Best Things About Moving Abroad

Some things in life we earn, and others, we don’t.

 

We use many names to describe the things that happen to us that we don’t earn, including “fate,” “destiny,” “God’s will”, “luck,” and my personal favorite: “dumb luck.”

 

After reading more than 9,500 answers to questions and 300 stories of more than 600 expats in Mexico, Panama, Nicaragua and Belize about their life abroad and now having traveled through...

Would you like to reduce your stress?

 

Based on the hundreds of expats we've interviewed and the more than one thousand who participated in our studies, if you are like them, there is more than an 80% chance you could reduce your stress by moving abroad.  As proof, first we'll provide the results from a survey we conducted about living in Panama, Belize and Nicaragua, in which we asked expats "What is your level of stress in your home abroad?":

Writer's forward: Why people in places such as Mexico, Panama, Belize and Nicaragua are willing to work for expats for less than if they were located in the US or Canada is the subject of another article.  Suffice it to say that those of us fortunate enough to be from Western industrialized nations have hit the “Where You’re From Jackpot” through no particular virtue of our own.  We were just lucky to be born in the US, Canada, etc., and to be able to use US or...

On our road trip through Mexico and on the Best Places in the World to Retire site, we and other contributors to our site are often asked to do a comparison between life in the US and life abroad.  In order to be accurate, these comparisons are almost always filled with lots of caveats because it is not often easy to do a fair one-to-one, “apples-to-apples” parallel.  However, sometimes, you can, which is exactly what happened to me a few days ago.
 
First, here’s...

Boquete mornings greet us with cool, fresh air. Except during the rainy season the morning clouds melt away fast and the sky becomes a beautiful jewel tone blue. The little humming birds come to greet us as we sip coffee in the cool morning air on our patio.

 

Our patio is private and it is our sanctuary from stress. It is almost always 72 degrees,​ offers shade, keeps the rain and mist off us as we sit there during the prettiest part of the...

Anglers take note:   Big fish in a big river!!

The week before Christmas five of us guys decided we'd take a road trip and head to the south part of the country and do some fishing.  Several of us had been there before and hooked some good sized tarpon, but the size and the ferocity of the fish caused us never to land one.  We took a three hour drive south of Managua, and then an hour and a half panga ride (similar to a john boat) east on the Rio San...

Yesterday was the monthly spay and neuter clinic in Boquete.  Over 130 animals were sterilized, thanks to the work of Amigos de Animales, started several years ago.

 

Some of the workers were talking yesterday of the long term effects of this fantastic program.  It's easy to see that this area of Panama has less homeless, starving animals.  Stray animals are captured, neutered, nursed back to health and put up for adoption.  More Panamanians are...

I am so tired of seeing the words 'their,' 'there' and 'they're' misused that I thought I would put all three in the title of this post. That way, anyone who might chance on this post could at least see that each of the homonyms is spelled differently and might also deduce from the example that each has a different meaning.

Besides the purpose stated above, the title of this post refers to the reasons people I met in Panama had either settled there already or were exploring that...

There is nothing better than new surroundings to get your mind off of old problems that have been holding you back and bringing you down . A different perspective appears when everything is new and different, especially if it is vividly green and tropical and warm. Being totally surrounded by new people and places may be a bit uncomfortable at first but if it is full of friendly Latin Americans and warm beautiful weather in a tranquil and incredibly beautiful place, it can be easy to let...