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Home Retirement/Living

Understanding The Living Overseas

Kathleen Peddicord by Kathleen Peddicord
Jul 11, 2011
in Retirement/Living
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Retiring Overseas
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Your Dry Cleaner Doesn’t Have To Get It

Unless you’re very lucky, your friends and family aren’t going to understand.

When you tell them you’re thinking about moving to a new country for your retirement, their responses will likely range from bemusement to shock and horror. They’ll think you’ve lost your grounding and are over-indulging in fantasy…or, worse, that you’ve flat out lost your mind.

My family still doesn’t get it. When I announced more than a dozen years ago that I was making plans to relocate from the East Coast of the United States to the southeast coast of Ireland, they at first indulged me by saying nothing. Then, when it became clear that the planning stage was moving into the moving stage, they got vocal. My mother cried. My sister wondered if a move like this could possibly be in the best interest of her niece (my 8-year-old daughter Kaitlin). My aunt asked how I could be so heartless as to take my mother and father’s grandchild so far away from them.

Our first year in Ireland, we heard little from my family. Then I became pregnant with my second child, Jackson, and my mom and dad put their misgivings about our international relocation aside and, finally, came to visit.

Years later, when I called my mother to tell her we intended to move again, this time from Waterford, Ireland, to Paris, France, she responded at first, again, with silence. Then, after an awkward pause, “Don’t the French hate Americans?”

Many phone calls and months later, my mom did come to visit. The morning we escorted her to the airport for her return flight to the States after she’d spent 10 days with us in Paris, she turned and said, “I was wrong not to have come sooner. You’re right. The French are fine, and this city is beautiful.”

Three years ago, we were at it again. “Mom, we’re moving to Panama!” I called to exclaim one morning.

Silence.

Then: “But I thought you loved Paris? Why would you move again now? Where will Jack go to school? Isn’t it miserably hot in Panama? What about your lovely apartment in Paris? You’re not going to give that up, are you?”

A few years later, my mother and Panama City remain strangers, though she indicated at Christmas that she might venture down to the tropics for a visit sometime this year.

Lief and I are on a different track from many, and we long ago gave up on the idea that everyone would understand. The lifestyle we’ve chosen doesn’t have to make sense to everyone else. It makes sense to us.

This is the point you’ll need to get to. Don’t expect the woman in front of you in the grocery store checkout line to endorse or validate your plan to reinvent your life in a foreign country. Why in the world would you want to leave everything familiar…your family and friends, all things comfortable and secure…to start over somewhere new?

Your reasons are likely many, for the benefits of spending even some of your time in a foreign locale can be great. You can reduce your cost of living, sure, but that’s only the beginning of the story. The real advantages to internationalizing your lifestyle are less practical. Living in a foreign country, all or even just part of the time, your life becomes fuller and richer in ways you likely couldn’t predict right now, certainly that you couldn’t articulate for your dry cleaner.

But that’s ok. Remember…he doesn’t have to understand.

Kathleen Peddicord

Tags: 'social security outside us'live overseasretire overseas
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Kathleen Peddicord

Kathleen Peddicord

Kathleen Peddicord has covered the live, retire, and do business overseas beat for more than 30 years and is considered the world's foremost authority on these subjects. She has traveled to more than 75 countries, invested in real estate in 21, established businesses in 7, renovated historic properties in 6, and educated her children in 4.

Kathleen has moved children, staff, enterprises, household goods, and pets across three continents, from the East Coast of the United States to Waterford, Ireland... then to Paris, France... next to Panama City, where she has based her Live and Invest Overseas business. Most recently, Kathleen and her husband Lief Simon are dividing their time between Panama and Paris.

Kathleen was a partner with Agora Publishing’s International Living group for 23 years. In that capacity, she opened her first office overseas, in Waterford, Ireland, where she managed a staff of up to 30 employees for more than 10 years. Kathleen also opened, staffed, and operated International Living publishing and real estate marketing offices in Panama City, Panama; Granada, Nicaragua; Roatan, Honduras; San Miguel de Allende, Mexico; Quito, Ecuador; and Paris, France.

Kathleen moved on from her role with Agora in 2007 and launched her Live and Invest Overseas group in 2008. In the years since, she has built Live and Invest Overseas into a successful, recognized, and respected multi-million-dollar business that employs a staff of 35 in Panama City and dozens of writers and other resources around the world.

Kathleen has been quoted by The New York Times, Money magazine, MSNBC, Yahoo Finance, the AARP, and beyond. She has appeared often on radio and television (including Bloomberg and CNBC) and speaks regularly on topics to do with living, retiring, investing, and doing business around the world.

In addition to her own daily e-letter, the Overseas Opportunity Letter, with a circulation of more than 300,000 readers, Kathleen writes regularly for U.S. News & World Report and Forbes.

Her newest book, "How to Retire Overseas: Everything You Need to Know to Live Well (for Less) Abroad," published by Penguin Random House, is the culmination of decades of personal experience living and investing around the world.

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