Making the Move Out of America: An Object Lesson on How NOT To Do It

You're Too Old to Spend the Rest of Your Life on the Couch: Let's Adventure!

Photo by Hưng Nguyễn Việt on Unsplash Vietnam has become a hoot expat desintation

A perfect lesson in wherever you go, there you are

Dear Reader: this continues my research, discovery and discussion about the potential for moving overseas. May I please reiterate: I am an experienced world traveler, lived as an expat in my early thirties, and am no stranger to discomfort. As I explore Ecuador and consider moving my aging backside to another country, I’m sharing what I’ve learned, what I see and what I read. If this potential is on your radar, I really hope this free series provides solid, actionable and important advice and insight.

First, let’s clarify terminology. I saw a good explanation on the Ecuador Expats page. One man wrote: you are an expat if you’re temporary. You’re an immigrant if you make the move permanent. A good way to understand the difference.

Let’s talk.

There’s a lovely young woman writing about becoming an expat here on Substack. I read some of her work. While it’s helpful and she has a plethora of resources, what troubled me was the dearth of serious investigation into the serious downsides of such a move.

It is NOT all blooms and bunnies. For anyone to imply otherwise, most particularly for those of us who are in our final third, is misleading.

I’m not saying she does this. However as fellow Stackers have pointed out, those pushing these articles out about expat life are often making the fundamental influencer mistake: they are not serious researchers, they aren’t thorough and aren’t well-traveled enough to have context.

Context is critically important for anyone after fifty or so making such a huge decision.

In many cases lots of those newly-minted expats aren’t old enough to have the concerns that those of us over sixty better be concerned about. In many other cases, even if older, that new country is the only other country they’ve ever seen.

But that makes them experts.

My buddy JC said, to our mutual hilarity, that there is no community more utterly convinced of its knowledge and agency than expats who have just moved to a new country.

Very funny and very, very true.

One area where this Substacker and I will have to agree to disagree is advance research. Their claim was that there wasn’t enough income to head over and take a serious look around before moving.

Look, I’m hardly rich. Doing this in Ecuador is all on my credit card, so I understand.

I’m going to do a

Tim Ebl

and call this out as the perfect analogy:

…if you don’ t have time to exercise now as a preventative measure, you will sure as hell have time for all the doctor’s visits, medications, tubes in your person and the agony of a failed body for too many of your final years.

This is precisely the same thing.

It’s just as foolish and irresponsible to not invest in serious research, in person. Especially after a certain age, it’s insane to leap at a destination because we honestly believe that it’s all a vacay forever.

The carefully-curated photos don’t show you the trash, the hovels, the panhandlers. They don’t show the lack of environmental awareness, the abuse of domestic animals, the casual filth everywhere, the waterways lined with trash. The noise, the smells, the bureaucracies and poorly-trained professionals.

You don’t see how women are treated, the lack of protection for victims, laws that are incomprehensible to us.

Cheap countries are cheap because they don’t have services. They don’t have the tax base for infrastructure. Lights go out the way a massive power outage in Chile plunged millions into darkness.

If you can’t deal with rolling blackouts in California or you can’t cope with a few days’ being out of power in Florida after a hurricane, do NOT move to a “cheap destination.”

The moment that cheap destination is sophisticated enough to have solved all those infrastructure problems, folks, it ain’t cheap anymore.

If you can’t cope with spiders and snakes and roaches in Florida, you will not do well in many places overseas. They are part of life. People die from viper bites. I watched folks in Fiji eat pieces of bread covered with honey AND ants, because are a fact of life. Can’t handle it? Stay home.

One expat, overheard at a lunch in a particulary pretty part of the world, asked of her very well-to-do compatriots from the USA,

“How can we make these women stop hanging their laundry out on their balconies every day?”

That’s so offensive it sucks the air right out of the room.

I’ve done homestays in Mongolia when the first order of the day is get outside to pick up dried cow flop for the fire. If you want water, you take a huge bottle, schlep it to the river and bring that 70 lb bad boy back on your back. The 68-year-old grandmother who was my host did precisely that.

That said, if you’re comfortable, and you simply cannot cope with the idea that you can’t flush your used toilet paper into the toilet but have to put it in the waste basket, stay where you are.

Most beautiful old cities like Cuenca and plenty of other places around the world don’t have the sewage systems to handle the paper.

If you can’t cope with the fact that you have to carry TP with you everywhere because poor people steal it out of public toilets, stay where you are.

These are simple, everyday facts of life for those of us who travel. They become living reality for those who choose to move.

If you are handicapped and you can’t use a squat toilet, huge swaths of the world are closed off to you. At all major airports there are plenty of places to pee, but good luck finding anything that accommodates a wheel chair or anyone who hasn’t used a drop toilet.

That’s the world.

America lives in a deeply-insulated bubble. As more of us consider the reality of what’s happening in the States, we’re looking abroad.

Please consider breaking that bubble. Go look with realistic eyes. Ask HARD questions.

Go to that country. Get out of the city. See how people really live.

Smell the land, hold the kids, see the animals. If you’re offended, if your protected American sensibilities can’t handle how life is for those folks, stay where you are.

Photo by Jordan Opel on Unsplash

No place on earth is a forever vacay.

Here’s the picture-perfect example of precisely what I mean.

From that CNN article:

They left the US in May 2022, heading to Santander, capital city of the Cantabria region on Spain’s north coast, where they’d rented a home.

Cristina says she was relatively happy in the beginning and went on to buy a chalet on the countryside of the same region after falling “in love with the area.”

“I think the first year was like a honeymoon stage,” she says. “I was more in that stage of, ‘Oh, we’re in Europe. This is what we’ve always wanted. This is a dream come true.’”

However, by the following year, Cristina was seeing things very differently, and soon realized that the Spanish way of life wasn’t going to work for her.

“I started to realize… this is not what we had envisioned,” she says. “I mean, we wanted to be here long-term. Forever and ever.

“But the way the country is going, and the way they do things, is definitely not what I’m used to.”

This woman lives in that deeply-insulated American bubble. She couldn’t cope at all with anything that didn’t align with her picture of how the world should serve her, not how the world actually is.

What’s even more stunning is that woman was Spanish-speaking. Even then she couldn’t adapt to regional differences.

Anyone who has ever traveled in Latin America and abroad knows that Spanish can vary drastically from country to country. Words vary, slang is unpredictable.

One of my first and funniest experiences overseas was learning the hard way that English is NOT English is NOT English everywhere. Commonly-used words in America can be deeply offensive low-brow terms in New Zealand, for example. It’s cause for great hilarity, but an object lesson in culture.

People who move to Australia, for example, assume that Aussies are just like Americans.

NO THEY ARE NOT. While some might find that slightly amusing, a great many Aussies would be deeply offended by the comparison.

This is what travel teaches us. We realize that we are not the center of the known universe. My god what a gift that is.

American exceptionalism and American imperialism are the twin attitudes which will kill off any kind of happy-ever-after anywhere, including in America, as we are seeing in real time.

There is a big difference between ignorant (I don’t know) and stupid.

Choosing to remain ignorant is stupid.

That CNN article was roundly hissed by many of the American immigrant community here in Cuenca. Local author and American Stephen Vargha is going to write his own version of her experience and lessons learned.

Perhaps the funniest part is that this couple didn’t even bother to research the weather.

Is weather important to your general happiness? If not, I have land in the Arctic to sell you. If so, read on.

The couple hails from Florida. Me too. That said, I hate Florida weather and all that comes with it. I seriously looked at the northern Spanish coast precisely because of how much it’s like Oregon, where I now live.

Cuenca’s weather is the kind of soft, foggy, misty, rainy, unpredictable take-everything-with-you weather I most love. I want to live in that weather for as long as I can before climate change shifts it forever. Already is.

Imagine the costs of making that move and having to come back. It’s not for anyone with limited resources, which is why I share it.

Can we please back way up and ask the much larger question, the one that is driving me to investigate the possibility of a move?

What are your VALUES?

Values are what you are willing to lay down your life for- those things that are so important to you that you will withstand tornado-force winds.

I once valued the USA that way. Took an oath to protect my country and take a bullet for what I thought we stood for. Fifty years later, things are very different.

I need horses, exercise, countryside, community, good health, good food sources, animals animals animals, the ability to do good work through my writing and speaking. I value being able to travel and learn and grow and expand.

I’ve not been able to create some of those things in Oregon. The costs of staying where I am, especially if my fixed income plummets, threaten to shoot everything else in the foot.

Those are part of what’s driving me.

I also value not being made homeless once again-been there- by brutal policies in my own country, the country I was willing to sacrifice my life to protect.

Whether or not I can make a move happen depends on a thousand moving parts. If the house fails to sell, I get to sit with it. I’ll deal if that happens, and work with what I have. I’ll keep on writing and try to find more work.

Photo by Leandro Loureiro on Unsplash

If it does sell, then the serious research I am doing right now, in person and with every intent of learning the ropes in advance as much as I can, will serve.

If you have the option to move, please do your due diligence. Get on the local expat/immigrant Facebook pages. Watch the comments. See what people complain about, look for trends, identify people who clearly share your value set and reach out to them.

Plan to show up and look at reality, not really nice photos that crop out the crap that you most assuredly will have to deal with if you choose to move.

We create heaven where we are. Sometimes our heaven turns to a hell we didn’t sign up for. Ask any immigrant in the US about that right now.

Sometimes it makes sense to move. Sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes we want to move, and we can’t. Sometimes all the dominoes fall in place and off we go.

Whatever happens in your life, should this idea sound increasingly attractive, don’t be that Miami couple. Be smart. Take your time.

Ask the really hard questions of people who share what you value and who have been in your target country a good long time.

Then spend time with those people in country. See their houses. Ask hard questions about what they had to give up to gain what gives them joy.

Read books about the culture and stories from other expats.

Ultimately home is inside us. We can make a home anywhere and with anything. I’ve done it. If finances ultimately force me to move, so be it. All this work will come in very handy.

If I can find a way to stay where I am, so be it. I haven’t made the decision yet.

That said, this terrible and final truth:

Wherever I go, there I am. I take my prejudices, my assumptions, my ignorance and my hubris with me.

I also take my willingness to be humbled, to be open, soft and curious with me.

The latter will get me a lot further wherever I land in the world, even if that ultimately means I dig in where I am.

Let’s play.

Photo by Angel Silva on Unsplash Panama, another expat favorite

Thank you again for reading my work. This free series is a serious effort to be of service to those who are looking at their options. If it helps you please support my work. It takes time and research and effort to do this for you.