Expatting

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