Category: Uncategorized

As I started preparing my second post I decided to look at some of my research history. I was surprised at the number of bookmarks that I have made on my browser. Looking at these tabs seems like a cornucopia of available dreams for my choosing.

Reflection of the many months that I have been doing online searches, reading about different countries, the languages, different types of dwellings, the temperament of the citizens, the cost of living, and the time and process of becoming a resident is overwhelming. I feel like I’m sitting on the fence about whether a move to another country is a good idea for me. I don’t think this is something unique to me when considering a move like this but it does feel like the most important decision that I have ever made.

Colombia?…Really?

A spoiler alert is the countries that I have looked at are Mexico, Panama, Costa Rica, Colombia, Chile, Ecuador, Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina in Latin America. In Europe I have explored Italy, Spain, Portugal, France, Germany, Belgium, England, Norway, Denmark, and the Netherlands. I have also considered the Mediterranean to Southeastern Europe. I also looked further east in considering Cambodia, Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand, Japan, Singapore, and the Philippines. Later on in this and future posts I will share what I found positive to most if not all of these. What I have learned is never say never and to keep my mind open.

Trying to be Objective

I decided to focus my priorities from most important to least important. As I write these words I am gauging how I’m feeling right now and trying to compare how I felt when I started. The two issues that are constant are the cost of living and the chaos that is on the evening news. Both of these create much anxiety and I’m not improving my mental health, in fact it has been stagnant for thousands of days. It’s depressing knowing that a fixed income is the same once the Social Security Administration sets the cost of living adjustment (COLA) late in the year. The COLA just tries to help me pay for the necessities. There is nothing to set aside. 

I still feel that the United States is still a friendly nation where neighbors will help neighbors. I served as a volunteer for a civic organization over 20 years ago in which there were clubs that had publicly elected officials as fellow members and worked for the good of the community. While I haven’t been involved for some time, I wonder if the societal fractures are working against the local community. I don’t like confrontation. I could feel societal divisions starting to happen. All it took was one person that disagreed and felt liberated enough to use personal insults. I felt helpless when I couldn’t mediate a repair in the relationship. I like being around nice people or at least people that respect one another.

I know I took the long way around the world to say that personal financial health is my number one issue and national societal harmony is a close second. I guess a negative review of either of these two issues could be dealbreakers and might be a reason that I would cross a country off my list. I realize that I will have to adjust to any living situation. My best decision will not be a perfect decision.

Many of my first bookmarks I made under a tab I created called “Expat Retirement”. While I have one page relating to the D7 Visa requirements of Portugal, the rest of them were for Colombia. Much of the information that I was looking at started in 2023. I searched for the best towns, cost of living, type of government, language, customs and culture, climate, housing options, and foods. While this seems like more than enough topics that I was looking at back then, it is still not enough information about Colombia to make a moving decision. A lot has happened in the world since 2023 and every country has changed due to global shifts. Colombia is included.

I was skeptical when Colombia popped up in a DuckDuckGo search about affordable countries for American expatriates. The exact words I can’t remember. If I can’t afford something I don’t buy it. I have a negative notion of Colombia being overrun with drug cartels, political assassinations, and lock downs because of violence in the streets. Going against perceptions and satisfying my curiosity I decided to do a little research. While things are not perfect things have gotten a lot better in Colombia. Because Colombia will allow me to live affordably and yes, more comfortably, it was put on my list in 2023. As of today, September 4, 2026, Colombia is on what I call my “reserve” list. I have found other countries that seem to be a better fit. https://smartasset.com/financial-advisor/retire-in-colombia

Chile

At one time Chile seemed like the best choice for me. Things can change quickly and what seemed like the best choice can become a poor choice. Chile elected Jose Antonio Kast as president in 2025, an extreme right wing politician that has taken a hard line on crime and immigration. There seems to be some “unsettling” in the population with protests about unfair treatment. This kind of chaos is what I need to avoid so I have decided that I can no longer consider Chile as a place to move.

Being Cautious

I do want to advise you that when I post a link, I believe that the information is fairly reliable. I also want to advise that smartasset.com has links embedded for financial advisors in between some paragraphs. I’m not going to endorse any website that I share. 

Please keep in mind that this blog is about my experiences. Since I am trying to raise funds to pay for moving costs, I may include a link to a tipping platform some time in the future. I am using other hacks, like online surveys that pay money. I will share more of this later. I want to make this blog enjoyable to read. I want to enjoy writing it. I never want anyone to feel obligated to pay anything other than a comment or compliment.

Your Thoughts

There are so many websites, blogs, and podcasts about finding a new life in a new country. Please let me know what you are looking for. Some people dream about change while some make it happen. Some like myself are trying to make it happen. Please drop a note on my contact page.

Most people who stumble across blogs like this one assume the author woke up one day, got frustrated with the news cycle, and started googling “cheapest countries to retire in.” Maybe that’s true for some. For me, the idea of living outside the United States has been circling for nearly sixteen years — showing up at crossroads, getting set aside for practical reasons, and returning each time with a little more urgency.

This blog is about the research. It’s about the numbers, the countries, the visa pathways, the cost of groceries, the quality of healthcare, and everything else a person needs to actually evaluate a decision like this. But to understand why that research matters to me, you need to know where it started.

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2008: A Seed Gets Planted

I was talking with someone who owned property in Honduras. He wasn’t pitching anything — it came up casually in conversation. He mentioned how affordable daily life was there, and then he said something that stuck with me: that my SSDI benefit might be enough to hire a cleaning lady twice a week.

That’s a small detail, but it landed hard. Not because of the cleaning lady specifically, but because of what it represented — the idea that a fixed income that barely covers the basics in the United States could actually provide a comfortable, dignified life somewhere else. I filed it away. Life moved on.

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2015: The First Serious Consideration

By 2015, the idea had matured from a passing thought into something I actually sat with. I looked into it. I weighed it. In the end, I decided to move domestically instead — to Tucson, Arizona. It made sense at the time. Familiar language, familiar systems, no passport required. The international option felt like too large a leap for where I was.

What I didn’t anticipate was that the economics of American cities were about to make that kind of internal migration progressively less effective as a strategy.

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Tucson to Albuquerque: The Treadmill Speeds Up

Tucson became too expensive. Not all at once — that’s rarely how it happens. It happens gradually, through rent increases and rising grocery bills and the slow realization that you’re working harder to stay in the same place. So I moved again, this time to Albuquerque.

Albuquerque offered more space, more privacy, and roughly comparable costs to what I’d been paying in the city. I found a place in the East Mountains, about twenty-five minutes out, where I could breathe. For a while, that worked.

But there’s a limit to how many times you can solve an affordability problem by moving somewhere slightly cheaper within the same country. Eventually you run out of road.

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The Last Two Years: Urgency Arrives

Over the past two years, several things converged at once.

My health situation became more complex. Managing disabilities — and finding healthcare that actually addresses them rather than just processing you — became more pressing, not less. The American healthcare system is many things, but reliably affordable and accessible for people on fixed incomes is not among them.

At the same time, I found myself increasingly worn down by something harder to quantify: the social and political climate in this country. I want to be careful here, because this blog isn’t about politics and I have no interest in preaching to anyone. What I’ll say is this: there are people across the full spectrum of American political life — moderate, conservative, liberal — who share a quiet exhaustion with how divided and hostile public life has become. The polarization isn’t abstract. It affects neighborhoods, relationships, and the daily texture of living somewhere. I’m not fleeing any particular party or ideology. I’m looking for a place where decent people of different views can still be neighbors without it becoming a confrontation.

That combination — healthcare needs, fixed income pressure, and a desire for a calmer social environment — created something it hadn’t before: genuine urgency.

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What This Blog Is

Starting with this post, I’m going to document the research process in real time.

I’ve already spent months going deep on this. I’ve evaluated more than a dozen countries against specific criteria: residency pathways, income requirements, healthcare quality, political stability, cost of living by category, and practical day-to-day realities. I’ve eliminated countries for specific reasons — some had bank deposit requirements I couldn’t meet, some had income thresholds above my benefit, some had political directions that concerned me for their own reasons.

I’ve landed on a destination. I’m going to explain how I got there, what the numbers actually look like for someone in my situation, and what the process of making this move looks like from the inside — the paperwork, the finances, the logistics, and the learning curve.

My income is what it is. It’s a fixed government benefit. I’m not independently wealthy, I’m not a remote tech worker with a six-figure salary, and I’m not doing this for adventure. I’m doing this because I’ve done the math, and the math says a better quality of life is available to me — if I’m willing to cross a border to find it.

If you’re in a similar situation, or if you’re just curious about how someone actually works through a decision like this, I hope you’ll stick around.

The next post covers how I built my evaluation criteria and why the country most people suggest first didn’t make the cut.

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Questions or your own experience to share? Leave a comment below.