The Year We Ran Away from Home

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Hello friends, and welcome to Notes from the Road! Glad you're along for the ride. Each week, you'll get news, advice, tools, and inspiration to thrive in your 50s and beyond, whether you're traveling around the world or blazing a trail in your own backyard. Topics we cover in this issue:

• Moving abroad in midlife or retirement.

• New things to try in midlife.

• What people often lose when they retire.

• The connection between sleep and longevity.

• Bicycling in Leiden, The Netherlands

• Wisdom from Cameron Diaz.

Let’s get started!

In 2021, we got rid of most of our stuff, put the rest in storage, ended our lease, packed everything into four suitcases and two backpacks, and set off overseas. We delivered our only child to college in Scotland (where we had never been), went to London (where we had been once) and spent the next three months living in Portugal in Lisbon (never been), Nazaré (never been there either), Porto (nope) and Madeira (ditto).

In a pandemic.

The plan? To scout potential places to relocate. With an empty nest, location-neutral freelance careers, and a deep weariness of the grinding ambition of our inner-ring suburb, we knew what we were running away from, but didn’t yet know what we were running toward.

We’ve slowly, quietly, started to share our story with others, and have been overwhelmed by the number of people who share a similar dream. So here, we’d like to offer our impressions of the Expat Escape Plan, as we experienced it.

In sum, we were about 15 years too late. At this age, an overseas relocation is hard, especially if you dream of a life or retirement in some parts of Europe. Here’s why:

• It’s lonely. We were missing two key catalysts for assimilation: a job and kids. We had neither. After the excitement passed, the loneliness set in, and it was easy to see that our points of entry into a social ecosystem would need to be very creative, disciplined, and intentional.

• It’s complicated and risky. It’s a different calculus at midlife. To become residents in most places that appealed to us, we’d pay a hefty price for the privilege in income, inheritance, and wealth taxes, at just about the time that we wanted to be disengaging from work. Are there strategies for managing this? Sure. Try sitting in one free cross-border financial management webinar and let us know how it goes for you. Our favorite quote from a financial planner: Europe is a very good place to live and a very bad place to die.  

• It’s exhausting. We very much wanted to assimilate. To speak the language, eat the food, take on the customs. We were overwhelmed. It probably would have gotten easier. But having negotiated mass transit, grocery shopping, Covid testing, and home maintenance, we soon determined that with the remaining time and energy we have left on this earth, we didn’t want to spend it learning a new language to the point of fluency (and worrying about what would happen in a medical emergency before then).

But we love to travel! And we love to meet new people in new places and see how they live. So we’ve landed on a new approach: being part-time expats, also sometimes called slow travel. We keep a home base in the US and spend 1-3 months at a time overseas in the places we love. This gives us a lot of what we like without the downside of a full-scale relocation. If your midlife or retirement plans include this kind of adventure, we’ve started to share what we learn over at our YouTube page, and we’ll include bits here in the newsletter too. If you haven’t seen it yet, here’s our take on the benefits of being a part-time expat. See you next week!

Join us each week for more on midlife living and retirement!

The Weekly Roundup

Worth your time to watch, read, and listen.

📰 How to Avoid Being Boring at 60. Rob’s journey from mundane to marvelous is an inspiration for anyone approaching retirement. Discover how he shook up his routine by committing to 60 new experiences—from salsa dancing to soufflé-making. (7 min. read)

📰 8 Things People Lose After Retiring. Retirement brings freedom, but what are the unexpected losses that come with it? From social connections to a sense of purpose, this article describes what you should be thinking about now, and how to navigate it when it happens. (7 min. read)

🎧 Want to Live Longer? Make This Adjustment to Your Sleep Routine. In this episode of Arnolds Pump Club, a new daily podcast where Arnold Schwarzenegger shares three tips in five minutes to live a healthier, positive life, you’ll read about the role of regular sleep in longevity. (7 min. listen)

💡💡We’d love to hear from you! Anything you’d like to see in the Weekly Roundup? Any burning topics you’d like us to write about? Comments, questions, feedback? Let us know. 💡💡

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