INTRODUCTION II: WHAT ARE WE LOOKING FOR?
In which several vague preferences are dressed up in fancy hats and introduced as “criteria”
Having now explained (to whatever degree such things can be explained) why we've decided to retire early, leave Oregon, and take the long way 'round the planet before settling down, we now arrive at the next obvious question:
What, exactly, are we looking for?
This is significantly trickier than it may, at first, sound.
It would be wonderfully convenient if there were some objective, universally applicable system for identifying the Ideal Retirement Location. One could simply feed a few details into the machine (income, climate preferences, medical needs, tolerance for unfamiliar cheeses, etc.) and receive a printed answer.
“Congratulations! You belong in Thessaloniki / Valencia / Dumaguete / whatever!”
Unfortunately, no such machine exists.* So we are forced to rely on something far less precise and considerably more dangerous: our own judgement.
Retirement Criteria
We are not looking for paradise. Well, kinda. But not exactly.
Paradise is expensive, crowded, heavily photographed, and probably has poor internet once you get more than about two streets away from the resort district.
Nor are we looking for the cheapest possible place to live. There are many places in the world where one can live very cheaply, provided one is willing to make certain compromises regarding comfort, healthcare, plumbing, personal safety, and the number of Madagascar Hissing Cockroaches one is prepared to accept as roommates.**
What we want is a good life. (Is that vague enough for you? I could probably be vaguer if you’d like!)
More specifically, we are looking for a place where our retirement income can provide a level of comfort, security, interest, and enjoyment that would be difficult to maintain where we currently live.
The exact criteria are fuzzy, subjective, subject to revision, and likely to be grossly contradicted by our own future behavior. But broadly speaking, we tend to care about the following:
Affordability.
Can we live comfortably on our expected income without spending every dinner out mentally calculating how many future cans of beans we have just sacrificed?
Healthcare.
This one matters. I have multiple sclerosis, which is rude of me, medically speaking, but there it is. We need access to competent healthcare, reliable medication, and doctors who are not located three ferries, a goat path, and a border skirmish away.
Climate.
We are not necessarily demanding year-round tropical sunshine, but we would prefer not to spend the rest of our lives in a place where the sky looks like wet concrete and the air itself seems to be wearing a damp wool sock. Though I am, genetically, a Tolkienesque cave troll, Shannon thrives on sunlight and it’d be an act of callous cruelty to move her to, say, Svalbard, Norway.
Safety and stability.
Everywhere has problems. We are not looking for a magical crime-free kingdom ruled by benevolent elves (it wouldn’t work out anyhow, considering the aforementioned cave troll thing). But we would like ordinary daily life to feel reasonably safe, and we would prefer governments that do not appear to generally operate via nepotism, bribes, and thuggery.
Infrastructure.
Electricity, water, internet, roads, transit, banking, grocery stores, pharmacies, and the other deeply unromantic systems that keep life from becoming an extended camping trip.***
Walkability and transportation.
We would very much like to avoid needing a car whenever possible. We’re getting old, after all, and I think I’d prefer to be the sort of elderly gentleman who doesn’t mix up the pedals and careen through a farmer’s market. This does not mean every destination must have gleaming trains, perfectly punctual buses, and sidewalks suitable for a minor royal procession. But if daily life requires driving everywhere, that place loses points.
Language.
English helps. We are not proud enough to pretend otherwise. That said, we are also not assuming the rest of the world has a solemn obligation to organize itself for our convenience. So English-friendliness is a bonus, but the lack thereof is not an outright deal-killer.
Culture, food, and daily interest.
We need more than cheap rent and a nice view. We want places with good food, interesting neighborhoods, public spaces, history, festivals, markets, cafes, libraries, museums, or at least enough going on that “walk around and see what happens” remains a viable recreational strategy.
Social life.
This includes local friendliness, expat communities where useful, and (crucially!) whether there are people nearby who might enjoy board games, roleplaying games, miniature games, or at least tolerating my attempts to recruit Blood Bowl players.
Friends-and-family-friendliness.
We do not need to live in a tourist hotspot, and we're empty-nesters. But it would be nice if our eventual home were somewhere friends and family might actually want to come see, rather than somewhere they describe as “an interesting choice” while quietly checking whether their tetanus shots are current. After all, travel is inconvenient, so we’d prefer to sweeten the pot to make visits more attractive. A place being legally and/or culturally hostile to LBGTQ+ warrants an automatic strike from the list; we want all of our friends and family to feel safe and comfortable visiting.
Legal and visa practicality.
A place may be wonderful in every other respect, but if we cannot legally stay there, or if staying there requires wealth, youth, employment, or a previously undisclosed grandparent from Luxembourg, then it may not be a realistic option.
General vibe.
This is the least scientific criterion and possibly the most important. Some places simply feel right. Some do not. We cannot know that from a spreadsheet, but we will probably know it after buying groceries, getting lost once or twice, and deciding whether the local cafe situation is survivable.
How We'll Evaluate Places
The first thing to understand is that this will not be scientific.
We will not be producing peer-reviewed retirement-location research. There will be no control group. There will be no double-blind testing. There will almost certainly be no lab coats, unless I find one in XXLT at a street market and decide it somehow improves my carefully cultivated air of solemn authority.
Instead, we will be evaluating places in the manner of ordinary people trying to decide whether they could happily become ordinary people somewhere else.
Our goal is to spend enough time in each serious candidate-location to get past the first flush of novelty. A week tells you whether a place is fun to visit. A month, maybe, begins to tell you whether it could be a place to live.
Not fully, of course. We are not fooling ourselves. A month is not the same as a year. It does not reveal every season, every frustration, every bureaucratic absurdity, or every possible way a washing machine can betray you.
But it's significantly better than just three days and a hotel breakfast.
So when we visit potential retirement destinations, we will try to pay attention to ordinary things.
- Can we find a place to live that fits our budget and does not make us sad?
- Can we buy groceries easily?
- Can we get around without a car?
- Can we find a doctor, dentist, pharmacy, or hospital without consulting an oracle?
- Is the internet good enough for gaming with friends back home?
- Do we feel safe walking around?
- Can we communicate well enough to handle ordinary problems?
- Are there places to sit, read, eat, play games, and watch the world go by?
- Does the place still seem appealing after we have done laundry there?
That last one may sound trivial, but I suspect it is not.
The test is not whether a place can impress us. Lots of places can impress us. Ruined castles can impress us. Tropical beaches can impress us. A well-timed sunset over a harbor can do an alarming amount of public relations work for a place that may otherwise have perilous sidewalks and truculent plumbing.
The real test is whether we can imagine just living boring, ordinary life there.
Can we imagine waking up on a Tuesday, making breakfast, running errands, taking a walk, getting dinner, playing a game, reading a book, and going to bed without feeling like we have made a terrible mistake?
Can we imagine saying, months or years later, “Yes, this is home,” without immediately laughing at ourselves?
That is the place for which we will look.****
The Shortlist
At some point in this process, we began referring to our collection of possible retirement destinations as “the shortlist.”
This was optimistic.
The list is no longer short in any meaningful sense. Still, “shortlist” is what we called it, and “shortlist” it shall remain, because changing terminology at this stage would require updating spreadsheets, and at my age I should know better than to inflict that sort of administrative violence upon myself unnecessarily.
The original idea was simple enough. We wanted to identify places where we might plausibly live well in retirement. This meant looking at the usual suspects: affordability, healthcare, climate, safety, infrastructure, visas, transportation, and whether the place seemed likely to make daily life pleasant rather than merely survivable.
Some places made the list because they seem genuinely promising, some because they are interesting enough to investigate, and some because they are useful places to “recharge” visa requirements. (And a few probably made the list because one of us saw a nice photograph at the wrong time.)
The list currently includes places in Europe, Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America, and a couple other locations. We do not expect all of them to survive contact with reality.
In fact, part of the purpose of The Grand Detour is to give us permission to be wrong. A place may look perfect online and feel all wrong in person. Another place may look merely adequate on paper and then, upon our arrival, immediately begin whispering, “You could live here, you know,” which is damnably presumptuous behavior from any municipality but must nevertheless be considered.
So when we talk about the shortlist, please understand that it is less a final list of destinations and more a suspect lineup. And we are the Columbo and Kojak who need to suss out the right one. (Feel free to decide for yourself which of us is Columbo and which is Kojak; Shannon’s probably gonna find this analogy mildly off-putting either way.)
Language Considerations
Language is one of the more obvious complications in this whole enterprise, because Shannon and I are Americans, and Americans are not generally famous for arriving in foreign countries already equipped with useful grammar.
Between us, we possess fluent English, fragments of German, a tiny amount of Spanish, and enough random miscellaneous words from other languages to confuse a waiter, alarm a physician, or, with completely unwarranted confidence, announce that the local train station must immediately be married to a duck.
This may prove insufficient.
English, obviously, helps. There are places where we could live quite comfortably using English for most daily tasks. There are other places where English would get us through the tourist district, the airport, and perhaps a restaurant menu, but would become considerably less helpful when trying to discuss bank accounts, medical appointments, or the emotionally complex subject of why the water heater is now making that noise.
If a place is otherwise a strong candidate, we are willing to learn. Slowly, badly, and with the haunted expression of people attempting to conjugate verbs in public, but willing. It just seems the thing to do if we’re going to be good guests in someone else’s country.*****
Our current thinking is that if we seriously consider retiring in a non-English-speaking country, we would probably begin in a city or larger town where language classes are available, English is at least somewhat usable, and ordinary life can be managed while we acquire the basic ability to apologize, buy onions, read signs, ask for help, and explain that I am not intentionally being difficult, merely monolingual beyond my own better judgment.
Only after getting our linguistic feet under us would we consider moving somewhere smaller, quieter, or more rural.
This seems sensible. It may even be sensible. Only time will tell.
That seems like a modest enough framework, assuming one ignores the fact that we have decided to test it by wandering across a significant portion of the planet with backpacks, spreadsheets, and the invincible confidence borne of profound yet unexamined ignorance.
Still, one must start somewhere.
* If such a machine does exist, it is probably being suppressed by a relocation consultant with a downloadable e-book and a suspiciously enthusiastic newsletter.
** We are not opposed to the existence of Madagascar Hissing Cockroaches in principle. We merely prefer that the objects of said principle never enter a) our home, b) our clothing, nor c) our breakfast cereal.
*** Humanity’s ancestors really went to a very great deal of effort to build societies in which we could sleep in rainproof homes on comfortable beds and without twigs and leaves and bugs getting in our hair. In that light, going camping on purpose seems awfully disrespectful, don’t you think? Instead, we prefer to honor the memories of our forebears via the enjoyment of refrigeration and indoor plumbing.
**** “Ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put.” -- probably not Winston Churchill
***** We’re Americans, but we really want to avoid being those Americans.
Having now explained (to whatever degree such things can be explained) why we've decided to retire early, leave Oregon, and take the long way 'round the planet before settling down, we now arrive at the next obvious question:
What, exactly, are we looking for?
This is significantly trickier than it may, at first, sound.
It would be wonderfully convenient if there were some objective, universally applicable system for identifying the Ideal Retirement Location. One could simply feed a few details into the machine (income, climate preferences, medical needs, tolerance for unfamiliar cheeses, etc.) and receive a printed answer.
“Congratulations! You belong in Thessaloniki / Valencia / Dumaguete / whatever!”
Unfortunately, no such machine exists.* So we are forced to rely on something far less precise and considerably more dangerous: our own judgement.
Retirement Criteria
We are not looking for paradise. Well, kinda. But not exactly.
Paradise is expensive, crowded, heavily photographed, and probably has poor internet once you get more than about two streets away from the resort district.
Nor are we looking for the cheapest possible place to live. There are many places in the world where one can live very cheaply, provided one is willing to make certain compromises regarding comfort, healthcare, plumbing, personal safety, and the number of Madagascar Hissing Cockroaches one is prepared to accept as roommates.**
What we want is a good life. (Is that vague enough for you? I could probably be vaguer if you’d like!)
More specifically, we are looking for a place where our retirement income can provide a level of comfort, security, interest, and enjoyment that would be difficult to maintain where we currently live.
The exact criteria are fuzzy, subjective, subject to revision, and likely to be grossly contradicted by our own future behavior. But broadly speaking, we tend to care about the following:
Affordability.
Can we live comfortably on our expected income without spending every dinner out mentally calculating how many future cans of beans we have just sacrificed?
Healthcare.
This one matters. I have multiple sclerosis, which is rude of me, medically speaking, but there it is. We need access to competent healthcare, reliable medication, and doctors who are not located three ferries, a goat path, and a border skirmish away.
Climate.
We are not necessarily demanding year-round tropical sunshine, but we would prefer not to spend the rest of our lives in a place where the sky looks like wet concrete and the air itself seems to be wearing a damp wool sock. Though I am, genetically, a Tolkienesque cave troll, Shannon thrives on sunlight and it’d be an act of callous cruelty to move her to, say, Svalbard, Norway.
Safety and stability.
Everywhere has problems. We are not looking for a magical crime-free kingdom ruled by benevolent elves (it wouldn’t work out anyhow, considering the aforementioned cave troll thing). But we would like ordinary daily life to feel reasonably safe, and we would prefer governments that do not appear to generally operate via nepotism, bribes, and thuggery.
Infrastructure.
Electricity, water, internet, roads, transit, banking, grocery stores, pharmacies, and the other deeply unromantic systems that keep life from becoming an extended camping trip.***
Walkability and transportation.
We would very much like to avoid needing a car whenever possible. We’re getting old, after all, and I think I’d prefer to be the sort of elderly gentleman who doesn’t mix up the pedals and careen through a farmer’s market. This does not mean every destination must have gleaming trains, perfectly punctual buses, and sidewalks suitable for a minor royal procession. But if daily life requires driving everywhere, that place loses points.
Language.
English helps. We are not proud enough to pretend otherwise. That said, we are also not assuming the rest of the world has a solemn obligation to organize itself for our convenience. So English-friendliness is a bonus, but the lack thereof is not an outright deal-killer.
Culture, food, and daily interest.
We need more than cheap rent and a nice view. We want places with good food, interesting neighborhoods, public spaces, history, festivals, markets, cafes, libraries, museums, or at least enough going on that “walk around and see what happens” remains a viable recreational strategy.
Social life.
This includes local friendliness, expat communities where useful, and (crucially!) whether there are people nearby who might enjoy board games, roleplaying games, miniature games, or at least tolerating my attempts to recruit Blood Bowl players.
Friends-and-family-friendliness.
We do not need to live in a tourist hotspot, and we're empty-nesters. But it would be nice if our eventual home were somewhere friends and family might actually want to come see, rather than somewhere they describe as “an interesting choice” while quietly checking whether their tetanus shots are current. After all, travel is inconvenient, so we’d prefer to sweeten the pot to make visits more attractive. A place being legally and/or culturally hostile to LBGTQ+ warrants an automatic strike from the list; we want all of our friends and family to feel safe and comfortable visiting.
Legal and visa practicality.
A place may be wonderful in every other respect, but if we cannot legally stay there, or if staying there requires wealth, youth, employment, or a previously undisclosed grandparent from Luxembourg, then it may not be a realistic option.
General vibe.
This is the least scientific criterion and possibly the most important. Some places simply feel right. Some do not. We cannot know that from a spreadsheet, but we will probably know it after buying groceries, getting lost once or twice, and deciding whether the local cafe situation is survivable.
How We'll Evaluate Places
The first thing to understand is that this will not be scientific.
We will not be producing peer-reviewed retirement-location research. There will be no control group. There will be no double-blind testing. There will almost certainly be no lab coats, unless I find one in XXLT at a street market and decide it somehow improves my carefully cultivated air of solemn authority.
Instead, we will be evaluating places in the manner of ordinary people trying to decide whether they could happily become ordinary people somewhere else.
Our goal is to spend enough time in each serious candidate-location to get past the first flush of novelty. A week tells you whether a place is fun to visit. A month, maybe, begins to tell you whether it could be a place to live.
Not fully, of course. We are not fooling ourselves. A month is not the same as a year. It does not reveal every season, every frustration, every bureaucratic absurdity, or every possible way a washing machine can betray you.
But it's significantly better than just three days and a hotel breakfast.
So when we visit potential retirement destinations, we will try to pay attention to ordinary things.
- Can we find a place to live that fits our budget and does not make us sad?
- Can we buy groceries easily?
- Can we get around without a car?
- Can we find a doctor, dentist, pharmacy, or hospital without consulting an oracle?
- Is the internet good enough for gaming with friends back home?
- Do we feel safe walking around?
- Can we communicate well enough to handle ordinary problems?
- Are there places to sit, read, eat, play games, and watch the world go by?
- Does the place still seem appealing after we have done laundry there?
That last one may sound trivial, but I suspect it is not.
The test is not whether a place can impress us. Lots of places can impress us. Ruined castles can impress us. Tropical beaches can impress us. A well-timed sunset over a harbor can do an alarming amount of public relations work for a place that may otherwise have perilous sidewalks and truculent plumbing.
The real test is whether we can imagine just living boring, ordinary life there.
Can we imagine waking up on a Tuesday, making breakfast, running errands, taking a walk, getting dinner, playing a game, reading a book, and going to bed without feeling like we have made a terrible mistake?
Can we imagine saying, months or years later, “Yes, this is home,” without immediately laughing at ourselves?
That is the place for which we will look.****
The Shortlist
At some point in this process, we began referring to our collection of possible retirement destinations as “the shortlist.”
This was optimistic.
The list is no longer short in any meaningful sense. Still, “shortlist” is what we called it, and “shortlist” it shall remain, because changing terminology at this stage would require updating spreadsheets, and at my age I should know better than to inflict that sort of administrative violence upon myself unnecessarily.
The original idea was simple enough. We wanted to identify places where we might plausibly live well in retirement. This meant looking at the usual suspects: affordability, healthcare, climate, safety, infrastructure, visas, transportation, and whether the place seemed likely to make daily life pleasant rather than merely survivable.
Some places made the list because they seem genuinely promising, some because they are interesting enough to investigate, and some because they are useful places to “recharge” visa requirements. (And a few probably made the list because one of us saw a nice photograph at the wrong time.)
The list currently includes places in Europe, Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America, and a couple other locations. We do not expect all of them to survive contact with reality.
In fact, part of the purpose of The Grand Detour is to give us permission to be wrong. A place may look perfect online and feel all wrong in person. Another place may look merely adequate on paper and then, upon our arrival, immediately begin whispering, “You could live here, you know,” which is damnably presumptuous behavior from any municipality but must nevertheless be considered.
So when we talk about the shortlist, please understand that it is less a final list of destinations and more a suspect lineup. And we are the Columbo and Kojak who need to suss out the right one. (Feel free to decide for yourself which of us is Columbo and which is Kojak; Shannon’s probably gonna find this analogy mildly off-putting either way.)
Language Considerations
Language is one of the more obvious complications in this whole enterprise, because Shannon and I are Americans, and Americans are not generally famous for arriving in foreign countries already equipped with useful grammar.
Between us, we possess fluent English, fragments of German, a tiny amount of Spanish, and enough random miscellaneous words from other languages to confuse a waiter, alarm a physician, or, with completely unwarranted confidence, announce that the local train station must immediately be married to a duck.
This may prove insufficient.
English, obviously, helps. There are places where we could live quite comfortably using English for most daily tasks. There are other places where English would get us through the tourist district, the airport, and perhaps a restaurant menu, but would become considerably less helpful when trying to discuss bank accounts, medical appointments, or the emotionally complex subject of why the water heater is now making that noise.
If a place is otherwise a strong candidate, we are willing to learn. Slowly, badly, and with the haunted expression of people attempting to conjugate verbs in public, but willing. It just seems the thing to do if we’re going to be good guests in someone else’s country.*****
Our current thinking is that if we seriously consider retiring in a non-English-speaking country, we would probably begin in a city or larger town where language classes are available, English is at least somewhat usable, and ordinary life can be managed while we acquire the basic ability to apologize, buy onions, read signs, ask for help, and explain that I am not intentionally being difficult, merely monolingual beyond my own better judgment.
Only after getting our linguistic feet under us would we consider moving somewhere smaller, quieter, or more rural.
This seems sensible. It may even be sensible. Only time will tell.
That seems like a modest enough framework, assuming one ignores the fact that we have decided to test it by wandering across a significant portion of the planet with backpacks, spreadsheets, and the invincible confidence borne of profound yet unexamined ignorance.
Still, one must start somewhere.
* If such a machine does exist, it is probably being suppressed by a relocation consultant with a downloadable e-book and a suspiciously enthusiastic newsletter.
** We are not opposed to the existence of Madagascar Hissing Cockroaches in principle. We merely prefer that the objects of said principle never enter a) our home, b) our clothing, nor c) our breakfast cereal.
*** Humanity’s ancestors really went to a very great deal of effort to build societies in which we could sleep in rainproof homes on comfortable beds and without twigs and leaves and bugs getting in our hair. In that light, going camping on purpose seems awfully disrespectful, don’t you think? Instead, we prefer to honor the memories of our forebears via the enjoyment of refrigeration and indoor plumbing.
**** “Ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put.” -- probably not Winston Churchill
***** We’re Americans, but we really want to avoid being those Americans.
Spain near the Costa Del Sol might check off all the boxes as long as you don't mind "surface of the sun" level heat in the summer and being inundated by English tourists that will, in no way, remind you of Downton Abbey. I myself am considering Spain heavily, although perhaps more in the north. I like rain and enjoy the occasional cachopo.
ReplyDeleteLima Peru has amazing food and every time I go there I like it more. I figure I only need to go there 100 more times before I like it enough to consider moving there.
Buenos Aires is great if you like meat and futbol. It has all the seasons and the drivers there do not need seem to feel the need to beep their horns every other minute like in some other places in Sudamerica.