Bona Fide Luxury Living At A Better-Than-Bargain Cost
Medellín, Colombia, offers a luxury high-end lifestyle without the high-end costs.
I make that statement based on nearly 15 years’ experience trying lifestyles across Latin America on for size.
When I took early retirement from my engineering career at the age of 49, I didn’t have enough of a pension or enough retirement savings to live on for the rest of my life in the States, certainly not living the level of lifestyle my wife and I had been enjoying in New York up until that point.
So I started looking around for options. My eyes were opened to the “retire overseas” option by a book on retiring to Costa Rica that I happened upon in a bookstore one day.
At that point in our lives, my wife Julie and I wanted a big change, an adventure. We craved culture shock, the bigger the better. So while Costa Rica was the first country I considered as an overseas retirement option, it wasn’t the one we chose for the start of our overseas retirement adventures.
For this, Julie and I chose Ecuador, where we embraced a very different and almost unbelievably affordable lifestyle.
We enjoyed Ecuador, but, once we’d made that first move, we couldn’t help but notice other options that also seemed very appealing. What could be better than Ecuador, we’d asked ourselves while enjoying our new life there, first in Cuenca, then in Vilcabamba.
Then we discovered that, well, other places might just be better in some ways.
So, from Ecuador, we moved to Uruguay, where we divided our time between Montevideo and Punta del Este, on the coast. What could be better than that life, split between a pleasant city and one of the world’s most beautiful stretches of coastline?
Then we discovered Itamaracá, Brazil, where we lived right on the beach. Could we top that?
In fact, yes, again, we found something better:
Medellín, Colombia.
Medellín is more First World than Ecuador. It has the same diverse natural beauty as Ecuador but (and this has become important to us) less corruption.
Medellín is less expensive than Uruguay. It has a pleasant, comfortable climate year-round with no winter. And it’s much closer to the United States than Uruguay.
And Medellín has better weather than Brazil, plus hardly any mosquitos.
Medellín is not too hot and not too cold. It’s accessible to the States. You can drink the water. Real estate prices are appealingly low, especially now, thanks to the current record-high value of the U.S. dollar versus the Colombian peso, and the market in general is rife with opportunity.
In Medellín, the attention has been focused on El Poblado, which I’d say is the best of the best. Frankly, this area of Medellín doesn’t compare to anything, certainly not to anywhere else I know in Latin America, and I’ve been traveling all over this region, covering this beat, as I mentioned, for nearly 15 years.
El Poblado is green and lush without any Third World poverty. It offers a bona fide luxury standard of living at a better-than-bargain cost.
When Julie and I moved to Ecuador, we were looking for adventure, and we embraced how different life was in that country. Now, 15 years later and 15 years older, we’re looking for something else, something more comfortable… something exactly like the lifestyle on offer in Medellín.
Given what you’re buying, this place is an almost unbelievable value. It is the cheapest place in Latin America to buy this level of lifestyle. In my experience, the living doesn’t compare anywhere else, not at any price.
Lee Harrison
