My husband and I are going to Panama in a couple months to see whether it's someplace we'd like to live, so I've been spending a lot of time planning our scouting trip. Not surprisingly, not every little hotel in the country has a website (at least, not in English). Since we don't want to stay in tourist hotels, travel and tour companies are of no help. So what's a future expat to do? Turn to your social networks. I've been doing that -- a lot. Expat Forums I started with some of the larger …
Expat Mailbox
Occasionally readers email me with questions about specific places. I thought it might be fun to pop them into an occasional post. A reader recently emailed: "Hi "Myself and a friend are looking to relocate to Barbados. Where do we start ? We have both been to the island and both love it and realize that we could defiantly live there. We are now looking for employment, my friend is a hairdresser with 20 years exp. Myself I am more of a office based person with a lot of customer service …
Portable Careers for Expats: Stock Photographer
Photography is a wonderfully portable career. But even if your shots aren't up to National Geographic or haute couture standards, you can make a nice living creating and selling stock photography. What is "stock?" It's a picture that's licensed for specific use by advertisers, journalists, travel writers and others. Newspapers, magazines and other media love stock because it saves them money -- they don't need to hire a photographer. They can peruse huge databases of images and purchase just …
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(Re)Discover Your Passion . . . in time for Valentine’s Day
In December, friend and life coach Barrie Davenport launched a new program called Discover Your Passion: A Step by Step Course for Creating the Life of Your Dreams. While not written specifically for the expat (or future expat), the course employs lots of techniques and exercises that can help you to create your ideal expat life. You can read my previous review here. Barrie is adding something special for Valentine's Day: an e-book titled The Passion Booster: A Simple Guide to Loving …
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How to Plan Your First Expat Scouting Trip
(Continued from How Do You Plan for the Unknown?) So you've decided to move to another country, you've done tons of research, and you've narrowed down your country choices. The next step is a big one -- scouting out your country of choice. Ideally, you'll be able to spend two weeks to a month exploring the country. The purpose of this first trip is not to buy real estate or arrange a long-term rental. This trip is to find out whether you like the country and its people, and whether you can …
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How Do You Plan for the Unknown?
The unknown. . . it can be exciting, exhilarating or paralyzing. Even when we're excited that we might "boldly go where no man has gone before," there's usually a bit of terror lurking in the background. In this internet era, with easy access to satellite photos and maps of the entire globe, there's not much on this Earth that's totally unknown. As a future expat, sometimes it just feels that way. How do you handle that moment of truth every future expat experiences, the time when you have to …