You should not retire overseas if you are unwilling to work through these common challenges.
I left the US 19+ years ago, and it was the best decision of my life. I only visit the US now for a week or two every other year. But it will not be the best decision for everyone, and I will do my best to explain why in this video.
In those 19 years, I have met hundreds of people who have left their home countries and now live or have retired overseas. In fact, I have interviewed 200 of them on this YouTube channel.
I have a YouTube playlist of all 200 video interviews if you would like to hear their stories in their own words. You can hear them share their greatest joys and struggles living overseas.
Some of them remain happily overseas, while others end up going home or moving to a second or third country before finding their perfect paradise. Others realize they miss living overseas only after they move home, and eventually try to leave again after fixing the mistakes they made the first time.
In this video, I share common challenges that torpedo life overseas, along with strategies that reduce the risks of failing at living or retiring overseas.
Overseas Retirement Challenges
Making Permanent Decisions Before Leaving Your Home Country
Some people fall in love with a country from watching YouTube videos. They see the drone shots of waterfalls, white-sand beaches, palm trees, beautiful mountains, and colonial-era cities, age-difference relationships, low rents or real estate prices, and low cost of living, and they paint romantic pictures in their mind about their new life overseas.
Then they make a permanent decision about exactly where they will live or retire while sitting on their couch at home, watching YouTube videos. But when they arrive, reality doesn’t fit their expectations.
I am not saying it is impossible to pick the right place while sitting on your couch at home, watching YouTube videos, but why take the risk? There is a better way.
Picking a country or a city based solely on online research would be like picking who to marry using an online dating application and asking them to marry you before ever meeting them in person.
When my wife left me 25 years ago, I started online dating. The best women for me were never the ones that I liked the most when reading their profiles. The better fits for me came from women I liked much more after meeting them in person than when I was reading their profiles.
Countries are like people. They have personalities that you can’t really know from afar. The most beautiful photogenic countries can turn out to be a pain in the ass when you put your feet on the ground and get to know their personalities.
I recommend that you date a few countries before you marry one. Your only goal while sitting at home watching YouTube videos is to make a short list of the top 3 to 5 places that best fit your personal needs. That is called the online search phase. Then, put your feet on the ground in each place and see how they feel.
In my retire overseas course, I teach how to use your personal desirability factors to help identify the top 3 to 5 places likely to satisfy your long-term needs.
Once you have your short list of favorites, then you fly to that part of the world and see which one feels right for you. I call this the second phase, the exploratory visits. But another major challenge occurs for some people during exploratory visits.
Falling in Love With The First Stop on Your Exploratory Visit
Some people fall in love with the first stop of their exploratory visits. They set up camp and decide to stay in the first place before seeing the others. They love it, so why not? That probably sounds like a good thing, right? But that creates another long-term problem for some people.
They buy a couch, a bed, and a TV. They find a local lover. They buy a small car or a scooter. They put down roots. And you know what happens after a few months or years? They get a little bored and wonder what life would be like in the other places they never got to see.
So they take a vacation and visit some cities that everyone is raving about in YouTube videos. Then they fall in love with a new place and wonder, ” Should I move to this new place now?” Do they sell everything they bought, or do they hire movers to move their new stuff to the new paradise?
Avoid this common mistake by continuing your exploratory visits until you have explored each place on your favorites list. Then you will be able to make the most informed decision. The most informed decision is likely to last the longest. And there are some great side benefits to completing your exploratory visits.
When we were first exploring Vietnam, we identified a minor problem with our favorite beach cities. The beaches can become crowded in high season.
But during our exploratory visits, we identified a perfect solution to that problem while visiting another city in Vietnam. We decided that if we settled in Vietnam, we would spend 9 months of the year at the beach during the off-season and the other 3 months in Da Lat, a mountainous region where it is cooler and cheaper than the beach in high season.
But another challenge some people experience during their exploratory visits is …
Falling in Love With Exploration Itself
I was already living overseas when markets crashed in 2008. I began exploring the world, looking for my favorite place to retire in the world outside the US. What I discovered about myself was a bit surprising.
I have enjoyed exploring the world so much that I have never stopped for 19 years. It turned out that the world itself was the most interesting to me. Now I am not suggesting this as a solution for most people, but you should at least be aware that some of you will end up like me.
You will love getting to know the nuances between countries, such as culture, food, arts, architecture, history, nature, and the underwater world, so much that exploration itself will become an important part of your new life. So I have continued my exploratory visits for 19 years now.
This will happen to some of you. And if you find that it is cheaper than living in your home country, as it has been for me, some of you will decide to keep traveling the world slowly instead of putting down roots.
This could last for a few years, or it could continue for 19 years as it has for me. I call this life slow travel. I cover tricks and tips for slow travel on a budget in many of my reports, courses, and videos.
Okay, but let’s assume you are not like me, and move on. You would then just complete your exploratory visits and pick your top place in the world to live or retire. You would then begin your new life overseas. Here are your next few challenges.
Bad Decisions During the Honeymoon Phase
Once you pick your favorite place and settle down overseas, life generally rewards you with a honeymoon period. You are issued your rose colored glasses, endless smiles from locals, and everything is fine and dandy for a time.
But eventually, many little annoyances will add up, and many expats realize that life overseas is not perfect, no matter where you settle down. Many of you will decide to stay overseas anyway because you prefer the life available to you on your budget. But some of you will decide to go home. Others will decide to move to another country or city overseas that you prefer more.
That is when some expats start wishing they had not made so many permanent bad decisions until the honeymoon was over. Some expts wish they had waited until the honeymoon period was over before making these decisions.
So, I suggest you do as little damage to yourself as possible during the honeymoon phase, so it is easier to move on to the next phase of your life if you decide to leave.
So here are some of the problems that you must avoid in a new country during your honeymoon phase. The main idea is not to make any life-altering permanent decisions until the honeymoon period is over.
These are decisions that are harder to unwind when it is time to move on with other plans.
I will just skim the main ideas here, but I have other videos, reports, and courses with more detail on many of these. Don’t make any of these decisions until your Honeymoon phase in Paradise is over.
- Buying Real Estate Overseas
- Having Children with Locals
- Marrying Your Local Lover
- Moving a New Lover in to Live with You
- Having Intimate Relationships with Married People
- Giving Your Retirement Nest Egg Away
- Putting your Retirement Nest Egg in a Foreign Bank
- Putting Your Retirement Nest Egg in Your Local Lover’s Bank
- Lending Money to Your Lover or Their Family
- Overstaying Any Visa
- Starting A Business Overseas
- Breaking Foreign Laws
- Using Street Drugs Before Researching Penalties
If you avoid these kinds of decisions during the honeymoon period, then you can easily uproot yourself and move home or move to another paradise more easily. But if you have to sell real estate, liquidate a business, collect money from bank accounts in another person’s name, or raise a newborn child, your options and mobility will be much more complicated.
Okay, there is a whole other set of problems you need to solve before you even leave your home country. I am not covering those in this video, but I will give you a free eBook at the end that covers many of them.
Finally, here is another set of problems you may face as you try to adapt to living in a new country. I will cover a few of those now for you to think about.
Challenges Adapting to a New Country
Maintaining Your Projected Budget
During your exploratory visits, you have to determine what your desired life will cost you in each place you visit. You will go house or apartment hunting to find out what a 12-month lease will cost on a suitable apartment, along with utilities estimates.
You will find example restaurants where you would eat to determine the estimated meal cost and frequency. You will visit local grocery stores to estimate a sample grocery budget. You will decide whether you want to live in a totally walkable neighborhood so all of your daily needs are within walking distance, or if you need to buy a used car or scooter and pay for gasoline. Maybe you would ride Uber or Grab Taxi.
How would you entertain yourself, and what would that cost? Would you be dating or doing your favorite hobbies, and what are your cost estimates for each?
So part of deciding where to live during your exploratory visit will include comparing the budgets of potential locations. Picking where to settle would include making sure your pension or other investments would be enough to support your chosen destination overseas.
So once you pull the trigger and move overseas, you will be watching your budget to make sure you don’t run out of money. If you are unable to adapt your life overseas to match your budget for an exploratory visit, you could run out of money before you die.
The next few struggles people face when moving overseas involve cultural adaptation.
Developing A New Sphere of Influence
To really feel successful in a new life overseas, people do better if they develop a new sphere of influence in their new community. Having connections in a new country helps you solve problems that arise naturally in everyday life.
That can be as simple as finding people to do things with, such as exploring your new city, shopping for things you need but can’t find, finding a doctor or dentist when problems arise, or finding people to hang out with for everyday life.
Many expats limit their social life mostly to other expats and their spouses. But other expats say that makes them feel isolated from their new country’s culture. So they like to develop friendships with both locals and other expats.
The problem with having only expat friends is that you have very little access to local problem-solving ideas. One of the things that surprised me when I first moved overseas was how differently locals solved problems when compared to expats.
Expats often say they know better ways to solve problems than the locals do. But when Expats try to use those better ways, they often can’t find all the tools, materials, or resources they need.
Whereas the locals may solve those same problems in another way, and they know where to get the tools and materials they need to do the job the local way.
So it is good to develop relationships with locals so you can learn how they do things and where to get the local materials. So the diversity of knowledge of both locals and expats can reduce some of the stress that naturally arises in a new country.
But developing local relationships can be difficult because of language barriers.
Language Barriers
Even in countries where a good number (or all) of the locals speak English, the pronunciation and word choice can be very difficult to understand. The same things can have different names, and local slang can vary greatly across English-speaking countries.
Plus, in countries that speak very little English, you will have to learn the local language before you fully feel part of your new country. In that case, I would suggest learning the local language using a free smartphone app such as Duolingo.
Eventually, if you stay with it, whether learning a new form of English overseas or a new local language, locals will eventually begin to see you as one of them. As clarity and understanding grow in your new country, you will begin to build a sphere of influence that includes both locals and other expats.
That full sphere of influence will help you solve all of the various problems that occur in life while you are living or retiring overseas.
But even among those expats who end up going home or moving to a second or third paradise overseas, I don’t ever recall hearing one say to me, “I wish I had never left my home country in the first place.”
Even a man who ended up homeless while living overseas told me he would get a job in his home country to save money as fast as possible so he could move back overseas within a year or two.
Okay, so grab a free copy of my eBook so you know what to do before leaving your home country. Plus, watch this playlist to hear expats tell their stories, and watch this video to learn about all the resources we have to help you retire overseas or make money online.