Make Your Dream Life A Reality

You hear from me every day in these dispatches on some aspect of living and retiring overseas.

One day I’m showing you how you can minimize your tax burden in an offshore haven like Belize… the next I’m tempting you with thoughts of an affordable luxury-level beach retirement on the coast of the Mexican Riviera…

This week I’m teasing you with stories of the best of Old World living on the Continent even if your retirement budget qualifies as shoestring… next week I’m sharing stories of the good life in the colonial town of Cuenca or maybe the welcoming hill town of Chiang Mai…

All this, of course, to whet your appetite for what could lie ahead in your own new life overseas.

Because it’s true. Your retirement does not have to be about scraping by and making do. This phase of your life can (and should!) be about reinventing yourself, enriching your life, enhancing your lifestyle, maybe having the adventure of your lifetime…

No matter how small your retirement nest egg.

And it’s also true that you can reinvent your life at any stage. You certainly don’t have to wait for “retirement age” to “retire” overseas.

I know these things to be fact because I speak every day with people just like you who have already done it…

People like Jay and Kathy Snyder who, for the past 10 years, have been dividing their time between Vermont, Florida, and Granada, Nicaragua (where they’ve launched not only a new life but a new business to boot)…

Folks like Akaisha and Bill Kaderli who have been spending half of each year in Mexico for more than a decade. As they explain, “Our lives are more colorful, more alive, and more fun since we began dividing them between Arizona and Chapala!”…

Retirees like Rodney and Berta Jacabson who, concerned that they’d never be able to afford to retire in the States, began looking around the world… and discovered Brazil.

“If someone had told us before we started spending six months each year on the beach here in Brazil just how cheap it would be, we would never have believed them…”

And like George Tulsun who is using his new home in Volcán Barú, Panama, as a base for living out his dream of exploring the Americas…

Jody Hanson traded shoveling snow and chipping ice off her windshield (an everyday chore for months of the year in her Canadian hometown) for a new life in Santiago, Chile, where the average temperature is 75 degrees all year-round…

Ed and Freya Stanford, five years into their retirement in France, are more active and engaged in their new lives than they ever remember being in their old ones. Ed and Freya travel regularly with their international expats club, take weekly French lessons, are members of both a walking/wine-tasting group and the local pétanque club, and have at least one lunch or dinner date with new friends each week…

Perpetual traveler Rich Ellison isn’t ready for retirement, but, for years, he has been enjoying long exploratory stints around Asia. Recently in the Vietnamese town of Nha Trang, he rented part of a five-bedroom house situated five minutes from the beach for US$125 a month. His part-time housekeeper kept the entire house clean for just US$25 per month, leaving Rich with nothing but free time for discovery and fun…

Thirty-somethings Dave and Melanie Stanley are copywriting, travel writing, and photographing their way through Mexico…

Sixty-something Hyta Holmes is, as she puts it, “a single girl living now on a Caribbean island trying to find out if this is where I want to grow up…”

Meantime, 80-something Jules says: “I could sit in my rocker and wait for the Grim Reaper… but this new life I’m making for myself in Belize seems like more fun!…”

Real Life Success Stories

These are all real people and real live and retire overseas success stories.

You’re reading these e-dispatches each day… so you understand the appeal and the benefits of launching a new life in a new place. I don’t need to tell you about the reasons to think about living or retiring overseas. You’re already thinking about it.

Maybe you’ve been thinking about it for a long time.

Thinking, thinking, thinking… but not acting!

Somewhere out there the perfect retirement haven awaits you… is calling to you.

So what are you waiting for? What in the world is holding you back?

Don’t answer. In fact, I think I know the answer…

With so many options and opportunities on the table, I understand how you might be confused… intimidated… almost paralyzed with uncertainty and doubt.

“How,” you must ask yourself, “am I ever going to find the place that’s right for me?”…

“And, once I do, how in the world am I going to figure out how to make the big leap to launching a new life in an entirely new land?”…

I’m going to be honest with you here. If you try to figure out all the logistics involved with reinventing your life overseas on your own, it could take you a long time. Months… years…

It could take you more than a decade. I know people who have been considering and researching the idea of living or retiring overseas for 10 years or longer…

What am I saying? It took me more than 10 years to get started!

I knew that I wanted to experience life overseas from a very young age. I traveled and I spent time in many beautiful, interesting, tempting places… but, for years, I rationalized reasons why the time wasn’t right for making a permanent move… and I returned “back home” to the East Coast.

Finally, after more than 12 years of researching and writing about living overseas, circumstances conspired to get me off my keister. Finally, I launched my own new life overseas.

Finally, I had the motivation and the impetus. Still, though, I didn’t have any help.

My husband Lief Simon and I were the blind leading the blind, feeling our way through every step we made. We didn’t know what we didn’t know… which was probably a good thing. Had we realized how naïve and clueless we were, we likely would have stayed put!

Did we ever imagine way back then that, 20 years later, we’d have traveled from Waterford, Ireland, to Paris, France, and then on to Panama City, Panama, where we’d be living and running a business?

No way. We had no idea when we took that first step down our own adventures-overseas path where it would lead.

And I can’t tell you now where it is headed from here. But I can say with confidence that the future wanderings, wherever they lead us, will be more efficiently handled than the previous ones!

Each new adventure abroad brings new challenges… and therefore new lessons.

Lief and I are learning still, but, I have to say that, more than 20 years and four cross-continental moves later, we’ve got a pretty good idea how to do this.

Along the way, from Baltimore to Waterford… from Waterford to Paris… from Paris to Panama… and back to Paris… Lief and I have dealt with…

• Miscommunications, misinterpretations, misunderstandings, and other language missteps (even in Ireland, where the language is “English”)…
• Tax advisors and tax returns, filing in the States as non-resident Americans and abroad where we’ve had income to report…
• Real estate agents and property developers in undeveloped, unregulated markets…
• Choosing education systems and schools for our kids…
• Setting up shop—and hiring staff—in a series of foreign countries…
• Setting up house—renovating, furnishing, decorating—again, in a series of countries…
• Navigating local real estate markets where no one’s ever heard of a multiple listing—figuring how to rent, how to own, where and when to buy, what to pay…
• Bank accounts, Internet packages, health insurance, dentist visits, buying cars, selling cars, moving pets, getting driver’s licenses, wiring money, paying credit card bills, managing investment accounts, arranging piano tutors and after-school activities for our kids… in English, French, and Spanish…

Now—after all these years of feeling our way through new places, new people, new systems, and new cultures—we have broken all our accumulated wisdom earned through the school of global hard knocks down into a step-by-step program you could use to follow in our footsteps.

You see, there’s a science to succeeding at this whole retire overseas game… and an art.

As with anything, you need a plan… a system that’s not going to take you 10+ (!) years to figure out.

That’s the idea behind my new “52 Days To Your New Life Overseas” program.

This is my way of sharing my family’s collected knowledge (and that of our most trusted friends and contacts around the world) with you, one easy step at a time, one day at a time, over 52 days.

All you need is the intent… and a passport!

Until next time,

Kathleen Peddicord

Founding Publisher, Overseas Opportunity Letter