Having not enough to retire on to stay in the USA, I’m considering going abroad.
Say I have $.75 million stashed, plus about $3K/month in SS (I don’t, BTW, but this is a little way in the future). Is there anywhere I could go and have comfortable retirement? I’m thinking mainly Latin America. Africa is out of the question. Asia, I don’t know.
Let’s further assume I’m not into tin-pot dictatorships (I get those at work).
Are there any countries out there in which I could live comfortably, but would not loathe my yankee ass?
Belize very aggressively courts Americans wanting to retire there and the country is lousy with retired Americans. They have special tax laws making it easy to do.
My wife is Romanian and we’ve looked at retiring to a little village there eventually. We’re both teachers and will have pensions which could make us pretty comfortable there. And Romania is a wine lover’s paradise. They are flooding Europe with outrageously cheap and good product.
Costa Rica is indeed good for that sort of thing. It is very stable (they don’t even have a real military) and they have a really good medical care system. There are American tourists everywhere and even whole communities of American ex-pats so you are never really cut-off if you get home-sick. Costa Ricans are really American friendly and most speak some English or at least try really hard to. It isn’t at cheap as it once was but you could live extremely well on the money you are talking about. It is a beautiful little country. Some of the infrastructure is a little off but I certainly wouldn’t call it 3rd world by any stretch. Belize, Panama, and Honduras are popular choices as well.
Are you sure? I know several retirees who have chosen to live in Arkansas mainly for reasons of affordability. I know it’s not a foreign country, but in some ways it seems like one.
I’ve been told that Texas is very affordable to live in, depending on where you decide to live. If you want cheap property values, you could probably do well to live near one of the old Air Force bases that got trimmed down or closed due to BRAC (that said, the only one of these that comes to mind of the top of my head, Wichita Falls, is kind of a dump).
When I lived in College Station, a very friendly college town, a mildly run down 3 bedroom house a few blocks from downtown ran about $900 a month to rent. Dunno what it costs to buy a house around there, but you could always buy a Duplex and rent out the other half or something.
I get the impression there are a bunch of military retirees living near San Antonio. They’re close to military health care–but it’s also an interesting city in one of the prettier parts of Texas.
The Guadalajara area, especially down around Lake Chapala, is famously full of US & Canadian retirees. A friend of a friend happily retired down there–although she regretted buying before checking all the neighborhoods.
I’d suggest a lot of research, a few trips & some time renting before committing to any place.
Quite a few retired “gringos” in Costa Rica. If you can be arsed learn some Spanish, you’ll get extra points; there’s like two kinds of retired Americans over there, the ones who want to live in a little piece of the USA (who only speak English, deal only with other Americans as much as possible and act offended when someone doesn’t speak it perfectly) and the ones who mix with the locals.
I lived there for six months, retired Americans are quite common. Many of them are “young retirees,” people who were able to retire in their 50s and who have opened a small business in Costa Rica (from bars to tourist shops to coffee farms).
My dad’s considering retiring to Thailand. Evidently there are significant property ownership hurdles. They’ve mentioned something like the majority owner of any property has to be a Thai citizen. They’re looking into it though.
Over the past several years, Panama has become one of the leading places for expats to retire. There are many new developments and communities that cater to US expat retirees. Panama uses the US dollar, and many US goods are available here. Due to the long US presence, people are accustomed to gringos and English is widely spoken. Panama City sometimes seems like a suburb of Miami.
You can get a residence visa pretty easily by showing a fairly modest regular income. There are lots of perks to being a retiree, like getting discounts on restaurant meals and airfares.
There’s always Thailand to consider. Lots of us expats here. Some travel magazine even named Nong Khai, up in the Northeast on the Mekong River border with Laos, as one of the top 10 or 15 places for Americans to retire abroad. (That’s a nice town, but no one here could really figure out why it rated so high in that poll.)
The thing about Costa Rica to keep in mind, and I am sure this is true of most places that fit the poster’s criteria is that you WILL not MIGHT but WILL get robbed, and robbed regularly. If you leave the country for any reason expect to be robbed, not by strangers but by people who you have invited into your home. It is natural that they be jealous of even a normal American’s ‘frugal’ lifestyle, which is still way more opulent than their own.
Puerto Rico is a pretty cheap place to live if you wanted to stay stateside but then again so is New Mexico of course you can go swimming in January in Puerto Rico, New Mexico believe it or not can get quite nippy.
Don’t know much about the other African countries, but I always thought SA was supposed to have the highest standard of living – and it’s plagued by violent crime and AIDS, is it not? Other countries you mention seem to have a problem with malaria in addition to 10%+ HIV infection rates. I’d be happy to learn otherwise if you’d care to share your experiences, but sorry, I do have an impression of most of Africa as being a not very pleasant place to settle down and retire, especially when I could be going to Costa Rica or Thailand. Are there any sizable expat retiree communities in Africa?
It certainly has a crime problem, but this doesn’t stop many people living there in safety and comfort. AIDS is only really a problem if you plan to have lots of unprotected sex. (Blood transfusions are largely safe in South Africa, especially in the type of clinics the OP would likely be going to).
For anyone above the poverty line it’s pretty easy to avoid getting malaria, and generally not that serious if you do.
What do you mean exactly by ‘expat’? The basic answer to your question, however, is ‘yes’.
Africa is out of the question mainly because there always seems to be something horribly wrong with anyplace I find interesting. If it’s not disease, it’s instability. If it’s not instability, it’s bad government. If it’s not bad government, it’s famine. There are always a few countries in pretty good shape; unfortunately the list seems to change.
Belize and Costa Rica are pretty high on my list. I hadn’t considered Puerto Rico; it’s something to look at. Romania’s not so good; has to do w/ Nazis vs. my wife’s parents. I live in Texas; it’s not affordable enough.
