How To Retire Overseas

Reality Check: Here's How You Are Going To Be Able To Afford To Retire

 Sept. 13, 2011, Panama City, Panama: No matter how badly your retirement nest egg has been reduced by recent global financial events, you can reinvent your life for the better by retiring overseas.

Dear Live and Invest Overseas Reader,

Jay Wintrob, president of SunAmerica Financial and the guy behind the group's recent "Retirement Re-Set" study, concludes, after surveying 1,000 Americans age 55 and older, that would-be U.S. retirees are proving themselves "to be both resilient and resourceful." They're embracing a new strategy, Wintrob explains, as follows:

"Work longer, save more, spend less, and adjust your lifestyle expectations..."

That's one approach.

Here's another:

Dive into a richer, more adventure-filled life. Reinvent yourself at this important stage. Imagine the life you want and then go find it.

It's possible, market meltdowns, downgraded credit ratings, shrinking home equity values, and spiking unemployment notwithstanding. These things are all current realities, but they don't need to define your life or your retirement.

You need to define your life.

It's easier, maybe, to buckle down, scale back, and live less well. To resign yourself to years (or decades) of making do with whatever retirement nest egg you've got left.

Easier but a whole lot less fun.

Whatever your current retirement fund amounts to, I'd bet it's enough to support a new and improved life somewhere interesting and exotic.

If it's not, I'd also bet that you could find a way to supplement it.

This hypothesis, which I offer based on more than 25 years of covering this beat and more than 13 years of personal experience living and doing business overseas, is the starting point for our Retire Overseas Conference taking place in Orlando, Florida, next month.

I believe that Jay Wintrob is right. Americans are both resilient and resourceful.

Which is why they aren't going to bench themselves for the duration of their retirements.

The U.S. stock market, the national debt, the U.S. dollar's value against other world currencies, the health care crisis, lost jobs, down and downer property markets...

We can't do anything about any of those things. What we can do is to take control of our own situations. We each can figure out our own retirement budget, then identify where, on that budget, we can live a life that, in our estimation, would qualify as great.

Again, that's the agenda for our Retire Overseas event in Orlando. To walk you through the process of quantifying your resources, calculating how much you have to work with, considering the world map, and connecting the dots.

Where will your budget buy you the life of your dreams?

Meet me in Orlando for the answer.

Kathleen Peddicord

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Why You Don't Have to Worry About Outliving Your Nest Egg...

You can retire in style overseas and live better than you do now...for as little as $694 a month...

Live well -- including a maid, a gardener, a driver -- all on a Social Security budget...

Arrange health insurance for $150 a month or less...some places, you can even enjoy free medical care...

Own your own home in the sun for as little as $99,000...and wake up each morning to the sound of the waves on the sand...or the freshness of clean, mountain air...

Go here now to learn The 10 Best-Value Destinations for Living and Investing in the World Today

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• U.S. Financial Crisis