Do we want to have a home or do we want to have a life?
part 2 of a never-ending series
I saw this question on another travel blog by someone who had decided to take an early retirement and spend a year on the road –
“Do we want to have a home or do we want to have a life?”
That got me thinking about how much cash would we need to have in the bank to just retire now and wait to collect SS in 2030. 90 months from right now for me to be eligible. $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 get through. 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 for someone earning a decent living.
What does a $3,000 per month lifestyle look like? 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 $2k per month income which is the minimum 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 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)
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 this is suddenly looking like a pretty doable plan.
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.
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.