Best Places In The World To Retire

I like living in Nicaragua. I have seen how the other world works. I have been to Europe and the United States and found that life in Nicaragua is similar, but it is definitely authentic. You have to get used to how things work here. It’s not very organized, fast and easy. It’s not convenient.

In the US, you can just get into your car or hop on a bus and go to Walmart or Target to take care of four different things. Here, you need to go to four different places...

I like living in Nicaragua. I have seen how the other world works. I have been to Europe and the United States and found that life in Nicaragua is similar, but it is definitely authentic. You have to get used to how things work here. It’s not very organized, fast and easy. It’s not convenient.

In the US, you can just get into your car or hop on a bus and go to Walmart or Target to take care of four different things. Here, you need to go to four different places to get four different things. You have to adjust. You learn that Saturday mornings is when you take care of all your chores. From 8 to 12, you are in the streets, going from one place to the other, which gets a little frustrating because it shouldn’t take you two hours to do all that. Again, you adjust.

You get to talk to people. It’s very "old school." We still have different people doing the houses, roads, food, and service.

Here's an example of a difference living in Nicaragua compared to, for example, the US.  You are on your way to work and suddenly, there’s a horse carriage with a family carrying their food to the market and you pass by them. You see children in the streets and you see construction of a new humongous building.

In Nicaragua, the laws here are not as hard as to comply with as in the States. The police would stop you here when you break a law but you can talk to the officer and he will let you go. They’re very lenient like that. Laws aren’t as strict and as suffocating here as they are in the States.

As for daily life, work is from 8 to 5. You work Saturdays here. We have tons of vacation. We have over six weeks total of vacations throughout the year.

People love baseball and boxing. There are beaches. You are half an hour away from a lake, volcano, beach and a colonial town.

There is a lot of poverty here. It really depends on how you are as a person, what your mindset is because, speaking quite frankly, due to the poverty, labor is really cheap here. You can have a housekeeper for $10 a day, which is good and bad, obviously. It’s good because for you, it’s cheap. At the end of the day you are providing a job for someone who doesn’t have it. But it’s bad because you’re paying $10 a day and that’s what it costs.

Issues like these exist here and it depends on how you want to look at these. For example, there are children begging for money and offering to clean your window by most stoplights. That’s a shock to most people. Not to me anymore. It was again when I left for Florida to study and came back.  I forgot about all this. But then you decide what to do with that issue.

For example, at the end of the school year, if the kids who are begging show me good grades on their report cards, we’ll talk and I give them stuff later to reward them. It’s trying to do something good with a bad situation when it shouldn’t be there at all. They will be there and they’re not moving.  That’s the downside of the poverty that you see here. You take it all in.

You can live very comfortably with $2,000 a month wherever in this Third World country. There’s a saying here, “We live in a Third World country, but we live like kings.” I’ve lived in other places in the world and it’s completely true. Definitely true.

I lived very comfortably in Florida, but not as comfortably as I live here. You take it all in, pretty much.

When you retire in Panama on the Pensionado Visa, you cannot work, but you can own a company. Me, as an example, being a Pensionado, I cannot work, but I can own a company and pay income taxes on my company’s income to the government of Panama.

 

If you come to Panama with a Friendly Nations Visa, you could own a company, but in many respects, you cannot work. Moreover, if you cannot work, you cannot have income. Hence, you cannot pay taxes either.

When you retire in Panama on the Pensionado Visa, you cannot work, but you can own a company. Me, as an example, being a Pensionado, I cannot work, but I can own a company and pay income taxes on my company’s income to the government of Panama.

 

If you come to Panama with a Friendly Nations Visa, you could own a company, but in many respects, you cannot work. Moreover, if you cannot work, you cannot have income. Hence, you cannot pay taxes either.

Portugal has cut down quite a lot of holidays.  Portugal is a Catholic country that had a tremendous amount of holidays for saints that they’ve had to cut down on.

 

Portugal has Easter, but you don’t have like you do in England, as Easter Monday. You just have Good Friday and Easter Sunday and then at Christmas you don’t have like you do in England with Boxing Day, which is a day after that. It doesn’t exist here in Portugal....

Portugal has cut down quite a lot of holidays.  Portugal is a Catholic country that had a tremendous amount of holidays for saints that they’ve had to cut down on.

 

Portugal has Easter, but you don’t have like you do in England, as Easter Monday. You just have Good Friday and Easter Sunday and then at Christmas you don’t have like you do in England with Boxing Day, which is a day after that. It doesn’t exist here in Portugal. You just have December 24th, which is more celebrated than December 25th here.

 

In June you have quite a few holidays.  The municipality of Lisbon will have a day in June and then the municipality of Cascais will have a day then another municipality will have a day, and so on. June is the month where they have the fairs, which are a bit like carnivals, where they eat all the sardines and they grill the sardines in the streets in Lisbon. June is sort of the holiday season.

 

Then you have days of saints, many of which are in the month of August. In England, the holidays occur on a Mondays, whereas here in Portugal, the holiday could be on a Thursday, so everybody, of course, will take the Friday off. There are quite a few holidays here.

 

(The Feast of Trays, or Feast of the Holy Spirit, Tomar, Portugal, pictured.)

There if definitely religious freedom here in Panama. The official religion in Panama is Catholicism, so most people are Catholics. Next to that are the different kinds of Protestants. Christians are the main Protestants here in Panama. Then there are some Jewish people, Muslims, Buddhists, etc.

 

There is no problem with religious bigotry here. I have never seen any problem with that. Panamanian people are very tolerant regarding religion. I went to school...

There if definitely religious freedom here in Panama. The official religion in Panama is Catholicism, so most people are Catholics. Next to that are the different kinds of Protestants. Christians are the main Protestants here in Panama. Then there are some Jewish people, Muslims, Buddhists, etc.

 

There is no problem with religious bigotry here. I have never seen any problem with that. Panamanian people are very tolerant regarding religion. I went to school here in Panama. My best friend is Buddhist, my grandmother is Buddhist, and they have a friend who is Christian and my other friend is Catholic. Nobody has anything to do with your religion. You believe that you believe and nobody will mess with that.