The Grown-Up's Guide to Running Away from Home, Second Edition: Making a New Life Abroad (26 page)

Retire Early Lifestyle

www.retireearlylifestyle.com

The personal website of a couple who retired at thirty-eight to travel around the world. Postings include their journal of adventures plus links to related financial, travel, and motivational topics.

The following are just a few sites to whet your appetite. Use your internet search engine to explore a wide variety of sites that appeal to the expatriate and expatriate-to-be.

If you’re preparing for an adventure in a country where English isn’t widely spoken, start learning the new language. Here are a few sites that will help.

Many travel search engines are available; some of the more comprehensive include:

When you run away from home, you won’t want to run away from your money. (If you do, give me a call, and I’ll be glad to take custody of it.)

However, you will need to simplify your affairs. It’s difficult to relax with an aperitif on a sunny Mediterranean patio if you’ve just perused the
International Herald Tribune’s
financial pages and are now frantically trying to reach your broker to yell, “Sell!”

Once you’ve determined to run away, begin organizing your financial affairs so that they’ll run on automatic pilot or the closest thing to it. This assumes your investments are not already so extensive as to require a cadre of trusted advisors (each of whom drives a Mercedes, thanks to your business).

If your money is spread far and wide, in individual stocks or other investments that require continual monitoring, appoint a responsible and trustworthy administrator who can manage them for you when you’re absent, or consolidate and simplify. Your choice depends on your specific financial situation, how long you’ll be overseas, and your willingness to entrust financial affairs to someone else.

Our decision was to simplify, for one important reason: once out of the rat race, we didn’t want complications with our finances. We weren’t running away to spend the time concerned about market timing or wondering where our next baguette would come from if the stock market went south.

We consolidated investments with one broker with whom we had worked for several years. We closed one of our two U.S. checking accounts and kept the other one to be used for bills that would have to be paid in dollars, such as our credit card payments and health insurance. The U.S. checking account was refreshed monthly, thanks to Social Security and the rental income from our house in the States, so that account also funded daily
living expenses abroad such as groceries, gasoline, and entertainment. We accessed it overseas through automatic teller machines. We just slid in the U.S. bank card and out popped the local currency.

We also opened an overseas checking account near us in France. We used the French checking account to pay expenses such as the mortgage and utilities. It’s easy to open checking accounts in most countries, and expats who are overseas for more than a few months need them to pay bills in the foreign currency.

We simplified to the point that we paid the U.S. bills on just three mornings a month—the three mornings that we received forwarded mail with the bills in them.

Having investments that don’t require continuous oversight makes your adventure easier. The downside of this is that it limits your choices to investments that stay on an even keel. You may have to sell individual stocks or trust them to continue safely on track. You could probably leave Treasury bonds, or even Coca-Cola stock, and count on your money being around when you return. You could choose many other investments as well—but that hot little software stock that could turn on a dime is not one of them.

Of course, many financial firms enable you to manage your portfolio online, and it’s a useful service. But even that requires sitting at the computer rather than at a sidewalk café watching the world go by, so I’d still recommend simplifying to some extent. One way to simplify is to decide on a solid mix of funds: stock, bond, and money market. Funds are already professionally managed, so from your point of view, they pretty much run themselves. Automatic reinvestment of dividends keeps your money earning while you’re away, or you can have your broker deposit any interest or dividends in a money market fund, which you can draw from for living expenses.