ – Wednesday we went to Penonomé to check out a couple of museums and Friday we went to Rio Hato (links to those posts coming soon). That means that Sunday, Monday, Tuesday and Thursday we hung out at the condo. There’s nothing going on to inspire a social media post except perhaps a pretty sunrise. A picture of me editing a video segment isn’t of interest to anyone. Maybe Sandra having lunch is more interesting to people……

Today (Saturday) may not lead to doing anything, it’s mid-day as I’m writing this and we’re locked into regular daily activities – she’s having some lunch and I’m writing; the kind of stuff that happens most days. It’s still possible we’ll go do something later but there’s no plan.

We have effectively spent a month as nomads now; we had a full week in Portland, 11 nights in Panama City (we left a day earlier than planned because there were still some protest related roadblocks happening during the week) and we’re 2 weeks into our stay at Playa Coronado (with another 3 weeks to go). Arriving in Panama was initially accompanied by a feeling that we need to GO and DO things and SEE things rather than sitting around writing and philosophizing or hanging out at the pool.

Several people have referred to us as being on vacation and that maybe is part of the mental conundrum – We’re in a foreign city, our previous experiences in foreign cities have almost exclusively been as vacation time, ergo; we must be on vacation.

But that doesn’t accurately reflect the situation; we are not ‘on vacation’, we are retired. As vacationers it wasn’t unusual for us to budget $350 or $400 per day for trip, plus transportation. As retirees, we are striving to stay under a $3,500 per month budget*. That means that we are more careful in shopping for accommodation, less likely to ‘splurge’ on meals out and also that we have a fixed amount for activities. If we spent $330 to do a full-transit canal tour, which would be cool, then we have either very little left for other activities that month or we’ll need to scrimp in a future month to balance it out. We’ve walked past several casinos without going in. Normally we wouldn’t pass up a visit to a casino, if only to say we’d been there. But let’s be honest here, we never just go in and look around; we always have to gamble a little. That money would have to come out of the ‘activities’ budget and it doesn’t feel like a great use of that resource.

Our impulse purchase threshold is now ‘do we actually NEED to have this’ because we are pretty short on storage space. Travelling with a carry on only mindset means paring our belongings to a minimum. We’re still carrying too much but we’ll get better with time. Same with budgeting – I anticipated that the first couple of months we were going to overspend as we make the transition. After the first of the year I’ll reveal what November/December looked like from a budgeting versus spending perspective.

Retirement versus vacation also means that we will be spending our time in a fairly similar way to what would have happened if we had retired in place in Oregon. There would be days – or weeks – where we didn’t DO anything or GO anywhere. There will be a number of days where we spend the day just wandering around a neighborhood, an activity that was pretty infrequent at home.

The process of adapting to retirement is a challenge many people face and I feel like too few really prepare for. I certainly didn’t think through all the ramifications of not going to work anymore. We have a lot more free time but a much tighter budget.

There is also a FOMO element to it. There are so many new and unfamiliar things to see and do here. The challenge is selecting activities because we are truly interested in them rather than choosing to do the things that everyone does when they visit a particular city. The corollary to that challenge is going to be successfully dealing with all of the “I can’t believe you didn’t <do/see> <place/thing> while you were in <City>” reactions that come with traveling. There is a tendency for people to transfer their expectations to others and since they were really interested in a particular thing they can’t can’t imagine that isn’t true for everyone else.

We tend to decide on activities based on ‘Will I regret not doing that or is it only being considered because a lot of people say it’s interesting?’ We arrived in Panama City with a short list of things to do – Panama Viejo, Casco Viejo and the canal museum there, the Bio Museo, Miraflores Locks, visit Albrook Mall – and 12 nights in the city to accomplish all that. If we had come here on vacation we would have made a much more extensive list because it’s a pretty expensive trip to just sit around the pool. We would be more rigidly scheduled and have the additional stress that goes with that. As it is, we expect we’ll probably come back to Panama at some point and since Tocumen is the most likely airport to arrive, we can just stop over in the city a couple nights on a future trip if there is something we decide later that we have to do. We never did make it over to Miraflores locks. Maybe next time?

What is our life like now? Probably more sightseeing than if we had retired in place somewhere in Oregon but our daily routines aren’t all that different. We spend time reading, I’ve started working on puzzles again, we even watch a little TV a couple of evenings.

Yesterday was our first visit to a beach and we’ve been in Panama for over 3 weeks. We’ve gone to the dollar store, inaccurately called “Todo a dollar.” I say that because the name translates basically to ‘everything’s a dollar’ but I didn’t see a single item that was a dollar. There’s some 99 cent stuff and some 2 for a dollar things but most of it’s 1.99 and higher. We’ve wandered through a couple of local markets with no intention of buying anything. Although I found some bomb empanadas at 3 for $5. Well, okay, the queso one was just okay but the carne and pollo ones were super.

Our travel and sightseeing habits here in Coronado are influenced by having a friend in the area who likes to go see and do things too. It’s much easier to say “Hey, what do you think about going out to Penonomé to check out a couple of museums and have some lunch?” rather than relying on figuring out the busses to get to a town 50 miles away. Once we get out of Panama we’ll have to make adjustments. Stay tuned for THAT next level of adventuring.

There is a level of novelty to new areas so we’ve been going out for food more frequently than we typically would; that’s a budget buster so we’re working on it. There is also a little bit of comparison to it because there are chains that we are familiar with. It’s sometimes fun to go and see what’s different. We had both noticed that chicken tastes better here so last night we went to KFC to see if that holds true across different types of restaurants.

Yup. The popcorn chicken was tastier, the breading wasn’t as thick (or as crispy, not sure how we felt about that) and the chicken sandwich was better than any fast food chicken I’ve ever had in the US. I hadn’t had Papa Johns pizza in like 20 years because I just didn’t care for their sauce. We went into the one here in Coronado for lunch last week and it’s not bad. Not the best pizza I’ve had lately but certainly better than I remember it being. (**)

We have been grocery shopping and cooked a few meals in our condo – we even had friends over for game night and ordered in pizza.

We tend to do simple meals, pasta with shrimp or chicken, maybe a salad with a small serving of beef. I don’t enjoy cooking as much as I enjoy eating so I hate to cook for an hour and then eat for 10 minutes.

It’s simply our retirement life, on the move, not a permanent vacation. As slow travelers we plan to stay long enough in each place to really get a feel for it but not so long that we’ll be looking for organizations to join, if that makes sense. We’ll keep busy when we want to be busy and we’ll chill out at home the rest of the time.

We’ll continue to share videos when we go adventuring, because we want to inspire you to go have some adventures of your own, just remember that there is a lot of nothing going on in the background.

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(*)Sort of – there is a $600 per month line item for ‘relocation travel’ which is just a placeholder for the annual target. It may be $1,500 one month and $50 the next. Our actual ‘living our life’ budget is $2,855 per month

(**) If you’re the “I can’t believe you went to a foreign country and ate the same things you can get in the states” type of whiner, two things – A) it’s an occasional thing, just like at home and B) more importantly; this isn’t YOUR trip or YOUR life. Unleash your inner Elsa, alright?