INTRODUCTION IV: THE MONEY QUESTION

In which we discuss filthy lucre, vulgar commerce, and the regrettable tendency of merchants to demand payment for things

Sooner or later, any discussion of retiring early and wandering around the world for an indecently prolonged period runs headlong into the obvious question: “How the hell are you paying for all this?”

This is another perfectly reasonable question.

It is also one that travel writers sometimes answer rather coyly, with phrases like “living intentionally”, “embracing financial freedom”, or “developing multiple passive income streams”, which may or may not eventually lead to an invitation to purchase an online course for $299.

We have no course to sell you.*

Nor do we have a secret trust fund, a successful cryptocurrency empire, a suitcase full of unmarked bearer bonds, or a mysterious wealthy uncle whose unfortunate boating accident proved unexpectedly advantageous.

What we do have is a fairly predictable retirement income, a willingness to live somewhat differently than we did while working, and the belief (yet to be thoroughly tested by actual reality) that our money can probably buy us considerably more of the life we want in some parts of the world than it can on the Oregon coast.

So, since at least part of the point of this blog is to produce information that might conceivably prove useful to somebody else, we're going to talk about money.  Not every penny,** but enough that when I later say, “We could live very comfortably here,” you'll have some idea what that actually means.

The Retirement Budget

Our basic financial premise is not terribly complicated.

We expect to have a steady, largely fixed monthly income for the rest of our lives. We are not rich, at least not by the standards traditionally associated with yachts, private islands, or people who use the word “summer” as a verb.

But neither are we attempting to retire on twelve dollars, a packet of ramen noodles, and an unrealistically optimistic estimate of the long-term commercial value of my Bullwinkle J. Moose impression.***

Our goal is roughly this:

Live well on about $5,000 per month.

To be fair, “live well” is doing quite a lot of unstated work in that sentence.

We do not mean five-star hotels, chauffeurs, Michelin-starred restaurants every Tuesday, or a household staff whose principal responsibility is ensuring that my grapes are maintained at the correct temperature.****

We mean comfortable housing in a pleasant area. Good food. Reliable healthcare. Fast internet. Transportation. Entertainment. Eating out regularly. The occasional trip or extravagance. Enough financial slack that an unexpected expense is an annoyance rather than a crisis.

In short, we don't want merely to be able to afford to exist somewhere.  We want enough money left over after mere existence to enjoy being alive.

This is one big reason we're looking overseas in the first place.

Our rent alone on the Oregon coast was around $3,000 per month. Before buying a single potato, turning on a light, seeing a doctor, going anywhere, or doing anything remotely entertaining, a very substantial portion of our desired retirement budget would already have vanished into the exciting financial adventure generally known in professional circles as “having a roof”.*****

There are places elsewhere where the same amount of money buys a very different life, and that's what we're looking for.

The Travel Budget

Travel complicates this somewhat.

Living somewhere for $5,000 per month and traveling continuously for $5,000 per month are not necessarily the same proposition.

Travel creates costs that ordinary life does not. Airfare. Trains. Ships. Visas. Travel insurance. Short-term lodging. Admission fees. The inevitable occasion when one discovers that saving twenty dollars on transportation has somehow required an eighty-dollar taxi.

So the Grand Detour itself is not intended to perfectly replicate our eventual retirement budget every single month.

Some months will be cheap.

Some months will involve cruises or long-distance transportation and be decidedly less cheap.

And some months will presumably contain an expense we have not yet imagined because reality enjoys introducing new categories to spreadsheets.

But our basic strategy is slow travel, which changes the arithmetic considerably.

A one-week vacation can be expensive because nearly everything is purchased at tourist rates: hotels by the night, restaurants for most meals, expensive transportation squeezed into a short period, and a frantic determination to extract Maximum Tourist Value****** from every waking hour.

A month in one place begins to look a bit more like normal living:

• We can rent an apartment instead of a hotel room.
• We can cook.
• We can use public transportation.
• We can spend Tuesday doing absolutely nothing interesting without feeling that we have squandered one-seventh of our precious vacation.

This is not only more useful for evaluating retirement locations.  It is (drumroll please): cheaper!

Convenient, that.

Cost Assumptions

There is a fairly important warning label attached to every number we publish here:

Our costs are our costs.

This sounds obvious*******, but the internet contains an impressive number of arguments caused by people treating somebody else's household budget as though it had been handed down from a mountain on stone tablets.

Two people can live in the same city and spend dramatically different amounts of money.

One wants a downtown luxury condo; the other is perfectly happy fifteen minutes outside the center.

One cooks every meal; the other regards kitchens principally as places where restaurants keep their delivery menus.

One drinks expensive wine; another doesn't drink at all.

One owns a car; another walks and takes the bus.

One wants golf, nightclubs, designer clothes, and weekly spa visits.

We want tea, baked goods, board games, plants, decent restaurants, comfortable chairs, reliable internet, and transportation systems that do not require us to own a two-ton machine merely to acquire onions.

Our numbers will reflect that.

So when we eventually report what it costs us to live for a month in Thailand, Portugal, the Philippines, Greece, or wherever else we wind up, it should not be read as:

“This is what it costs to live here.”

It means:

“This is what it cost these two particular carbon-based life forms to live here in roughly this fashion.”

So if your preferred lifestyle involves champagne brunches and nightclub bottle service, you should probably adjust our numbers upward.  On the other hand, if your idea of an exciting evening is splitting a banana and watching the ceiling fan rotate, you may be able to adjust them downward.

Use us as a data point, not as Holy Writ********.

How We're Paying for This

This is perhaps the least exciting section, because the answer does not involve buried treasure and we're going to be at least a little vague on purpose.

We're retired.

Our income comes from the assorted mechanisms by which Americans eventually attempt to convert several decades of employment, retirement programs, benefits, investments, and bureaucratic paperwork into money with which to purchase groceries.

Some of that income is fixed. Some may change over time. There are retirement accounts and VA benefits in the background as well.

The important part for purposes of this blog is that we expect our regular income to cover our ordinary retirement lifestyle without requiring us to earn money from The Grand Detour.

What's important to you about this?  Well, for one, this blog is not intended to become a machine for financing the trip. Nobody is paying us to visit a hotel, praise a suitcase, recommend a cruise, or become mysteriously enthusiastic about a particular brand of compression socks.

If we like something, we'll say so.

If something is crap, we'll say that too.

If we someday make a little money from the blog through ordinary advertising or similar means, lovely. More baked goods for us.  But it's neither intended nor expected.

Which means that when we tell you a $1,200 apartment was wonderful, or a $2,500 apartment was terrible, or that the $7 bowl of noodles with unidentifiable bits in was one of the finest things humanity has yet accomplished, those opinions can at least be relied upon to be our own poorly considered opinions.

And that brings us back to the point of publishing the numbers in the first place.

We're not trying to prove that our way of retiring is universally affordable.

We're establishing the ruler we're using to measure things.

If our comfortable lifestyle costs $4,000 somewhere and your budget is $3,000, you know you may need to make different choices.

If we're spending $5,000 and your budget is $8,000, you can probably add nicer housing, more taxis, better restaurants, or a personal servant whose sole responsibility is to carry snacks to bribe the monkeys into bringing back your sunglasses.

The numbers give everything else context.

And context generally retains some value.*********

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* Although if anyone would like to send me $299 for no particular reason, we are not doctrinally opposed to the concept.

** Mostly because assembling a pie chart labeled “How Much We Spend on Pastries” would force us to confront information we may not be emotionally prepared to process.

*** I think it's worth substantially more than Shannon does, because Shannon is, sadly, both intelligent and realistic.  (Sometimes I think I will never understand that woman.)

**** More's the pity.

***** Please forgive the technical jargon.

****** Sing along with me, Generation X!  "I want my... I want my... I want my MTV!"

******* As is the way with so many tautologies.

******** "Holy Writ, Batman!"

********* Unlike my vast collection of Nineteenth-Century Austro-Hungarian urinal cakes, tragically.