Picking a Retirement Option? It's About a Lot More Than Just the Savings
You're Too Old to Spend the Rest of Your Life on the Couch: Let's Adventure!
Thinking of moving? Some notes on living and dying in unlikely ways and places
Dear Reader: this is a continuation of articles that I began early 2025 as I considered moving overseas. I ultimately chose Ecuador. This is a piece from March 2025.
Lots of us aging Boomers are thinking about sunny climes and cheaper everything. Popular destinations range from Spain and Portugal to Colombia and Uruguay and Mexico and Ecuador, and plenty more.
Some of those locales are already a little overrun by some estimations,usually anyone who recently moved there and everybody who moved there before the most recent arrivals.
The online chatter among all of us who are looking, planning and indeed picking up and moving is lively. It’s also full of mis-truths, outright bad information and a great deal of very good information from folks who want newcomers to be successful.
Yet in all this, there are some big issues that I don’t see addressed anywhere near often enough. Among all the claims of paradise and cheap eats and reasonable housing, immigrants do not discuss the real dangers enough.
Kindly it’s not about drugs or cartels or casual theft. It’s about both money and your health. Let’s talk.
This year (2025) I’ve been exploring whether or not to move to Ecuador. Or Mexico, or a few other places, for that matter, but primarily Ecuador.
Lots of my friends are still thinking about Mexico. They are still under the impression that they can live there for pennies, a story that passed us by a long time ago.
Places like Mexico have changed drastically. The engines of their economies have changed especially near large cities and industrial areas. With that the requirements for minimum income for the immigrant community have leapt.
In Ecuador, it’s still under $1500 a month. That’s no longer true for Mexico, where last I checked it was closer to $5k a month.
My buddy Tim Leffel writes regularly and with great authority about expat life. Not only is he a prize-winning writer, he lives the expat life in Mexico and regularly updates his books on the best places to retire or visit for cheap. I’m a fan; he’s also my editor for the occasional travel piece for his online publication Perceptive Travel.
Lots of people write about expat life but Tim is the expert on the best countries, and why. Worth investigating. It was his work that ultimately guided me to focus primarily on Ecuador.
Tim moved permanently to Mexico during the first Trump administration and has been keeping a close eye on residency requirements since. His recent article about this addresses something I alluded to: developing countries are cheap until they develop.
Then they’re not cheap any more because people are earning better wages, facilities improve, infrastructure improves and the like.
We all help pay for those improvements, as we should, since we benefit from them.
Here is what Tim wrote about this.
The comprehensive nature of this information is part of why I love Tim as a resource. Mexico, once the whipping boy of America, is doing better these days. Nowhere is that expressed more eloquently in that they are now demanding that gringos show up with a great deal more proven income if they want to become a resident.
In other words if all you have is your Social Security, you may not be able to qualify to be a retiree there. You most assuredly still can in Ecuador and certain other places, but those conditions may well change over time. Are, too, especially in countries where expat overload is having a serious impact on the locals.
If you’re much younger and considering digital nomad status, Tim addresses that in his books and articles. This is about becoming a resident, whether working or retiree.
It’s certainly true that healthcare is less expensive in most of the above-named places. They are also being a lot more picky about preexisting conditions, and demanding that we have paid plans when we apply for our visas. But health insurance isn’t enough.
Mexico, however, is no paradise, nor is anywhere else, if we don’t take care of the essentials, and that means being brutally honest about our health, our bodies and what could and may well happen to us as we age. Will happen, eventually.
Writer Kaila Krayewski penned a piece that she shared with me yesterday. While this is largely about the loss of both her parents to illness after they moved to Mexico, the piece is also a cautionary tale about what happens when we move to another country and don’t take our health insurance needs seriously.
This is a tough read, but I appreciate the fact that Kaila points out the critical mistakes her folks made. I’ve read about and listened to expats who moved to their dream destinations in their sixties, assumed that their health would stay that way forever (it never does).
They may and sometimes do end up isolated, lonely, often solo after the death of a spouse, stuck with real estate they can’t sell and bereft of key services, like end-of-life care.
Part of this is the utter denial on our part that we will indeed deteriorate and die eventually, that no matter what paradise we choose we will end up as fertilizer. Our resistance to such truths causes terrible heartbreak for those who love us, to say nothing of how we may end up.
Many people who enjoyed natural good health most of their lives feel as though they can sail into and past their sixties without trouble. This article addresses the changes many of us face, but here’s the kicker: our health can fall off a precipitous cliff right around our seventies if we don’t seriously invest in good food, lots of movement, brain stimulation and the like.
It’s a fool’s journey to just assume vibrant health forever and not do the work. Even if we do the work, we can’t assume that we’re immune to plain bad luck.
Those of you following the death of Gene Hackman may well have seen something similar to what I’m addressing. Hackman, at 95, had advanced Alzheimer’s and heart disease. His younger wife by some 32 years, Betsy Arakawa, might have been perfectly-positioned to care for him to the end but she contracted the rare hanta virus and died before Hackman.
That left this man, who had plenty of money and access to care, to sit alone with his dead wife’s body for a week before his own body gave out.
That is a horrible way for anyone to die. And it speaks to the lack of a close network of people who check in on us and who ensure that we’re all right.
Part of that network is health care, part of it is investing in the community around us. While I cannot speak to the Hackman’s situation, the fact that it was days before they were discovered tells me that they may have overly relied on each other and not created the kind of network that might have saved them.
That is my opinion only, I have no clue if I’m right.
Arakawa’s youth may have convinced them both that they were good to go. But youth is no guarantee. As with Kaila’s father, the fact that he, like me, was a gym rat for years is no guarantee that a horrible disease won’t hit us right at the knees. We cannot assume, and we must prepare.
That means invest in insurance. Part of that insurance is community. For me, community is one of the main reasons I chose Ecuador. The other insurance is the combination of exercise, careful eating and regular socialization that make up three of the four legs of the aging chair.
The last is to have a purpose, a reason to join the day with joy and gusto and gratitude.
Before you and I consider moving anywhere, especially late in life, we absolutely MUST be realistic about our final days. Some countries are checking our health at the door, if you will. They’re not interested in spending their coffers taking care of our fatty liver disease and lifestyle illnesses for cheap. We may not be allowed in some places at all if we’re that ill.
The other stark reality is that no matter how young or old we are, we are subject to illness, disease, accident - just life. Insurance is also part of just life.
During my trip to Ecuador in February I met with an insurance broker. I’m very clear that first, I can’t move there without insurance coverage. Second, I am very happy to pay for that coverage because first, I’m aging, second, I like my sports.
Third, I’m clumsy AF. Finally, I don’t care for magical thinking when it comes to my health.
Of course being able to pay for it means that I have to have an income, which is under threat right now as it is for many. Something for all of us to consider. Gone are the days when just Social Security pays for a great life, if we lose those payments entirely.
In many Latin American countries, the long term care policy is the family. It’s embedded in inheritance laws, for example. If Dad dies in Ecuador (according to what I’ve been told) everything is split between mom and the kids. The kids are expected BY LAW to take care of Mom until she dies. I guarantee you that today’s kids chafe at this, but this is why there are few end-of-life care facilities in Ecuador. Yet, anyway.
No matter what I decide, to stay or go, what’s very clear is that I have to have that community.
To have that we have to invest in others first. Again the other insurance is our own health: walking, eating well, running, cycling, hiking, whatever it is that keeps us moving and active and engaged. Little to no alcohol. No smoking.
All the things- you know what they are, and you also know if you need more of them. It’s one reason I write so much about exercise and health, for a fat bank account cannot make up for clogged arteries or immobility.
That’s insurance. Perhaps all it does is give us a much better life as we age towards a better death. No matter where we end up, overseas, on the Riviera, in Panama or Panama City, Colombia or Cuenca, doesn’t matter. We need to be prepared for the costs that life exacts for granting peace, to rip off Amelia Earhart.
Gene Hackman did not have a good death. Money made no difference. People, community, love do.
Being filthy rich is no guarantor of life, nor quality of life, nor the presence of people who give a flying damn about us as we suffer the indignities of a dying body.
You and I are going to die. Whether we are eyeing Manta or Mexico or just moving into a senior community, we need to mind our health, our health insurance, and invest in a community that cares.
To get that, let’s care deeply about others first and foremost.
In order for us to be able to play, let’s invest in our own health, the world and the people around us.
Thanks to Tim and Kaila for their material. I hope this was useful to you. If you’re thinking about moving overseas please take preparation seriously including end-of-life care needs. Please also consider supporting my work.
Really loved this view. I really appreciated how you centre community and health over fantasy, and confront ageing without sentimentality or fearmongering. Brilliant.