In this report, we talk about the difference between living in an International wet dreams retirement or nightmare? I hope my knowledge helps you avoid your retirement nightmares.
International Travel is really about self-discovery. Who are we when our life, and our time, is suddenly our own? Let’s be honest, many of us have been living our lives in ways that please others. First, we please our parents, then our spouses, and then our kids, if we have any.
There is nothing wrong with that. It is the circle of life. But are you allowed to add a chapter or two of excitement to the end of your book of life?
Retirement might be the first time you have complete control over your life, your time. Do you finally get to ask yourself, what do I want to do with my life now?
If I am lucky, I have 20 years. What will my life look like?
So in a sense, retirement is about finding out about what makes you tick when you are in charge of your time, and then having the courage to go after it. You may even have a realization that you are running out of time. It is the last phase of life. Is it time to create a living novel of your life in real-time?
Here are some ideas about how to fill your day so you feel connected to your new environment whether you are an international slow traveler or retire internationally in one place most of the year.
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An interesting thing about living outside your home country, is you are finally starting from zero. Group-think from your family and society is not so intense or controlling. You get to define your essence and go after it. Retirement is your ‘me’ time.
So, the most important thing about living outside my home country was discovering myself.
When I first started traveling I wondered if I was just running away. It felt like I was getting away from a predictable life. My life had become predictable. I saw patterns in my old life, repeated over and over again. I wanted something more.
One day I said to myself, “I don’t want to turn the rudder on the ship of my life this time.” I wanted to pick my ship up and move it to another ocean. I wanted a do-over in my life. I wanted a mulligan.
I had contorted my life into a shape that wasn’t exciting to me anymore. I wanted to be proud of myself again. I wanted to dream big one more time. I wanted to wake up in foreign lands, I wanted to learn things about the world and myself.
I was tired of just scratching the same itches while time passed me by.
You see, in my old life, different behaviors were trying to scratch different itches that my old life just wasn’t scratching. Nights and weekends were all about scratching itches. After my divorce, my main itches were looking for love, working out, finding delicious food, home improvement projects, investing, hiking in nature, and finding fun social things to do, like live music, dancing to funk, skiing, and just a pinch of the arts.
I would pursue these behavioral itches in patterns. But my free time didn’t seem to be moving towards anything. It was more like, I was scratching itches to get myself ready to go back to work each Monday.
When I was younger, I worked for myself. I started and run many small businesses. Owning my own business itself was invigorating. I was never watching the clock. My day had no beginning and no end, it was almost all joy and there was nothing to scratch at the end of the day. When I was self-employed, it was me-time all day.
But once I took the high-paying job. I was a cog in someone else’s wheel. Once I became a cog in another’s wheel, my nights and weekends were about scratching enough itches so I could get myself back to work on Monday.
So, to keep the itches scratching, I varied my itch scratching routines. By varying my routines, the variety kept the scratching more effective.
Exercise: I changed my workout patterns once every few months so I wouldn’t get bored.
Love: Finding love (dating and sex) went through another kind of pattern. Whenever single, I would publish an Internet dating profile and try to find a new girlfriend. When I found a woman I was into, I would quit dating and focus on her. That is when the sex frequency was highest.
Once I had a steady girlfriend, my patterns for finding delicious foods and fun social things would increase, depending on what she was into. Those were times of couple-think. If she didn’t like to dance to funk or enjoy live music, she would probably be into the fine arts, book stores, museums, and such. I used her itches to scratch different sides of my social self.
I would try to mix things up and vary patterns so my life felt fresh for me, and for my lover when I had one.
But during all of this time, I always knew my true itch was exploring the world and I would never be able to itch it while I was stuck in one country. My dreams were always about travel. Everything else I did was to compensate for the fact that I couldn’t travel yet.
When I was stuck in one country, I couldn’t scratch my true itch.
You see, the thing I loved the most was travel. Because of work, I was only able to travel internationally about once a year for a week or two, or maybe three.
All year long I would think about where I would travel next. There was something about travel that really touched me in a way that nothing else could. I would sit at my desk at work and get very excited about my upcoming trips. My entire year was secretly about travel.
I spent the whole year planning the best dream location and my dreams would come true for one or two weeks per year. By the time I jumped into a taxi to the airport, I was in a dream state, silly-happy, … ecstatic.
Many of my trips were to tropical destinations where the air was warm and sexy. There were often palm trees over my head, soft silky breezes blowing over me, and the smell of a warm salty ocean in the air, and white sand beaches so bright I needed my sunglasses to see the turquoise blue water.
In the early years, I often spent the whole time at or near the beach just relaxing. Not a care in the world. Just soaking in the decadence of nowhere to go, nothing to do, and nobody to answer to.
Other vacations were jam-packed with activities like jumping from waterfalls, riding scooters up and down the coast, and finding the best beaches. Other trips were temple-hopping, worldly museums, and castles, or wine and olive tasting tours.
Whenever I traveled, there were no patterns that I was cycling through to keep my life fresh. Everything was fresh already, even the ground I was walking never had been walked by me before.
The first few days I would be so present to the new environment that I would often forget that I would eventually have to go home.
By the third day, I was often imagining … I would never go home. I would be walking down the street and look up and see flowers hanging from a balcony and I would wonder, could I live here? Could I just stay and create a new life here. Could that be my balcony … could those be my flowers?
A day or two before it was time to fly home, I would be wondering how long it would be before I could afford to retire in one of these paradise locations. I would start thinking about which of all the beautiful places I knew was my favorite. Where would I live when I didn’t have to fly home?
Every year I would fly somewhere amazing and the same thing happened over and over again. I would wish I never had to leave. Somehow I knew that my life would be measured in two different time frames–before travel freedom and after travel freedom.
So, I made a promise to myself back in the 80s. I would save and invest enough money that I could leave and never come back. I would keep moving forward whenever I left a new place. I would keep moving forward slowly around the world to all my favorite places. I would only return to visit family once a year or so.
In 2007, that day finally arrived. When I finally left the USA in 2007, I wasn’t sure if I was running away from my old life or running towards my new life.
But what I learned is that it is much more complicated than that. Once you never have to be anywhere again, you find out what really makes you tick.
I learned that in my old life, I was cycling through the same patterns, over and over again, with slight variations. It was my way of coping with my desire for travel when I thought I was stuck.
The pattern variations helped me reduce the feeling that my life had become repetitive. I was living a groundhog life. Changing the colors and patterns but living the same days and weeks over and over again.
In my old life, I had to work to make money, so my working pattern was stable. But my free time was mine. I was arranging my free time in interesting ways to reduce the feeling of repetition. Learning and doing new things was my way of creating freshness in my life. My way of being a child again, seeing and doing new things.
I was dressing the groundhog up in different clothes. Feeding him different foods, changing the color of the carpet, doing the same things in a different order to fool myself that it was new. But deep down I knew, it was all just groundhog day. I wanted to travel.
Pattern variation was my way of feeling alive. My way of feeling my life was not over.
But once I left the United States in 2007, everything was different.
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Here are the main ideas that helped me distinguish the difference between living in an international wet dreams retirement or nightmare. I am living my retirement wet dreams and I hope my knowledge helps you avoid your retirement nightmares.
First, I didn’t have to fly home on Monday. I no longer had to cram a year’s worth of vacation into 7 days. I could pace myself. It was finally me-time.
By 2010, I was even working remotely. So I lived wherever I wanted in the world and controlled my time almost completely. I could discover my new surroundings at whatever pace pleased me. Or I could stay home and watch Netflix if I wanted. I could stay as long as I liked when I loved a place and move to a new place whenever I was ready.
Because of the changes in my environment when I moved, the pattern variations in my life were no longer necessary.
Like my exercise. Since I was often running on a beach, or a colonial-era city center, or the mountains, there were new sights and sounds to experience. It wasn’t about varying my workout patterns to keep me motivated.
Finding delicious foods no longer required pattern variations. It can take months to learn about a new country’s cuisine, so food variation was rarely something I had to think about. I just learned about a new country’s cuisines as I visited restaurants specializing in those new foods.
My real estate was rented out in my home country so I didn’t spend any time doing home improvements. My property manager took care of that. Plus, my investment strategy was in place. I spent almost no time thinking about that.
My travel adventures became about finding fun things to do socially or otherwise. But it was no longer limited to just live music, dancing to funk, and the arts. I wasn’t waiting for new restaurants to open or wondering what sports team or performance would roll into town next. I was in a new country and I had to discover what people there did for fun. So the variation was provided by my new surroundings.
Before I met Qiang in 2016, I would just throw up my dating profile and see if there was anyone worth dating. But I was just as likely to meet interesting people walking around and enjoying myself. And it was never a problem for me when I ended up exploring a new place all by myself.
What really surprised me about traveling was self-discovery. When you are no longer in your home country, almost everything you do is a choice you get to make. You are not limited by variations on what you have done before. You have to discover yourself in a new country. What do you like here?
When you wake up in the morning, your dance card is empty. There are no expectations on you. You are not on a tour. Your time is unlimited. You don’t have to be up at 8:00 AM. You can just stay in bed if you want.
When you leave your home country, and time is yours, you discover what makes you tick. Here are some of the things I learned about myself when I was finally free to create my retirement wet dreams.
How to Discover a New Place: I prefer to start without a map or agenda. I love discovering a new town by walking or running around without a map, without an agenda, without a schedule. I often start very early in the morning when no cars or people are around to block my view. I put on my running shoes and follow my heart when it tells me to turn. Sure, I take my smartphone with me so I can find my way home. And I also learn about a new place by reading, but the real feeling of a town is through your own eyes, your own pace, your own time, and your own intuition.
I Love Down Time: When I get to a new place, and I don’t know if I will be there for a week or a month, I spend a few days wandering around. The feeling of the place tells me if I want to stay longer. But after a few days of wandering discovery, I need my downtime. My downtime is not organized. I won’t get up and move until I have a definite urge. The urge comes in a day or two, sometimes three or five.
I Watch The Locals: I like to watch the locals as I wander. If you get outside the tourist areas and watch the locals, you will often find out what is most interesting about a new place. Like we are in Mexico right now. We just had our best meal walking in an area where we saw no other tourists. We were walking down the street and we saw a restaurant packed with locals. Only one table was open and we sat down. We had a three-course meal for $3 per person. It was better than the meal we had at an ex-pat restaurant with an imported Italian chef we tried a few days ago that cost $20 per person. This trick has worked for years. Find locals waiting for food and get in line. What you think you will like doesn’t matter. Let the real experts teach you.
I Am Skeptical of Travel Vloggers: I often pay little attention to what the travel bloggers say that I “must-see” or “must-do.” Many are just following the same backpacker trail others have blazed for 10 or 20 years. There is often a less crowded version you will find with fewer tourists and lower costs. I dig a little deeper, I wander freely.
I Make Delicious Food Now: When I was in my home country, my interest in finding delicious food was limited to asking friends about new restaurants and reading Yelp reviews. Now when I eat delicious food, I also try to make it at home. And I have learned to be one of the best chefs in the world for my palate. I am excited about learning about the foods of the world so I can create spicey fusion versions of them.
I Don’t Need As Much Money: Living on less meant I was able to retire earlier. When I worked as a consultant it wasn’t unusual for me to make really good money working remotely while I continued to travel to cheaper parts of the world. So I was able to save money. So when I was laid off from my last consulting contract, I had enough money saved so we could keep traveling for a few years.
I Live in the New Economy Now: When I was laid off, I was only 57 years old. I was too young for social security and I wanted to learn about how to make money in the new economy with VagabondBuddha.com. So I decided to try to make money on the Internet. I would never have to work for anyone else again. So for about 2 years, Qiang and I lived on as little money as possible while we traveled the world. I was surprised to learn it is more fun to travel the world and live more cheaply like a local. Learning to live like a local taught me more about myself and the world around me. It taught me what each country is really about. Losing my high-income job is one of the best things that ever happened to me. It not only taught me more about each country, but it also has helped me provide data for you that is valuable for your retirement. At VagabondBuddha.com, we have over 80 retire cheap reports all over the world.
I Am a Lifelong Learner: I was afraid that if I retired too early my brain would atrophy and I might run out of money. I was afraid I would get bored or have nothing to do. Plus, I wanted to make a little extra money each month in case inflation takes off again. So, being forced to retire early and being forced to learn how to make money online at VagabondBuddha.com, taught me that I am a natural life long learner. You see, the world is changing really fast. People are already losing their jobs to outsourcing, robotics, and artificial intelligence. So, I decided that if I am able to learn how to make money online, I can also help others be more adaptive and successful in the new economy. Others would also have the freedom to travel before retirement age, as I did. I now make twice what Qiang and I need to travel the world. So I have started teaching others how to do it. To watch a video I made that teaches how I make money online with my favorite hobby, and maybe you can also, check out my hobby income course video.
Thanks for viewing my report–international wet dreams retirement or nightmare. If you have enjoyed this content, could you please like, comment, or subscribe?
This is Dan of Vagabond Awake, the YouTube Channel for VagabbondBuddha.com. Thanks for stopping by. The world is your home. What time will you be home for dinner?