Redefining retirement – A nomadic retirement

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.