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