Citizens of the World: A Stoic Podcast for Curious Travelers - Living Abroad: How to Have a Better Life for Half the Price

Episode Date: January 31, 2018

There’s one question that American listeners of this show keep asking: How can I live abroad?    It often feels like you’re stuck at home if you’re not from the EU or a Commonwealth country. But there’s hope! You have options to live abroad that don’t involve marrying some random.     In this episode, I talk to Tim Leffel, a travel writer and author of A Better Life for Half the Price. We get into specific options that are open to you, how to test out a country before committing, the questions you need to ask yourself before becoming an expat, and more.    Thanks to this conversation, I’ve added a few more countries to my ‘must visit’ list for this year. I hope find some inspiration, too.   I’m your host, Sarah Mikutel. If you so desire, you can sign up for my newsletter here. And thank you so much for listening to this show. I know you’re busy and have many listening options, so it means a lot to me that you’re here. You are the best.   This podcast is brought to you by Audible. Not a member yet? Postcard Academy listeners can get a FREE audiobook and a 30-day free trial if you sign up via audibletrial.com/postcardDo you ever go blank or start rambling when someone puts you on the spot? I created a free Conversation Cheat Sheet with simple formulas you can use so you can respond with clarity, whether you’re in a meeting or just talking with friends.Download it at sarahmikutel.com/blanknomore and start feeling more confident in your conversations today.

Hello, friends, and welcome to the Postcard Academy, your weekly travel and culture podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Micatel, and I'd like to start off by saying thank you to all of you who have already subscribed, and a huge thanks to those of you who've left a review on Apple Podcasts. I love reading them, and your feedback means so much, so thank you, thank you, thank you. As a way of giving back, I'm devoting this episode to a question I keep getting from American listeners. How can I live abroad? As many of you know, I lucked out and I was able to score EU citizenship, but I know that's not an option for most of you. So what do you do if you want to live abroad but you don't want to marry somewhere in them to get residency?

Well, today I am talking to Tim Lephel. He is a travel writer and author of A Better Life for Half the Price. We talk about specific options that are open to you, how to test out a country before committing, the questions you should ask yourself before becoming an expat. We talked about health care, safety. so much more. Thanks to this conversation, I've added a few countries to my must-visit list for this year. I hope you come away with some inspiration as well. Now into my conversation with Tim. Welcome, Tim. Thank you for coming on the podcast. Hey, thanks for having me on.

So you're an American who's lived abroad on and off throughout your life. Where are you from exactly? And what was your first experience living abroad? I grew up in Virginia, kind of in the middle of the country on the east coast. in the Shenandoah Valley below Washington, D.C. And I studied music and business in college, and I ended up moving to Nashville because you could either live in Nashville, New York, or L.A. if you wanted to be in the music business.

And it was much cheaper to live in Nashville. So even back then I had value on my mind, but I did eventually get transferred to New York. And then I went traveling after I'd already worked for seven years. So I didn't really spend a lot of time abroad in my 20s, like a lot of people, basically just a couple trips to Canada and went to Jamaica on vacation, usual kind of stuff. But my then-girlfriend, now wife, said to me, I'm going to go traveling around the world,

and I'd really like it if you went with me. But if you don't, I'm going anyway. So that kind of settled it. But we sort of had some signs from above that it was time to go. Basically, I got fired from my job because my boss and I hated each other. And her company went under and went bankrupt, basically. And this happened within a few months of each other. So we had saved up some money.

We hit the road and eventually backpacked around the world for three years off and on. So I lived in Turkey and South Korea teaching English. But anyway, to answer your original question, I traveled a lot of time in the U.S. when I was a kid because my parents were school teachers. But I spent most of my years in the U.S., that's for sure. Now you have a family, but you're still making living abroad work for you. Why make the move from America to Mexico? What prompted you to want to live abroad at this stage?

So I mentioned that I lived abroad when I was sort of a younger backpacker. It was just my wife and I. And we taught English in a suburb of Istanbul and then later close to Seoul, Korea. And we really like that experience because no matter how much you travel, you only see, you know, the upper level, the surface level of a place normally. But if you live somewhere, you really get a deep dive into the culture and really get to know how things work and explore all the food instead of just some of it. And, you know, you can travel a lot within the country, go to places that normally

not many tourists go. You know, you hear that cliched phrase off the beaten path, but when you live somewhere, you really find it. And so we enjoyed that part of it a lot. And we wanted to repeat that, but we had a daughter and she was. you know, at school and all those kinds of things. So it took more thought and it took more planning. But we eventually decided on Mexico because it was not too far away. It was pretty easy to get back. And I like the food. I like the culture. And so that's all like the

nice things that you bring up as your reason to live abroad. It's slower pace. It's people are friendly. It's mellow. But also there's that whole economic aspect. And it's just, it's just drastically cheaper to live there. And, you know, some things, you just take $1,000 off the top when you start talking about things like health insurance, you know, and your rent price goes down by, you know, two-thirds or more. And so all that stuff adds up in a hurry. So a better life for half the price? Exactly. The name of your book. Sometimes less than half. Could you tell me about your life in Mexico?

Well, I have one of those laptop jobs, and that used to be a very unusual thing, but it's gotten super common now. So there's a lot of things you can do that aren't location specific, you know, that don't require you to go into an office or even be in a specific country. I happen to be a travel writer and blogger and online publisher and I have some books out. So all those things contribute to make up enough to support a family. The place I did move to was Guantanato, Mexico, and it is about an hour and a half from San Miguel Dayende where a lot of retirees live. And it's about half an hour from the Leon Guano Hato Airport. And when I first started going down there, I think there were maybe five flights a day that

went into there, and now there's probably 25 or 30. And so it's pretty easy to get in and out. There's American Delta United Air Mexico and Belarus, a couple others. So I don't feel too handicapped when I'm living down there as far as travel options and getting back to the U.S. But the reason I chose that city was it was just one of those things where you get to a place and go, wow, this feels like the place. It really was like that for me.

And I had been to a lot of places in Mexico, a lot of places around the world. And I think most of us travelers are sort of thinking in the back of our mind, hmm, could I live in this place? What would it be like when we go somewhere that we like? But this one was just kind of magical to me. It's not your typical Latin American colonial city in the sense that it's very curvy and windy and houses go up the side of the mountain. And there's just hardly any right angles there. And it's very, very pedestrian friendly.

There's really only two streets to go through the city that cars can go on. The rest go through these tunnels through the mountains. So it's just a really unique kind of place. And it's not for everybody because those hills are pretty daunting if you're not in great shape. And if you're old and losing your mobility, it can be a tough place to live. So because of that, it hasn't gotten the kind of crowds that some other places have gotten. And we're kind of glad about that. Right.

So us that do live there. So it sounds like where you live in Mexico, sort of like love at first sight for you. But you advise that people do a test drive before they commit to a new country. So how can they do this? How did you test out Mexico? It basically means moving to a place and kind of giving in a trial run more than just being there as a tourist. So when I went to Guantanato, I'd been there on my own on a writing assignment and my wife and daughter weren't with me. So when I came home and started raving about this place, we started making plans to take a vacation there.

So we went back for a month the following summer and rented an Airbnb kind of apartment for a month. So we took Spanish lessons. We shopped at the market. We went to the butcher shop, you know, got some pants hemmed, all those kinds of things that you would do if you live somewhere, figured out where everything was, and lived in a real neighborhood. So by the time we were done there, my wife said, yeah, this is great. My daughter didn't know we were planning to move, but she liked it. So we knew it was going to work out okay. And we checked out schools while we were there.

because we had to figure out what we were going to do with her daughter for school. She was only in elementary at that point, so it wasn't such a big deal. So, you know, we spent that month there, and then when we came back, we knew, you know, where we wanted to live, neighborhood-wise, what was okay, what wasn't, what prices were generally like and what our budget was going to be and all those kinds of things. So we felt like we were ready. As opposed to what happens a lot of times is people go somewhere on vacation, especially beach resort areas, and they decide right then and there that they're going to buy a condo or something.

And then they realize it's not as much fun living there as it was on vacation and hanging out on the beach every day gets kind of boring after a while, especially if you don't have a waiter bringing you cocktails all the time. So it sounds like your advice as do like rent a place for a month, live your life as you would in your normal home. So run errands, figure out what things cost for local people as opposed to like, just being happy for any little discount that you get. Exactly. And take some local language lessons if it's not an English-speaking country so that you can communicate more than just, you know,

a few food words you know. Yeah. And Airbnb is great. Did you have any other housing recommendations if you wanted to do a more long-term stay? Well, it depends on how long you're going to stay. I actually have a post on my blog. called How to Find Local Accommodation for a month or more. And my sort of caveat in there is it's not always easy to do this stuff online over the internet.

So sometimes if you're willing to suck it up and pay a little higher price to stay there a few weeks or a month, it's no big deal to rent through Airbnb or VRBO or whatever. But if you're going to stay three months or six months, then longer, you're probably going to want to just get there and look around because your amount of inventory, fans exponentially, especially in developing countries, if you're willing to put feet on the ground and really get out there. Because a lot of times people want to see you face-to-face a local landlord, but like maybe this is a little separate section of their house, you know, and they don't want some weird stranger in there that they've never met before. So you've got to

kind of go talk to people. And you also want to look at places because pictures can lie. And you know, you don't want to commit for three months, six months to something that turns out to be not at all what you expected. Would you go to like an agency or would you just? Yeah, that's possible or just ask around. Usually there's some kind of local message board that expats are on or there's a Facebook group or something like that. And then there's probably some local rag that has real estate listings.

I know where I live, there's this local little tabloid paper and that's where you go to fire an apartment because still almost everything's in print. It's not online. Yeah. You know, you can look on Craigslist too, things like that. There's, you know, Craig's list for most international locations now. But again, it's only going to be a fraction of what's out there because a lot of people that are old enough to own lots of property aren't on the Internet much, you know. Yeah.

And they don't want to be. It's true. And it depends on where you are in the world. I moved to a place in Italy for a while called Reggio Amelia because I was applying for a dual citizen. ship there. And I had a hard time finding a place. Like I was looking online. I wasn't finding anything. I went to the university and just like looked up at signboards and things like that. And finally, a friend I met, we went to a cafe and she just asked the barman. And the barman knew somebody who was in the cafe there right at that moment who had a place. And that's how I ended up finding

my place. But you're right. So just like literally huffing it and asking random people. Yeah, that's great. I've heard so many stories like that. You just have to tell anybody and everybody that you're looking for a place because you never know who's going to have a cousin or a friend or something. And look at signs. Just walk around, you know, just look up because I know a few people that were ready to give up and they just walked down the street and saw a for rent sign. And that's where they ended up living. You just never know. So you had a pro con list for Mexico. What was on this list? Like what should people be evaluating when they're thinking about? making a move? I think it's really important to get a feel for the pros and cons of a place, especially the cons. So you got to know if a place is going to drive you crazy or not, because if you're somewhere for a few days or a week, you're not going to be bothered by anything, probably, because

it's not happening over and over again. But if you stay there for months, you're going to start noticing that that neighbor plays loud music at 2 a.m. or the other neighbor has three dogs on the roof that never shut up. Or, you know, there's a mariachi band at the bar on the corner every Saturday night until the wee hours. You know, those are all noise things that happen at Mexico. But, I mean, you can apply those kinds of things to all kinds of possible places you would rent. And sometimes you've got to walk by a place a few times during the day and make sure it's not a bad neighborhood or it's not an auto body shop or whatever.

But I think just in general, you need to really spend some time in a place and walk around and see the neighborhoods and just know what the problems are so that you know if you can deal with them or not and what the obstacles are. And Latin America all over, people get frustrated with the speed of things. You know, if somebody says they're going to get something done in a week, that means they'll try, but they're not really going to get a time in a week. Or if they say they're coming at two, they might come at five, you know, and you just got to be right. ready for that. So I think those kinds of things could drive people up a wall if they're really type A personalities and used to being super organized. So maybe that's not the best place for you. And I think it's always a good idea to ask other people who have lived there for a while, what drives them crazy or what bothers them because then you'll kind of get a feel of what you're

in for. And every place has something like that. I mean, even the U.S. or England or Italy or wherever, it doesn't matter how developed or rich they are. If you move to Norway, you're probably going to be really distressed about the price of alcohol, for instance. There's going to be something everywhere. Yeah. So I guess it's important for people to get real with themselves and be honest about what's actually important to them. Could you talk about some critical questions we should be asking ourselves when we're trying to decide where to live? I think you mentioned like head heart wallet questions. Yeah, and I think all three of those are important.

So the head part is just what would you put on a list that is really important to you or the converse, what would you put on that list that's a deal breaker? So for a lot of people, this is going to be a list of real quantifiable things. What's the weather like if you want a hot place, you want an eternal spring place, you want a place with all four seasons? how close does it need to be to your aging relatives or to your grandkids, whatever the case may be, you know, how long is it going to take you to get back? Do you need to be in a similar time zone? That's the real problem for people that are running a business that they have to talk to someone on the phone on a regular basis.

You're probably not going to move to Thailand or Cambodia or something. You're probably going to want to live somewhere within a few hours of where you are now. If you're doing business in North America, for instance, you're probably going to want to stay at the furthest, maybe Europe, but you're probably not going to want to go to the complete opposite time zone. And then, you know, how good are you at learning languages? Are you willing to learn something weird like Czech or Hungarian? Or do you want to learn something you can use again like Spanish or even Portuguese?

And or do you want to just say, forget all that. I'm too old. I want to live in the Philippines because everybody speaks English. So all these things you would put on a list of. quantifiable things that you can put on paper. So those are the head things. The hard things are what I was talking about, that you hear this over over again,

where people just say, oh, I came to this place, and as soon as I got there, I fell in love with it, and I knew this is where I wanted to live. And that's happened to me more than one place. So it's not necessarily just a, it's like a magical lightning bolt hits you.

There could be multiple great places that just feel right to you. They feel comfortable, or they feel like this is where you want to be, or it's a place that you know you're still going to be excited about two or three years from now, and that's important. So that's the one that you really can't do very easily on paper. You can't do it ahead of time. It's more like you've got to get out there and travel. And I've met people that have traveled to 10 or 12 places that they had on their list before they made a decision. And if you've got the time, that's probably a great way to do it,

because then you know for sure, you're not thinking to yourself, oh, if I'd only gone to that other place. And then the wallet factors are pretty obvious. What can you afford? So I've got 20-some different countries in this book of mine, Better Life for Half the Price, but they're not all created equal. I mean, there's a sliding scale sort of. There's places at the very bottom that aren't going to cost you much at all and have really low-income requirements for residency visas. So you can skate by with less than $1,000 a month and be in pretty good shape. But if you try to move to Portugal for $1,000 a month, you're probably going to have a much tougher time and you're going to be living a much more frugal life than you would if you were in Nicaragua,

or even Bulgaria in Europe, you know, another part of Europe. So you have to keep that in mind and figure out what you can afford. Or maybe you can afford more, but you want to have a more fun, lavish lifestyle than you had at home. That's a big incentive for some people. They're like to have a maid and a gardener and take a taxi whenever they want and get a massage every week. You know, so maybe you want to not go to the very top of your budget. You want to go to a cheaper place so you can do all those things. Yeah, and I interviewed somebody a few episodes back who has been living in Slovenia for quite a while, and he tested out a bunch of different cities before he landed there.

And I really like the idea of auditioning your next home. I'm thinking of doing the same myself. Yeah, and you could do that on vacation. Just if you go on vacation, make it a decent length one, you know, not five days. Stay there a few weeks and really get a feel for it. So let's talk logistics. Where is it easiest to legally live and work abroad? And let's say for Americans, since they don't have as many options as EU or Commonwealth members.

Sure. And there's two different ways you can live somewhere. you can either just stay on a tourist visa. And so then the most important thing is, how long can you stay on a tourist visa and what do you have to do to renew it? Or you can get legal residency and then not have to worry about it.

You can just stay as long as you want without leaving the country. And either of those can make sense in different situations. And I've actually done both in Mexico. I've been there on a tourist visa and I've been there as a legal resident. Mexico is one of those places

you can stay for 180 days on a tourist visa, so that's hugely attractive to a lot of people, especially snowbirds that only live there part of the year. So they come down from Canada or the U.S., from the far north somewhere usually, and they will live in Mexico for five or six months and then go back home. And you can do that for your whole rest of your life if you want until the law has changed, but for now, that's what the law is. You just have to, you get six months just for asking for it. So that's really easy. And if you did have to stay longer, then you just go on vacation to Guatemala or Costa Rica or back to the U.S. and then reenter again and start over.

Peru is like that too. You basically get six months when you enter the country if you ask for it. And then there are other countries where you only get three months when you get there, but then you can really easily renew it. Nicaragua was one of those. You can just go across the border to Costa Rica. But going the other way, Costa Rica is more strict. Like if you try to stay there longer, they're not so easy about it.

So you kind of got to, again, ask other expats that are living there, the situation is on the ground because a lot of times what you read online is either outdated or not very helpful. But most of Latin America is pretty easy in terms of staying on a tourist fee. So you can generally stay for three months at least and then you can renew it. Sometimes within the country, I think Columbia will let you do that if you've got your papers in order and you show that you have some money. Otherwise, most of the time, you just have to leave the country and come back and then you're all set. You start over. How long do you have to be away for?

Usually it's just you can come back the same day even. Usually you just have to leave and sometimes it has to be overnight but even that's not difficult. And I've known people living in Argentina where they've been doing that for years on end and they just stay for three months and they cross over to Uruguay or Chile and come back the same day and just keep doing it. It's like it's a mandatory vacation for them. But sometimes they just do it for the day. They just go over on the ferry to Uruguay and have lunch and Clonian come back. And so it's not that hard. If they're doing that then, presumably they're just, I guess, sort of living like a digital nomad or they're retired because they wouldn't be able to work on a tourist visa, right?

Correct. You usually cannot work. But if you're working from a laptop, then nobody cares, you know, as long as you're spending your money there. As long as you're not a burden on the system. And that's the big debate we're having in the U.S. right now. like in reality, immigrants contribute more than they take, but, you know, some give more than others and some take more than others. And they want to make sure you're not the kind that's going to like live off the system and take away jobs from the locals and those kinds of things. That's a universal care across the world.

So if you can show that you can support yourself and usually they want to see bank accounts, they want to see, you know, income coming through your checking account on a regular basis or something like that. then, you know, you're pretty much given a stamp and you're on your way. Now, for residency, they're going to scrutinize those things more closely. A lot of times when you come through on a tourist visa, you don't even need to show any of that, even if you're renewing. But if you apply for residency, they're normally going to want to see some documentation. And this is where it varies drastically from country to country on what those minimum requirements are. and they're as low as like $800 in Nicaragua or 600 maybe even to get permanent residency,

which is almost nothing. You'd be destitute in the U.S. if you were trying to live on that. But that's all they want to see to make sure you're good enough to survive. But in Mexico, it's more like $2,000 plus $500 for each dependent, I think, or $2,500 plus $500 for each dependent. A month? Yeah, so then you got to be making real money. And in reality, you don't need anything close to that to live in Mexico, but they do it.

The calculation is like the minimum wage times 50 or something like that, the way they figured out. So, you know, there are ways around it. Like I'd known people that have shown their retirement account that shows they have $150,000 in their retirement account, and that's been enough. Like a 401K, so even if you've got some cash in that. Okay. Correct. They just want to see that you've got assets. But a lot of it depends on the embassy you go to.

And the one I went to was in Orlando, and they didn't seem very experienced. And they, so they made me show six months of checking account statements notarized, which was a real pain. But, you know, that was just the initial step I had to get past. And once I got past that, everything was pretty easy. The rest was done in Mexico. And it was just a matter of showing up and filling out forms and doing fingerprints and whatever. So after that initial check, nobody looked at anything. But this is true for most countries.

You just have to show some kind of income or assets. If you own property, that helps, you know, but sometimes it doesn't matter at all. And Mexico doesn't help you a bit. So they don't really care if you own anything. They really care about how much money you got coming in. But they all go down from Mexico, really. Columbia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Nicaragua.

They all require a lot less in terms of the income. you have to show. And again, you just got to see what it says online, what the official embassy information is, and then recheck that with locals and make sure it's valid. Could we talk through, like, maybe five or six recommendations, say I want to live abroad, not as a tourist, but I actually want to make my home somewhere else, like some specific country recommendations you would make for Latin America and maybe Europe? Yeah. So we glossed over the EU stuff. So obviously, if you're in the, the European Union, it's very easy for you to move within Europe.

If you're America, it's a bit tougher. Like, you can go live in Portugal or Hungary or one of these places, Bulgaria, Romania, but you have to go through a lot more hassles, a lot more paperwork than you would in Latin America just because of the way that EU is set up. But, yeah, I mean, as far as where people do go in Latin America, and I think that's kind of a good guide because it shows you it can't be all that hard because there's thousands of people doing it all the time. So the ones where there are a lot of U.S. and Canadian expats already, just going down the map would be Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Belize, Costa Rica, although I've got to stop for a second and say Belize and Costa Rica are not very cheap.

You will not live a half-price life there. Panama, you can. It depends on where you are. If you're in the capital city, it's much more expensive than if you're in Bocete or Bocas del Toro, which is where more expats. end up living different climates, slower pace of life, lower costs and all that. So then getting down to South America, the number one would be Ecuador probably. I would say there's probably more Americans living there than anywhere else in South America that aren't working as far as just people living there by choice or that are retired.

And that's because it's very easy to get residency there, especially if you're 50 or older. And you get all kinds of benefits for being a retiree, including half-price flights that are in or from Ecuador, so that's a huge, huge incentive. And then after that, it would probably be Colombia. A lot of people live there because the climate's nice. Medellin is very popular, but also there's a lot in Cartagena. And you've got a lot in Argentina, some in Chile, but again, those are not as cheap. and then, you know, there's some in Peru, some in Bolivia, but in general it tends to be

Colombian Ecuador, probably the most popular. Can we dive a little bit deeper than on those two, let's say for Ecuador, like how much would we need to live a month, to live a comfortable life? Well, there are loads and loads of people living there for a thousand a month or a couple for 1,500 a month, and it's kind of, it's kind of, it's kind of, it's kind of, it's kind of, kind of like the place of last resort for some retirees, I think they sort of realize that they're not going to be able to make it in the U.S. on what they've got saved and what they're getting from Social Security. So they move to Quinka, Ecuador, and have a pretty comfortable life for that amount. Like you could get by on one Social Security check pretty easily there. And if you've got two, then you're living quite comfortably. So even if you don't have anything saved up, if you're just getting that coming in every month in pretty good shape. because you can rent a place for, you know, let's say $400 a month, and it's going to be pretty decent, and you can get, you know, groceries really inexpensively, especially if you buy a lot of local fruit and vegetables and things like that. You can eat out for a few dollars, especially if you go for the meal of the day,

which is several courses for, you know, three to five bucks. So it's quite inexpensive to live there, and it's all in U.S. dollars, so you don't have to do any math in your head. Panama uses the dollar, too. It's kind of weird. So you don't have to worry too much about inflation or currency exchange fluctuations in those things. And what about some basics like health care, Wi-Fi, transportation? So, yeah, those are all quite good in Ecuador.

They're really good in Panama. Like if you have any health problems and you want to live to a country that's got great hospitals and great health care, Panama would be the place to go. And urban Mexico is pretty good, too. As long as you're near a city in Asia, the best place is Bangkok. Malaysia is quite good too. So, yeah, that's another thing to put on that head list is how much medical care do you need because in general, if you're near a city, most places in the world, it's going to be pretty good. But if you're out in the stick somewhere, you're going to be in trouble in a lot of places.

So you've got to factor that in. But, yeah, I mean, most people pay out of pocket for their health insurance. And I mean, not their health insurance, their health care, because it ends up being literally like a quarter or a fifth. of what you would pay in the U.S. and sometimes a tenth. So most people just pay out of pocket when they go to the doctor or buy drugs or whatever, and then they oftentimes will have some kind of catastrophic policy in case something really bad happens. But, you know, that's just one of those high deductible things in your back pocket in case you really need it. But most of the time, you just pay out of pocket because it's so much less expensive.

Yeah, I had forgotten how stressful insurance can be until I was talking to an American not that long ago. And he was saying he wanted to leave his job, but he just felt chained to it because of the health insurance. And I was like, oh, that's so sad. What a messed up system that we feel like lactating. It's really sad. And there's a lot of people in that situation. They're just hanging them at the job because of the health insurance, especially if they have a spouse that doesn't have it. You know, then it's like that's the way that both of them are getting covered.

But then when you move abroad, it's just this giant weight coming off your shoulder. You just go, oh, I can afford to go to the doctor. and oh, that guy went into the hospital for two days and it was $500, not $50,000. Yeah. It's just such a different world. It's just most places believe that health insurance is just a necessary right. You know, it's just something that it's either subsidized or it's free or it's just reasonable. Well, and I actually know senior citizens who have retired and have gotten part-time jobs just for the health insurance.

And now I want to tell all of them, go to Ecuador. You can live such a better life. Although at least they have Medicare, so that pays for a lot of it. It doesn't pay for all of it, though, unfortunately. Yeah. Okay, before moving on, so I want to just stick with your country recommendation. So Columbia was another one. Could you just talk a little bit more about who this country might be great for, some pros, some cons?

Yeah, so a lot of people move to Medellin because of the weather. It's one of those, you find this in a lot of places where there's some altitude, but it's normally a hot country. So if you get up a few thousand meters in Columbia, it's quite nice. It's sort of like that eternal spring weather. It might get up to 80 during the day and it's going to get to the 60s at night and it's going to be that way all year. And so a lot of people like that kind of climate. And it's a real city. You can do all the kinds of things you would do in a city as far as shopping and nightlife.

And all those opportunities that you have in terms of if you want to do business or you make partnerships or whatever. But it's just so much cheaper than living in a big major city in the U.S. or Canada. And then there are other smaller towns in Columbia that are really nice and pretty and, you know, more mellow. But you're going to have to speak some Spanish, more Spanish in those. I mean, you're probably going to need to learn it anyway. But you'll have more demands on you if you live in a smaller town. But, yeah, so in Columbia, it's pretty easy visa-wise to get residency there. there's a whole bunch of different options

and you might have to go through some jump through some hoops like you would anywhere but eventually you'll get it done so you can stay there for years and years on end if you want and it's pretty civilized the populace is pretty educated and it's a fun place, good music and there's a lot to see within the country

and there's good transportation there there's really good domestic airline system and there's good bus system and all that so it's pretty easy to get around So step one for wherever you want to move is to go to the embassy wherever you're living and start like the visa process there and then go from there. Usually that's easier, but it's not always necessary. It's necessary for Mexico. It can help you do things faster in Thailand just to throw out another for instance.

But I do know people that have moved to Columbia or well have traveled to Columbia and decided they were going to stay and they did it all. within the country. But the problem is all the documentation. So if you just happen to have all that stuff with you, you're fine, but most people don't. And so they end up having to go home anyway. So a lot of times it's just easier to start the process in your home country. And I think also there's a little, just a little bit of ease there in the sense that you can come back if you didn't have something. And, you know, you can go back three times if you need to if it's in your home country. But if you're a... You know, in Columbia, and there's one document that you have to have, like, a stupid marriage certificate or birth certificate or something like that.

You're going to have to go back home and get it. So that's a pain. Yeah. I thought I was just thinking bank statements, but, yeah. Yeah, that's true. I wouldn't. Yeah. When I moved to Korea to teach English, I had to show my actual physical diploma from college to get my residency.

So you just never know what they're going to want. Yeah. God, I don't even know where mine is. So, it's crazy. I'm just some addicts somewhere now. Like I had to get my mom to fish it out from the frame and send it to me. So you mentioned a few other cities that were, our countries in Europe, Bulgaria, Romania. I think Albania was also in your list this year of cheap cities to live in that you would recommend to live in.

Could you like speak a little bit more about those or pick one and sort of do a deep dive on it? Yeah, Albania I didn't actually have in the book. I just went there last summer. and I don't know how I missed this in my research, but apparently as an outcome of us supporting Kosovo and the Bosnian conflict, Americans can go to Albania for an entire year on a tourist visa if they want. So I don't know of anywhere else in the world that will give you more than six months. So that's a major incentive if anyone wants to live abroad without having to jump through all the residency requirements and all the paperwork and hassle. So basically you could just kind of waltz in and have a year there, and then you can renew it and stay longer. And it's most people probably couldn't find Albania on a map, and I can understand that.

But it's above Greece and across the Adriatic Sea from Italy. So it's basically got a Mediterranean kind of climate. It's basically just slightly colder than Greece. So really nice beaches in the summer and not all that cold in the winter. So it's a pretty pleasant place to live and they grow a lot. And you can get to a lot of places from there pretty easily. It's next to Croatia, Montenegro, Bosnia, and Greece, obviously. And then you can take a ferry over to Italy and go anywhere from there.

So it would be a pretty nice place to live and it's crazy cheap there, like Southeast Asia kind of prices. So it's hard to believe you're in Europe when you're out to eat or having a coffee or whatever. What are Southeast Asian prices for people who don't know? Well, I mean, when you hear about people going to Thailand or Lao or Vietnam, you can't believe it when they put it in a blog post or send you an email about what they're paying for things. So you can, you know, you can go out and get a cup of coffee for literally a quarter or 50 cents, depending on how nice it is. A beer is going to be about a dollar, a glass of wine for two or three dollars. You can get a pretty significant lunch that is going to leave you stuffed for four or five dollars.

and it's going to be, you know, a major deal. And you can go buy fruit and vegetables for like a dollar a kilo or less. So, you know, more than you can carry. If you spend $5, it's going to be, you know, 10 pounds of fruit and vegetables. So it's very inexpensive to live there. You could find housing for a few hundred dollars a month, find a nice apartment and even in the capital in Toronto. So, yeah, it's, those are the kind of prices you'll find in a lot of Southeast Asia.

and I really was surprised to find you could still find those kinds of prices in Europe too. Bulgaria is pretty close, by the way, but the Balkans are even cheaper than that, I think. Cheaper than Bulgaria. I was in Bosnia. Well, I was in a few Balkan countries this summer, but I was really taken by Sarajevo, and that's definitely a place that I want to go to go back to and spend a good amount of time. Yeah, I think I could live there. That was one of those places I looked at and said, this would be.

nice, but I think I would want to skip the winter. So just really quick before we move on from Albania, Bulgaria, healthcare, Wi-Fi, transportation, could we live a digital nomad life there? Yes, and kind of the rule of thumb in a lot of places is the more urban the area is the better the Wi-Fi is going to be. So if you move to rural Bulgaria because you bought a house for super cheap and you're fixing it up, that might be the biggest issue is getting good Wi-Fi in because there's just not as much demand. But, you know, some countries are more wired than others, and the Balkan ones seem to be pretty good. I had quite fast Wi-Fi when I was there and was doing video calls and things like that. So I didn't really have any issues. And there are some

countries that, like Romania that are, that have super fast, I mean, supposedly Romania is the fastest in Europe overall. So you just never know. Sometimes those developing countries just made it a priority and they really, you know, started wiring the place better. And then there are others like Nicaragua

where they just totally skip the whole wiring part and just did it all by mobile. So if it's a small enough country, I guess you can do that. But almost nobody in Nicaragua has a landline coming in. They do it all with that little USB stick

you stick into your laptop, which is kind of weird, but it works. It's sort of like 4G speeds, so it's relatively fast. Who would Nicaragua be great for? I think it would be good for digital nomads that don't have to have super fast connectivity. Like if you're the kind of person that's doing video editing online or things like that or you're uploading videos on a regular basis, you might have some trouble with a situation like that.

But I think the average person, if they've got 10 megabytes for something, megabits per second, then they're going to be okay with almost everything they want to do, including streaming Netflix. So, but anyway, I mean, Diccarag was good for people that like tropical weather, and there's a great beach area there, San Juan del Sour that's a lot of fun and surfing and all of that. But there's also mountain areas and coffee plantations and Granada is a colonial city that's really attractive. So a lot of different things you can do there and a lot of different reasons to be there.

And it's also pretty safe. It's much, much safer than Guatemala or Honduras. They've just done a better job of keeping the drug smugglers out, I guess. Yeah, that's another consideration, especially when somebody tells family and friends, oh, I want to move here, even go on a trip. Like, I'm going to Columbia soon. And I've had a few people express safety concerns. So what's the reality compared to?

what we see on TV with some of these places. Well, it's important for people to remember that the Netflix show, Narcos, is a historic show. It's not what's happening now. They've come a long way since then. I think it's important to really compare honest statistics from your own country to where you're going. I think a lot of cities in Colombia are safer than cities in the USA if you really look at the homicide rate. And that's still even true in Mexico, you know, despite, all the stuff we hear.

There are some parts that are nasty for sure. And there are other parts that are, you know, they have a murder a year. And that's about it. So, you know, look at your own city. I mean, there's place in the U.S., like New Orleans that are horrible in terms of crime stats, but that doesn't keep people from going there. I'm going to Jazz Fest in May, and I didn't hesitate, you know. Like, I'm not worried about it because where things happen is generally not where tourists are.

And that's true in almost all these places. I mean, every once in a while you hear about something happening to a tourist, and that's because it really is news because it's so odd. I have friends will say, like, oh, I'm afraid to go to Europe now. Like, I'm afraid to go to Paris. And, yeah, I say the same thing. Like, if you compare deaths by violence and, like, gun violence that happens in the U.S., you know, there's no comparison. Yeah, we've got everybody beat.

Paris is much safer. So, well, thank you so much for this insight, Tim. What's keeping you busy these days? I'm in work mode right now in my office trying to get a bunch of stuff done. And then I'm going to Panama and Costa Rica next month, actually, with my wife. It's for a writing thing. I'm going to be on an uncruise, which is, I've never been on an actual cruise, but these are like adventure tour boats.

They're very small. And you spend the day kayaking and hiking and doing nature walks and things. So I'm excited about that. Where can people find out more about you? I am on the cheapest destinations blog. If you want to just put that in Google, it will come up. If you search my name, I'm pretty easy to find. My sort of portfolio site is timluffel.com,

and that links out to all my books and all my websites, and it's got a bunch of articles on there that I've written. So that's probably the best way to go. And my contact information is on there as well, and all my social media handles, which are usually my name, Tim Leffle, but I'm Globetrotts on Instagram. Somebody already had my name.

Thank you so much for this. Well, thanks for having me on, and it was great talking with you, and hopefully we'll run into each other one of these days. Somewhere in the world. Exactly. Okay, so of all the countries we mentioned today, what's at the top of your list? I love Mexican food, so that is a contender for me,

but I am also curious about the Bulgarian side of the Black Sea, which Debbie mentioned on last week's Romania episode. I will include highlights from today's discussion on postcardacademy.com plus some extras like expat insurance and houseway sites. Questions, comments, dreams, send them to me by Instagram. You can find me at Postcard Academy. That's all for now. Thanks for listening and have a beautiful week wherever you are.

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