Retire In Panama

“I can only stay for about an hour. I have a meeting about establishing a food co-op at 10:30, and, right after, I’m getting a lesson on which bus to take to get to the El Dorado shopping center.”

Bobette Jones lives like a Panamanian. She walks nearly everywhere, and, to get places too far to walk, she hops on a bus. Bobette makes Panama her home seven to eight months a year and spends the rest of the year at her summer home on an island in Lake Huron.

She first came to Panama to learn Spanish before embarking on a two-month-long pilgrimage across Spain  from the French border to the Atlantic Ocean. Bobette says she didn’t know a single Spanish word before coming to Panama and was disappointed to find that quite a few Panamanians do not speak English, contrary to what she had been told.

The expat and Panamanian communities embraced Bobette within her first weeks in the country, so she decided to pack up her life in Seattle and spend most of her time in Panama.

Her first address was an apartment in Punta Paitilla, an upscale oceanfront neighborhood in  Panama City. In Punta Paitilla, she lived with friends, but, after deciding to make Panama a more permanent home, Bobette was looking for more comfortable accommodation.

Through a Panamanian doctor friend, Bobette rented an apartment in  El Cangrejo. And, she admits her decision came down to the apartment and not the neighborhood. Now, after calling the neighborhood home for four years, she couldn’t be happier with her choice.

The apartment building Bobette lives in is just off El Cangrejo’s main street, Via Argentina. The building is more than 20 years old and was built at a time when apartments were constructed with ample square footage.

The apartment has two bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a large maid’s room, which has been converted into an office. The building has an immaculately maintained pool and attentive staff. Also, the building manager lives on-site. For all this space and service, Bobette pays about $1,200 a month in rent.

“I don’t own a car, and, living in El Cangrejo, I don’t need to,” says Bobette. “I walk everywhere. The grocery store, the beauty salon, the movie theater, not to mention I’m within a few minutes’ walk of what I consider to be some of the best restaurants in the country. If I can’t walk somewhere, I take a city bus or the Metro.”

Plus, a retired attorney, Bobette spent the later years of her working life in health research and preventative medicine. Impressed with the interest Panamanians and expats in this country have in alternative medicine, Bobette hopes to become involved in that field in some capacity.

She says her own natural medicine practitioner in Panama City goes beyond what is expected and even gives her advice over the phone for minor complaints. Bobette has experience with conventional medicine in Panama, too.

When she informed her international medical insurance provider that her doctor was recommending cataract surgery, the insurance company approved the procedure within 45 minutes, recognizing that having the surgery performed in Panama would cost them a fraction what it’d cost if Bobette underwent the procedure in the United States. She gives glowing reviews of Panama’s hospitals and doctors.

But, adjusting to life in a foreign country takes getting used to. The challenge for Bobette in Panama is getting used to the lack of customer service. “When I was living in my first apartment in Panama City,” she explained, “my water heater broke, and it took a month before the service technician came to repair it, even though he called every day and promised he was on the way.”

She recounts a handful of other frustrations with the service industry in Panama, but, overall, she is very happy with life in this country.

“I feel safer walking after dark in Panama than I do in Seattle. My wallet was taken from my purse once, but that was my fault for making it so accessible. Besides that, I’ve had no problems. I also like that it’s so easy to get to Panama, from just about anywhere in North America, and the airfares are usually cheaper than flying across a couple of U.S. states. The tropical weather doesn’t hurt either.”

And with that parting thought, Bobette is off to her meeting to find out how to start a food co-op. She is typical of a growing number of retirees living in Panama. They may have ditched the 9-to-5, but they are not slowing down.