Best Places In The World To Retire

There are a lot fewer blackouts and brownouts than there used to be. It used to be a significant problem but CFE, which is the national electric company, has had major improvements in terms of service.

 

How often you experience a blackout or brownout depends on where you live. Some areas have more problems with blackouts and brownouts than others, but it’s nowhere near the problem it used to be.  For example, I live on a mountain in San Antonio,...

There are a lot fewer blackouts and brownouts than there used to be. It used to be a significant problem but CFE, which is the national electric company, has had major improvements in terms of service.

 

How often you experience a blackout or brownout depends on where you live. Some areas have more problems with blackouts and brownouts than others, but it’s nowhere near the problem it used to be.  For example, I live on a mountain in San Antonio, above the golf course, probably a mile to a mile and a half from the center of Ajijic.  In the last year, we’ve had zero blackouts and just three brownouts.

 

We don’t have a back-up generator because it’s just not important.  

 

(Pictured: gated adult community in Ajijic, Mexico.)

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.

Being that I moved to Belize with ten animals, finding the right veterinarian was important to me, and I did not mind if I needed to drive to Belize City from San Ignacio or fly them to the island.  I was very pleased to find out that there are very good vets right in my area of San Ignacio. The vets are very well-trained and very efficient. With that said, we have the same quality vets in Belize City, San Pedro, and in Placencia.

Being that I moved to Belize with ten animals, finding the right veterinarian was important to me, and I did not mind if I needed to drive to Belize City from San Ignacio or fly them to the island.  I was very pleased to find out that there are very good vets right in my area of San Ignacio. The vets are very well-trained and very efficient. With that said, we have the same quality vets in Belize City, San Pedro, and in Placencia.

The crime rate in Portugal is probably the lowest in the world. Whatever crime exists in Portugal is mostly petty crime or drug-related. Some guy would break the window of a car to take a bag or whatever valuable thing he could find, for example, or some guys would break into a house and go after the TV of a Hi-Fi system. Most of the crimes here are non-violent crimes and more of petty crimes. 

 

I live in Cascais (a high end area about 30 minutes west...

The crime rate in Portugal is probably the lowest in the world. Whatever crime exists in Portugal is mostly petty crime or drug-related. Some guy would break the window of a car to take a bag or whatever valuable thing he could find, for example, or some guys would break into a house and go after the TV of a Hi-Fi system. Most of the crimes here are non-violent crimes and more of petty crimes. 

 

I live in Cascais (a high end area about 30 minutes west of Lisbon) and I do not worry at all about my safety here. This is one of the safest places in the world I’ve been in. I think read once that Portugal was in the Top 10 in safety, taking several factors into account such as police population, army population, etc. 

 

It is very difficult to get a gun here in Portugal. The process to get a gun in Portugal is not as fast as it is in the UK, for example. We read and see horrific murders and shootings in the US and all we can say is, “Thank God we don’t live in a country like that.”

 

(Tile plague on Avenida Diana Spencer, Princess of Wales in Cascais, Portugal, pictured.)

How much of your personal items you should move to Panama depends on how much sentimental value the items have for you, but not everyone does that. We have friends who bring containers down of everything they had in Canada or the US, while my wife and I gave a lot of our items to our kids and sent most of the other stuff to auction and bought brand new down here.  The alternative for us to bring it with me would have cost well over $10,000 to ship a container.

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How much of your personal items you should move to Panama depends on how much sentimental value the items have for you, but not everyone does that. We have friends who bring containers down of everything they had in Canada or the US, while my wife and I gave a lot of our items to our kids and sent most of the other stuff to auction and bought brand new down here.  The alternative for us to bring it with me would have cost well over $10,000 to ship a container.

 

Another consideration is if you are living in Panama full time or part time.  The more time you spend here, the more important it may be to you to have your sentimental items with you.

 

(Containers waiting at the dock of the Panama Canal, Panama, pictured.)