Expatting

#Moving #Minimalism #Memories #Life

We expect to put our house on the market some time in the next couple of weeks. Our real estate agent already has prospective buyers, so the time frame might be moving along faster than we thought. We're currently in the process of going through our house, room by room, and separating everything into collections of “estate sale”, “taking with us” and “maybe take with us”. That last category being stuff that we'd like to bring along, but we'll have to wait and see how much room we have and what can be shipped separately.

It's been tougher than I expected, going through possessions I have a sentimental attachment to and trying to decide what stays and what goes. There are a few things that there is simply no way to take with us, which I'm already having a difficult time with.

Going through our closet last night, we came across my old Class A army uniform, my “dress greens”. I don't have any particular attachment to that uniform, or much of anything from my time in the army, which surprised Laure. I pulled a single medal from the jacket and decided the rest could go. She did a little searching online and found that there is a market for old military uniforms. That style of Class A uniform was in use from the 1940s all the way to the early 2000s, and each piece could fetch $100 or more.

Of course, she had to try it on just for fun. I'm about thirty pounds heavier than I was the last time I wore that thing, but she swims in it. Still, it looks better on her than it ever did on me.

We've already ransacked the living room, our bedroom and bathroom, our closet, and we're getting started on the downstairs livingroom/hobbyroom. Next will be my office, and then we go out and start the enormous process of digging through the garage and attic.

I'm not particularly enjoying this part. It's oddly emotional at times. I keep reminding myself that building it all back up again when we get there will be a lot more fun.

#RatRace #Retirement #Burnout #Employment #Work #GenX

About two years ago, I hit a particularly low point in my life. The details are irrelevant here, but the gist of the situation is that I had far too much on my plate. Too much stress, too many people depending on me, no time or space to myself, and a complete lack of boundaries regarding doing things for other people. The more I've read and learned about my generation, the more I've come to understand that this is a pretty standard place for GenX to find ourselves at middle age (generally men more than women).

All that independence and dependability we cultivated out of necessity, starting around the age of nine or ten, has become a ball and chain the size of a Mack truck that we pretend isn't there. If we do acknowledge it at all, we get competitive about how little it bothers us.

It's not just people at work or the people in what little social circle we still have; it's also at home. In all of those places, we've slowly taken on more and more because we tend to be uniquely suited to problem-solving in a way that subsequent generations can't seem to even come close to. Furthermore, the idea of doing something difficult that we don't want to do, because the end result is getting something we want, is completely alien to them. Gen-Z in particular has a problem with this. If they can't get an answer from their phone, they either give up on the idea entirely, or they turn to us. Of course, now they're turning to AI and getting us off the payroll. They're already beginning to see that fail, and now they're turning back to us to clean up the mess, and guess what we're doing? We're saying a word that has rarely entered our vocabulary over the last forty years.

“No”

We're discovering through necessity (again) that we can get along without them, without that social circle, without that job, and without AI. Those of us that are still employed are quietly unloading that workload we've been piling on over the years, and electing not to take on any more, while coming up with increasingly creative ways to retire early and leave it all behind.

Another way of putting it is we're fucking tired of trying to protect people from themselves, and we're done. They're on their own. If the world burns, so be it. We'll sit and watch while roasting marshmallows and listening to Billy Idol.

For me, personally, once I understood that I had given away so much of myself to everyone around me that there was almost nothing left for me, I started taking it back. I started making decisions about who really deserves my time and found that the list is incredibly small.

At the start of the new year (2026) I declared a moratorium on new IT projects where I work. I'm in charge. I can do that. I cited cost and time, and the onslaught of federal funding cuts, but the real reason is that I knew I'd probably be leaving sometime in late 2026 or early 2027, and I need to wrap up everything I'm currently working on and start pumping out documentation on systems and software I designed and wrote. The next IT director is going to need it. I'm ready to leave, but I'm not going to screw my co-workers over on my way out. It's not that kind of workplace.

Regardless, this is far from unique. Article after article, video after video, newsreel after newsreel is bringing attention to this. As they do, they're inventing buzzwords around it like “quiet quitting”, “retiring in place”, and a few others I can't think of right now.

We, generally, don't call it anything. We're just walking away, and they can call it whatever the hell they want.

I watched Laure finally join me there a few weeks ago. Things at her job have finally reached that point, and she's too tired to keep rescuing people in other departments from their own stupidity. Holding out a few more years to get a bigger retirement check no longer feels worth it to her, and all she can think about is walking away from it.

She said this out loud one evening. Only a few days later, we signed an agreement with a real estate agent to sell our house. Things are picking up speed now, considerably.

We're so glad you asked.

Costa Rica was not the first place we looked at. Like many USians do, we only briefly considered Canada. There are plenty of reasons why this just wouldn't work for us, but the main thing was our want to get out of cold weather and forest fires. Four to five months of smoke every year is taking a toll on my asthma situation, and we need to get as far away from it as we can.

Another big reason, tangentially related to the cold, is that Laure grew up a California girl. She thrives best in direct sunlight, with regular hydration and at least one Piña Colada every twenty-four hours.

We considered Europe, but after spending quite a bit of time trying to come up with an economical way to get over there and get residency, we were forced to give up on the idea. It's expensive to get there, it's expensive to live there, and getting residency takes a long time and a lot of money.

So we started looking south, influenced in no small part by the fact that we both love Latin American countries and cultures. We've vacationed quite a bit in Central and South America, and while we do understand that vacationing isn't the same thing as living there, we have loved every minute we've spent in those areas.

I initially checked out Ecuador, and I honestly don't remember why I ruled it out, but I spent several months looking into it, and it didn't make the cut. Then there was Uruguay, followed by Colombia. Both are doing pretty well economically and socially and making fantastic strides and improvements every year, but one of the things we kept having to compare was the problems those countries have. However, the US certainly has its problems, all countries do. It always comes down to which country's problems do you find easier to live with, and is the trade-off worth it? Colombia was winning that argument in just about every facet we investigated.

Then, in 2024, Laure went on a solo adventure to Costa Rica.

She spent ten days there, staying at little hotels and resorts, wandering the towns on foot, talking to the people, eating the street food, and also riding the horses, rappelling off the waterfalls, rafting the rapids, and ziplining through the jungles. She even got a really fantastic private tour through one of Costa Rica's cocoa factories, which happened because the rest of her small tour group failed to show up. So she spent several hours one-on-one with the girl who was her tour guide, and it was one of the highlights of her trip.

When I picked her up at the airport, the first thing she said to me was “That's it. That's where we're moving to.”

We've been looking into it ever since.

One of the first questions that comes up when you talk about living in non-North America is the danger, but let's take a closer look at that. Yes, there are some areas, particularly in Mexico, that are more dangerous than others. One thing you have to consider, which most white Americans usually never even think about, is that the main reason we feel so safe here in the USA is that we're white. That's it. It all boils down to that one thing. Race. Non-whites in America rarely feel safe anywhere here unless they're wealthy, but even then... not so much.

Costa Rica is rated as the safest place in Central America; however, when you read the travel advisories, what you see is the same thing the rest of the world says about the US.

• Don't advertise your money
• Don't leave valuables sitting in plain view in your car or hotel room
• Don't be an entitled asshole to the locals
• Avoid conflicts with the police
• Lock your car and your hotel room
• Don't take your shoes and socks off and stand in the fountain so some complete stranger can use your very expensive camera to take a family photo of you.

If this all sounds familiar, it's because this is the same set of rules most of us have been living by any time we travel anywhere away from home in the US... and you love Chevy Chase movies.

So let's get into the rest of it, starting with the money aspect. The US dollar stretches considerably further in Costa Rica than it does here at home. How far it gets you depends on where you want to live and how you want to live. The beaches and touristy areas will be more expensive, and the larger cities like San Jose aren't a heck of a lot cheaper than here in Montana. The more mountainous areas, the flats further inland, and the smaller towns along the coastlines are a different story, though. You can easily live in these areas and live well for less than $2500 a month USD.

Eat locally sourced food, and your bank account will thank you. Just be sure to rinse your fruits and veggies well before you eat them. Grocery store prices are fairly comparable to what you'll find at Albertsons, and most of what you find there isn't the processed crap we eat here, which is basically poisoning us anyway, so you're not missing much.

Regarding household goods, anything imported, especially electronics, is subject to as much as a 50% tariff, but all that does is force you to decide how badly you really need some things, something the middle class in the US rarely considers.

Then there is the health care. Costa Rican health care ranks much, much better than here in the US, which honestly isn't a terribly high bar when you start comparing us to other nations. Caja, the public health care system, is excellent, but the waits can be long. Private health care there is considered to be stellar, easily on par with the US, if not better in some regards, and it is dramatically less expensive. Prescription drugs? Same. More readily available and actually affordable.

Home prices, again, much more affordable than in most of the US, and easier to get into. The same goes for building.

The drawbacks

Of course there is always the language issue. We've been studying Spanish since Laure got back from Costa Rica, two years ago. Neither of us is what you would call fluent, but our recent trips to Mexico and the Dominican Republic have demonstrated that we can manage the basics and a little bit of conversation here and there. Once we're living there and immersed in it, I know we'll both start picking things up considerably faster. From what we've experienced ourselves, and what others who live in CR have said, the willingness to learn goes a long way, and most people are thrilled to help if you ask.

Most of the touristy areas have lots of English speakers, and you could probably get along fine there never learning a word of Spanish, but you'd be missing out on so much of the culture. And nothing screams entitled asshole like someone who refuses to learn the local language. Don't be a dick. Learn the language.

Driving is a much slower affair. There is no public highway system, and many roads are not paved. 4WD is a must if you don't live in town, and traffic can be pretty awful in a lot of areas. Allocate plenty of time for slow traffic and long stops. Learn to factor it into your plans.

Of course, there is a lot more to it all. Believe me, we've been doing our homework, and we both feel perfectly comfortable with this decision.

We're taking a trip down there in November to look at some real estate, get a feel for the area we're considering moving to, and talk to some other expats and local contacts about everything involved in getting there and living there.

Step one though, is selling our house. A process we set in motion last week. The details of which I'll be getting into in later posts. It's official, though. We are on our way.

As much as I'd like to regale readers with all the details of our two decades together, the good and the bad (but mostly good), that ultimately isn't what this blog is about. Our intention with this blog and its associated social media pages is to chronicle our journey leaving the US for good. Not merely the act of physically exiting the country, but the whole process.

This will require just a little bit of backstory, though. So let's start with “the playbook”.

The Playbook

If you grew up in the 80s, you know the playbook:

• Get good grades.
• Don't do drugs.
• Love white Jesus.
• Go to college (“university” for the world outside the USA).
• Start a career where you work hard and stay loyal to the company, moving up the ladder until you're eventually running things and driving a convertible with Timbuk 3 singing about beer and sunglasses at full blast on the radio.
• Somewhere along the line you get married and unleash 2.5 kids onto the world.
• Maybe get a dog.

Stick to this, and all that hard work pays off when you get older. The company rewards your decades of dedication and loyalty by taking care of you in your golden years. Your kids say things like “gee whiz” and “gollie” while following in your footsteps with college and the company and yada yada yada.

The Reality

Again, if you grew up in the 80s, you know the playbook was a giant, steaming pile of grade-A American bullshit. You watched “the company” screw your parents over and then tell them it was their fault for not working hard enough, and they believed it. The government kept repeating the playbook well into your forties, making money hand over fist at our expense, and your boomer parents continued to vote for the same corporate sellouts over and over again, not understanding why they kept finding themselves on the wrong end of the same stick every time.

Fast forward to today, where you're probably at least partially supporting your boomer parents and your adult millennial children, if they're not living with you. You're staring down the barrel of a fully inadequate retirement account that was whittled down by a corrupt corporate government, four recessions, a pandemic, a terrorist attack that leveled a financial system, and a cost of living that's been outpacing your wages for thirty years. If you're lucky, you didn't spend most of the 2010s swimming in medical debt and recovering from losing your home, savings, and retirement to the 2008 recession.

Spoiler Alert: We were not lucky.

Finally, you've spent the last decade slowly coming to the realization that the whole financial system is rigged to squeeze you for every dime it can and then discard you when there is nothing left to take. Furthermore, corporate America has now found creative ways to make even more money from your poor health and eventual death.

And it's highly likely that something else has slapped you hard in the face as well; somehow, through all of this, all that independence and reliability you had no choice but to cultivate, starting around the age of ten or twelve, have resulted in at least a few members of your family coming to depend on you way, way too much, to the point where even you believed that your only value to yourself and to the world was wrapped up in what you could do for other people. This one hit you particularly hard if you grew up male, and you're probably spending a great deal of time in therapy sessions trying to rectify this mindset.

For any number of reasons, your eyes are open now, and you know it's time to make a drastic change before it's too late. You've probably already hatched a long and well-thought-out plan, and the time to execute that plan is just a few crossed-off days away on the calendar. (Yeah, most of us still prefer actual wall calendars.)

If you're Gen-X, you're most likely reading this while nodding in agreement, and maybe raising your eyebrows occasionally, while sipping coffee from a cup with the phrase “FUCK YOU I HAVE ENOUGH FRIENDS” written across the front of it.

If you're a millennial, or even Gen-Z... well, let's be real about this: if you're still reading this post, I'm honestly impressed and maybe a little proud of you. The overwhelming majority of your peers likely only made it through half of the first paragraph (or more likely, couldn't sound out the word “ultimately”) and then switched back to whatever page it was that landed them here, moving on to something more accommodating of their attention span.

That isn't disdain you're picking up on in my tone there; it's morbid acceptance of the reality of the current US education system.

So in a nutshell

That's it, you've got the gist of it. Without going into the specifics of my family's financial and medical issues, you've arrived at the point where I announce that, yes, in fact, Laure and I are leaving the USA, likely for good. Sure, we'll be back once a year or so for short family get-togethers, but it has become financially impossible for us to live here.

After years of research and careful planning, we are moving to Costa Rica. With any luck, we'll be fully moved out of the country by March of 2027.

What follows in this blog is an accounting of everything involved in that process.

Thanks for sticking around until the end of this post. Mix yourself up a White Russian and pop in that “Big Trouble in Little China” DVD for the thousandth time. You've earned it.

Sincerely,

Allen and Laure

Please bear with us while we get things set up here. Actual content coming soon.