You wouldn’t even have to sneak. Just cross legally and stay. The problem comes if you need to see a doctor and don’t have (and can’t get) a health card. Or if you want a driver’s licence (which you need to buy a car). Or really, almost any interaction with the government.
How about Sardinia ? Buy a home for $1 !!!
We saw the writing on the wall and left the US a year and a half ago. However, we are fortunate that I hold 3 citizenships and was able to pass down one of them to my kids. Getting my spouse their permanent residence was a relatively simple 6 month process. The hardest part has been dealing with having to pay local and US taxes for the first year and completing all of the FBAR forms. We hired an accountant to make sure everything was done properly, and have not been audited yet.
We lived in a blue state, so we probably would have been fine staying. However, my mental health has been much better and I am sure that I would have been losing a lot of sleep since Nov 5.
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In fact, there’s a village on the Italian island of Sardinia that will sell you a home for as little one Euro (some TLC needed) AND assist you with the bureaucracy to navigate moving there.
Gawd, don’t fall for that one. We have a whole TV series here in the UK called 'Help we bought a village’, about expats buying up whole estates/abandoned villages for 1 euro in France/Italy/Portugal, and then dealing with the consequences.
That will be the tricky part. Canadian housing costs are even worse than the current US problems.
Here’s another cautionary tale, though perhaps there’s a clue if you scroll down the page
I follow a couple of expatriate blogs in France, and it’s clear they made a go of it by (a) having good French first, (b) doing their homework about the bureaucratics, (c) finding people with similar interests and otherwise getting involved with local community events and activities - particularly (in a small village) getting on well with the mayor.
Yeah. I can sympathize with the difficulty of learning a new language in your 70s. But there’s no excuse for an expat who disdains other expats and then says, “I’m lonely.”
Yeah — as an expat myself, those people sound kind of dim, if the article is accurate.
“We made a wholehearted attempt to make the move work!” Did you? Did you really?
That also shows on my PBS station - I like watching it. The big difference is you are only buying a house, not a village. I’m sure the 1 Euro houses need lots of work, but I’m curious if the 100k houses are ready to live in. I’m also curious of the climate - it looks like Sardinia is all over the place – this is in the mountains so may be cooler. I wouldn’t want to live where there is NO rain (nor rain all the time)
(somewhat off topic) Many of the village buyers are trying to use it as a commercial venture (destination wedding / B&B type place) – not sure how much they are charging but I wonder how many they have to book to pay for renovations not to mention upkeep…
Brian
I’m puzzled by their reaction. Of course it’s hard to make friends if you don’t speak the language. Duh. That’s the chief reason I’m afraid to move to a non-English-speaking country. I suck at learning new languages, and i expect I’d feel lonely and isolated.
I’m also surprised they couldn’t find food they liked, as i visit food markets whenever i travel, and I’ve found good produce in France. (I wonder if the celery was all blanched. I don’t care for blanched celery, either, but in another thread some people were bemoaning its absence.) Also, the article said they’d lived there for 2 months prior to the move. In 2 months they hadn’t gone grocery shopping or done any cooking? Of course you have to get used to a different food palette, too, if you move. But that’s something you should be able to evaluate from a 2 month visit. (And i bet you can buy a machine that makes frozen yogurt, if that’s really important to you. Maybe it’s hard to fit one in a little French apartment.)
FYI, I linked to the same story upthread; I think post 12.
I, too, think it is a strange story. But, if one does not know how to make friends, even moving to an English-speaking country will not magically generate new friends. As for the food stuff, you can buy normal stuff at a normal supermarket, or ordinary market, or eat fast food all day (or at good restaurants and bistros), whatever you prefer— just like in any urbanized country, so the complaints that you can’t find a decent stalk of celery sound like nonsense.
ETA “picking up the language” is (arguably?) less of an issue for people who are retired enough literally to study it full-time.
Old dog, new tricks, etc.
I don’t think language acquisition works that way.
I may be way off base. But, no matter the starting level of proficiency, would one not learn faster studying 6 hours per day versus, say, one hour three times a week? How does it work?
Real example: I see some “intensive” courses in German advertised as 75 lessons, 45 minutes each, 5 lessons per day Monday through Friday.
There is certainly work the person has to do…learning the vocabulary at the least which just takes work and time.
Other than that, I have read that being immersed in a language is the fastest route to learning it. If all you hear everyday is (say) Italian then you will start to acquire an ability to understand it. You may not get proficient with only that but it’s not a bad start. Add in some work to learn and I think most people will get ok enough to get by.
In my experience, people fail at language learning for a lot of reasons, including but not limited to:
- failing to put enough time in
- putting the time in, but inefficiently (e.g. stick with Duolingo instead of moving on to the next step)
- being uncomfortable moving out of the learning environment, where you can have 100% comprehension, to the real world, where you can’t
- being too self-conscious about deficiencies in accent / vocabulary / grammar to be willing to use the language socially
- other psychological barriers, like “I’m just no good at languages.”
Learning a second language is part study, and part psychology, and it’s easy to get tripped up by one or the other if you don’t have experience and confidence and help.
I will say, as an aside, that some of the best English speakers I have met have been foreigners (English as a second language).
Native speakers use colloquial language and tend to be a bit sloppy whereas someone who has learned it formally and really put in the time can be amazingly well spoken in the second (or third or whatever) language.
Also, some people have a knack for it. Others don’t. We are all wired a little differently. Learning a language is a chore for me but I have friends who it seems second-nature to.