By the time you read this, I'll be tossing the last few items into my suitcase and heading for the airport. Today I fly to Panama to attend the Live & Invest in Panama conference, followed by a week exploring the country. This is the culmination of a decision made in January, just a couple of months ago. But in another respect, it's the culmination of nearly five years of research and planning. That's about when I started reading some of the expat websites and thinking about retiring …
Let Total Strangers Plan Your Trip
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 …
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 …
To Untether, First Take Inventory
The story goes that Michelangelo created his beautiful statues by visualizing what was trapped inside the marble and chipping away everything that wasn’t the statue. Before you can untether yourself as an expat you have to undergo a similar transformation. You need to chip away everything that won’t work with your new life so you can free yourself to enjoy it. There are two broad categories you need to chip away at: your stuff and your ideas. Chip Away the Stuff One way to start is by taking …
The Untethered Life
Untether Yourself is the title of the free e-book I recently released. (If you missed its release, you can grab your copy here.) But what does the untethered expat life mean? Is it: the freedom to travel constantly, flitting from place to place and exploring all the world has to offer? the opportunity to live on a tropical beach soaking up the sun? the ability to live where you want but travel back to your native land whenever you want to visit friends and family? simply a move from one …