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    Super Cheap

    • Chitré, Panama
    • Santa Marta, Colombia
    • Phuket, Thailand
    • Dumaguete, The Philippines

    Cheap

    • Medellin, Colombia
    • Boquete, Panama
    • Kyrenia, Cyprus
    • Hua Hin, Thailand
    • The Algarve, Portugal

    Affordable

    • Valencia, Spain
    • Cascais, Portugal
    • Las Terrenas, The DR
    • Pisa, Italy
    • La Rochelle, France
    • Mazatlán, Mexico

    Luxury

    • Ambergris Caye, Belize
    • Kotor, Montenegro
    • The Panama City Beaches
    • Paris, France
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  • Home
  • Countries

    Top Destinations:

    Whether you’re looking for fun and sun, a peaceful retirement, or the chance to earn some extra income, you’ve got a real world of opportunity open to you… In short, we’ve done our best to narrow down your best options, but only you can decide the right country for you.

    • Spain
    • Portugal
    • Panama
    • Belize
    • Colombia
    • Cyprus
    • Mexico
    • France
    • Montenegro
    • Browse All Countries

    Best For:

    • The Best Places To Retire
    • Health Care Abroad
    • Cost Of Living
    • Investing in Real Estate
    • Establishing Residency
    • Gun Laws In The World
    • English-Speaking Countries
    • Safest Places For Retirement
    • Best Places In Latin America
  • Budgets

    How Much Will It Cost You To Live Overseas?

    The only honest answer is, we have no idea. And neither does anyone else. The only one who can answer that question is you. Here’s the most important thing to understand about budgeting your new life overseas…

    Super Cheap

    • Chitré, Panama
    • Santa Marta, Colombia
    • Phuket, Thailand
    • Dumaguete, The Philippines

    Cheap

    • Medellin, Colombia
    • Boquete, Panama
    • Kyrenia, Cyprus
    • Hua Hin, Thailand
    • The Algarve, Portugal

    Affordable

    • Valencia, Spain
    • Cascais, Portugal
    • Las Terrenas, The DR
    • Pisa, Italy
    • La Rochelle, France
    • Mazatlán, Mexico

    Luxury

    • Ambergris Caye, Belize
    • Kotor, Montenegro
    • The Panama City Beaches
    • Paris, France
  • Resources

    Global Living

    • Living & Retiring Overseas
    • Raising A Family Abroad
    • Foreign Residency & Citizenship
    • Offshore & Diversification

    Making Money

    • International Real Estate
    • Banking
    • Employment
    • Investing

    Follow Us:

    • Meet Our Experts
  • Real Estate

    Buying Real Estate For Cashflow

    • Discover tips and strategies used by global property investing veterans

    Explore Our Latest Posts

    • Learn how to invest and purchase property abroad…

    Go To The Overseas Property Alert Site

    • How To Become Independently Wealthy And Fund The Lifestyle Of Your Dreams
  • Conferences

    Upcoming Events

    • Explore Our Events Site

    Live and Invest In Spain Conference

    Offshore Wealth Summit

    Greece Workshop

    VALENCIA, SPAIN

    Sep. 17-19, 2025

    PANAMA CITY, PANAMA

    Oct. 15-17, 2025

    VIRTUAL

    Nov. 13, 2025

    Learn More About This Event
    Learn More About This Event
    PRE-REGISTER
    Learn More About This Event
    PRE-REGISTER
    • MORE EVENTS

    Contact Our Events Team

    Toll-Free U.S. and Canada:
    1 (888) 627 8834
    From Outside North America:
    1 (443) 599 1221
    Working Hours
    Monday – Friday 08:00 am – 17:00 pm EST.

    Reach us with your questions by email at: events@liveandinvestoverseas.com

  • Store

    Unlock The World

    • Access Your Library

    Overseas Havens Reports

    • Expats' comprehensive destination guides

    Conference Kits

    • Hours of coverage  from our latests conferences

    Lahardan Books

    • Titles on living and investing around the world
    • Explore Our Store
    Your passport to a life well-lived abroad

    Services

    overseas living letter offers affordable retirement guidance
    The Simon Letter Wealth Protection Insights
    Global Property Advisor Global Investment Opportunities

    Our Customer Service team is here to assist with any questions or concerns CustomerService@LiveandInvestOverseas.com

  • My Library
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Home Countries Belize

Pursuing A Self-Sufficient Lifestyle

The #1 Choice For Your Overseas Escape Hatch

by Lief Simon
May 25, 2020
in Belize, Lifestyle, Self Sufficiency
0 0
vineyard in argentina with mountains in the background

Image Source: iStock/pawopa3336

In a world of uncertainty, having an escape hatch can help you sleep better.

Everyone’s Plan B will look different. Maybe a nest egg on deposit in an offshore bank account somewhere is all you need to feel comfortable and confident about your and your family’s future.

Or maybe you’re interested in more elaborate apocalyptic planning. Our current global circumstances make the point that a serious end-game backup plan could come in handy.

And, indeed, making sure we’re prepared for a crisis is one of the objectives behind taking our lives offshore in the first place.

One strategy can be to identify a place where you could live completely self-sufficiently. A piece of land where you could grow crops, keep chickens, and maybe make your own wine (a necessity, I’d say, of any reasonable lifestyle). Once an agenda reserved mostly for hippies and New Agers, aspiring to self-sufficiency is an idea that resonates today more than ever.

Someone I know bought a few hundred thousand acres in Argentina where he is establishing his own private, self-sufficient estate, completely off the grid, off the map, and off any public road.

Your escape plan needn’t be so ambitious. A few acres of fertile land could suffice for a small family.

A developer friend is focused on a project in Cayo, Belize, that fits this bill. It’s a community I’ve told you about before called Carmelita Gardens where the owners can be “independent together,” as he describes it.

Living at Carmelita you’re on your own, self-sufficient, with your own micro-farm (if you choose), but part of a like-minded community… so not all alone. The community establishing itself at Carmelita features organic gardens, aquaponic systems, and self-sufficient homes.

When it comes to embracing a self-sufficient lifestyle, location is a primary consideration. You have to be able to get to your land when the crisis comes. This is why one overzealous follower of this philosophy has set himself up in Texas. He has lived overseas but has decided that, in the current climate, he’s better off where he can have some land and the guns to protect it. He doesn’t want to have to leave “home” to get to his safe haven, and he’s expecting to have to fight off others who aren’t as prepared.

The guy in Argentina has the opposite problem. No one is likely to bother him on his ranch the size of a small country, but getting there from wherever he happens to be when a crisis strikes could be a long trip. Once he gets himself and his family to his hacienda compound, though, he’ll be sitting pretty.

Where should you consider for your escape hatch?

It depends on your perspective. If you want to be far, far away from everything, Argentina is a great choice, along with New Zealand, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay. All these countries have plenty of fertile land and relatively few people. The population density in each is 40% to 70% that of the United States. All boast a great deal of arable land per capita, and all are in the Southern Hemisphere, removed from where any war or nuclear strike is likely to hit.

Nearer to home (assuming home is North America or Europe), top options could include a small farm in the interior of Panama. I’ve told you about the community Kathleen and I are developing on the coast in Panama’s Veraguas Province. No, this isn’t a self-sufficient undertaking, per se, but we’ve conceived and engineered our home here as a personal Plan B, a place where we could ride out a storm. And, as soon as Panama opens her borders to international flights… and then opens the bridges to allow travel from Panama City to the rest of the country… 

Los Islotes is where you’ll find us

.

The fact that we weren’t able to get ourselves to Los Islotes before border closings made the trip impossible, underscores the reality that no Plan B is foolproof. Thus the need for multiple backups and my efforts over the past 25 years to look for opportunities to spread my life around as much as possible and then to take advantage of every chance for arbitrage my diversified approach creates.

My operational currency is the U.S. dollar… meaning these past several months in Paris, I’ve been spending strong. The current dollar-euro exchange rate translates to enhanced buying power for dollar-holders in this part of the world.

Good French wines, cheeses, and every loaf of baguette we’re indulging in (no, we can’t complain about our quarantine conditions) are all cheaper for us in Paris than they would be in Panama, where a baguette is about 15% more expensive in dollar terms and about 40% as good as the real thing. We can’t go out to enjoy most of what Paris has to offer, but we’re enjoying our super-charged buying power when it comes to food and drink.

A Venezuelan rum that I like is expensive in Paris, but I saw a bottle in Portugal for 30% less last time I was there. Again, I couldn’t resist the pricing arbitrage. The bottle is now sitting on our bar here in Paris.

I shop for clothes and shoes in the United States, where, even if I buy not on sale (painful for me), the cost is generally better than it would be in Paris or Panama. Plus, in U.S. men’s shops, I understand the sizes.

I bring A.1. to Paris with me from Panama or the United States because the steak sauce is about twice as expensive in France.

These are all small things, but, right now, week eight of lockdown in our little apartment in Paris, these small things are making the confinement much more comfortable.

Now, though, I’m down to my last bottle of A.1. I’ll either have to get back to Panama or the United States soon or break down and pay the premium price at France’s online American store.

Lief Simon

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Lief Simon

Lief Simon

Lief Simon has lived and worked in 7 countries on 5 continents and traveled to more than 75 countries. His real estate investment career began with a $5,000 down payment on a three-flat building in Chicago. Less than three years later, Lief sold the building for a leveraged return of 3,000%—$150,000 in profit after closing costs and commissions.

From there, he turned his attention overseas and has bought property in 24 countries including France, Croatia, Portugal, Ireland, Belize, Spain, Argentina, Cyprus, Romania, and beyond. Thanks to his decades-long career as a global property investor, Lief has built a multi-million-dollar portfolio that includes rental properties, significant land holdings, and 7 personal residences.

Lief has established residency in 3 countries and acquired a second passport from Ireland.

In 2008 Lief and wife Kathleen Peddicord made the most important investment of their lives—a 215-acre oceanside finca, known as Los Islotes. There, on Panama’s largely undiscovered Veraguas coast, they’ve installed underground electricity, water, and internet and built a forever family home that sits at the heart of their ultimate vision: a gold standard private residential community for those in search of a true safe haven escape.

Lief’s latest book, “Cowboy Millionaire—The New American Pioneer,” collects all the wisdom he has learned in three decades of living and investing outside America.

He offers advice on international diversification in his twice-weekly Offshore Living Letter and monthly Simon Letter dispatches. For real estate investment opportunities, check out his monthly Global Property Advisor service.

If you’d like to meet Lief in person, join him for one of our upcoming in-country conferences. You’ll find further details here.

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Top Countries

  • Spain
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  • Belize
  • Colombia
  • Cyprus
  • Mexico
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  • Montenegro

Best For:

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  • Investing in Real Estate
  • Establishing Residency
  • Gun Ownership
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BROWSE ALL COUNTRIES

Budgets

How Much Will It Cost
To Live Overseas?

Super Cheap

  • Chitré, Panama
  • Santa Marta, Colombia
  • Phuket, Thailand
  • Dumaguete, The Philippines

Cheap

  • Medellin, Colombia
  • Boquete, Panama
  • Kyrenia, Cyprus
  • Hua Hin, Thailand
  • The Algarve, Portugal

Affordable

  • Valencia, Spain
  • Cascais, Portugal
  • Las Terrenas, The DR
  • Pisa, Italy
  • La Rochelle, France
  • Mazatlán, Mexico

Luxury

  • Ambergris Caye, Belize
  • Kotor, Montenegro
  • The Panama City Beaches
  • Paris, France

Resources

Global Living

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Reach us with your questions by email at: events@liveandinvestoverseas.com

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Lahardan Books

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