Hi from a global citizen

[Amy T]

Hi. I had the opportunity to have a trial run at retirement. I lived in Ecuador for six months. I have always lived below my means for the freedom it has given me. Living in Ecuador was a great learning and travel experience and I now speak survival Spanish. I would have stayed but I was offered a good job and I wanted a little more wiggle room in my budget. Now I am planning the next retirement and researching which country to try next.
My question to the community is what country has been your favorite and why? What country would top your list for retirement outside the US?
I can share the ups and down of living in US, Belgium and Ecuador.

 

[Mdlerth]

And the Ministry of Administrative Affairs takes care of everything

I can't guarantee it would be the same in retirement, but of all the foreign countries I've visited I felt the most at home in Britain.

Common language, extremely welcoming people, decent beer and easy to get around. The left-hand driving felt odd for about the first two miles, then it passed. But since it's a cinch to get around most of the country without a car that wouldn't have been a major obstacle anyway.

To get even more specific, there was one particular town in Britain that I absolutely fell in love with: York. It's an old city, dating back to Roman times. About 200k souls live there, and most of the town still resides inside a medieval wall that's about a mile across so there's nothing you can't walk to in five minutes. So it's got a population density similar to Manhattan, but go about two blocks beyond the wall and you can see cows grazing in fields. You could stay your whole life and never need to set foot in a car.

Vastly more affordable than London, it's also said to be the most haunted city in Britain. The skyline is dominated by a gorgeous Gothic cathedral (The Minster) replete with lovely gargoyles. You could buy a perfectly livable home there for about what you'd pay in mid-sized US cities, simple to care for and convenient to everything in town. Loved every minute I spent there.

Maybe now it's all different 30 years later, but that was my experience.

 

[Alan]

Maybe now it's all different 30 years later, but that was my experience.

Still the same fortunately. We live about an hour outside of York and love visiting, in fact we will be staying for a couple of nights in June when we meet up with 3 friends from Louisiana before we all go onto our place then onto Durham which is similar to York with a cathedral and a castle side by side on the same hill, and the castle is still occupied, used as dorms for the final year students of Durham University, but still provides tours for the visitors.

If you’ve seen Harry Potter movies you have seen part of Durham cathedral.

 

[Red Badger]

I lived in Germany for over 3 years. We could retire there easy peasy. But... we'll stay here unless evicted, extradited, etc.