“Where do you live?”
For me, the answer to that benign getting-acquainted question is not straightforward.
I spend my time between the Old World and the New, back and forth between Paris and Panama, slipping in and out of life in these very different places.
My Paris digs are 320 years old, my view a small cobblestoned courtyard. It affords me a front-row seat to day-to-day life in this neighborhood that appears on the earliest maps of Paris.
“Bonjour! Comment ca va?” my neighbors call to each other cheerfully in passing. The French are nothing if not polite.
In Panama, I drive a Jeep. That means investments in insurance, maintenance, parking spaces, and tanks of gas.
In Paris, I rely on my own two feet to get me most everywhere I go day-to-day. When they give out, I hop on the Metro. A bundle of 10 tickets to load onto your Navigo Easy Pass costs €17.35.
Before Panama and before Paris, Lief and I lived in Ireland.
We bought a 200-year-old stone house then renovated those 5,000 classic Irish Georgian square feet with care. Our Waterford country home was charming but never warm. Lief put in a standing order with the local fuel supplier who arrived the first of the month every month to refill our oil tank. Even in “summertime,” our furnace worked overtime.
In Ireland I drove a beat-up old sedan. Well, it wasn’t beat-up when we bought it, but driving on the left along narrow and winding Irish roads proved a challenge I never was able to rise to. I side-swiped so many stone walls and hedgerows that Lief gave up asking about the source of new dents and scrapes when I pulled into our driveway at the end of each day.
My point is that your new life overseas—at whatever stage of your life you choose to launch it—will be different in every way depending on where you choose to launch it.
Everything follows from the where. The weather and the view from your bedroom window, the cost of groceries and your annual tax bill, the language your neighbors speak and the ways they fill their Friday nights and Sunday afternoons… all these things and all other things will depend on where you’re living.
This world of ours includes about 200 countries. Not all of them are places you’d want to call home, and some stand out as alluring beyond all the rest.
Don’t worry. You don’t have to consider all aspects of life everywhere. I’ve done that for you.
In my brand-new book, Where To Retire Overseas, I direct your attention to the world’s 23 best places to live or retire overseas. Havens in the Americas, Europe, and Asia where a richer, better life awaits.
Discover them for yourself, here.
Until next time,
