How Our Plan Took Shape for these active seniors traveling internationally on a Budget – The Itch is Real…

As active seniors traveling internationally on a budget we think we are ready for this exciting life plan! We’ve been living on a loose budget for years stateside so international travel shouldn’t be any different? You think? Yes, there are naysayers but we aim to prove them wrong!

[UPDATE as of November, 2023: Today, late in 2023, we still cannot believe we have been able to put a plan into place & follow it. We’ve been to Central & South America, Asia & now presently we are on the continent of Africa! Can you believe it? All because of our budget! Yes, you can travel year round on a budget & you do not have to feel you are being cheated on anything! Back to the article, we’ll catch up later in newer blogs. Thanks for following!]

As active seniors traveling there are a lot of things to take into consideration! We are on a set budget. I know you are probably already of hearing that word – budget but I’ll warn you now that you will hear it again & again in my posts. We need to play our cards right & do some homework before we start our grand adventure. Where do we want to start?  Do we want to travel abroad or out of country? Do we want to put roots down along the way for our new home? Where would we want to move abroad? Are we nuts? Maybe, a little. We believe that prior proper planning will prevent any unforeseeable mistakes, we hope! We know there may be road bumps along the way, however, we do anticipate that but nothing we cannot handle. We hope to share both our good & bad experiences with you along our grand adventure. Just maybe by following us you will be inspired to take the steps to become the next active seniors for international travel!

Believe me, we do not take this lightly. As we learn along the way, we will be able to pass those lessons on to you. We may find that at some point we may have to amend our plans. Again, you will learn as we go on this quest we have set out for ourselves.

Your mission, should you accept it, is to begin following us, sit back & enjoy the adventures with us. Will an interracial senior couple traveling be happy living outside of the states? Oh yeah, we truly believe so but to be totally up front we know as seniors traveling there are specific things we need to consider. Let’s see what we can find!!

American Expats Living Out of Country

It was not that big of a surprise to us that moving out of the country is not a ‘new thing’.  What did surprise us was the number of seniors who do actually move out of country. Here are some interesting tid-bits about expats.

According to the World Atlas, millions of Americans live outside of the U.S. Twenty out of every one hundred travelers becoming an expat are over sixty years young! When you think about it, the economic benefits of living outside of the U.S. can be very beneficial especially if you are living on a tight budget as most seniors do in the U.S.

The top countries for American expats to move are Mexico, Europe, Canada & then Southeast Asia. Mexico & Canada make sense as they are border countries to the U.S. with easy access. Italy, Germany, France & the U.K. are the most popular European countries for American expats. Now India & Philippines being the most popular SE Asian countries is, to me, surprising but I think that is because not everyone moves for the same reasons.

Marriage, relationships, politics, economics & work are just reasons that play into a move to a foreign land from your home country. For us, the ongoing racial issues in the states played a large part on our desire to explore our options outside of the states.

Back to our Plan for this interracial couple Traveling Internationally

Remember when you were 20 years young & you thought your parents were old because they were in their 50s? Then when you turned 40 [I did!] I thought hmmm 65 is old. Now that we are over 65, I think how silly. We both feel like we are just starting over again! Yes, we are seniors & I don’t mind saying that at all! Seniors get discounts folks! My sister-in-law Sweet Mary introduced me years ago to Dairy Queen senior discounts! LOL. I digress.

We are in good health & continue to work on keeping it that way with daily exercise, walking, biking & in general just trying to eat healthy. Like most seniors over 60 years of age, we live on a set income & just need to be sure we can financially afford to make this escape. To do this, we have to put a budget & plan into place to make it happen!

Just the fact that we are at those retirement years, traveling internationally as a mixed race senior couple, leaves a lot of things to worry about that younger travelers may not. We have to be healthy & financially able to take care of ourselves separate from our families in the U.S. We may be hopping country to country – its not like we can just call and say hey ‘can you come over to help’. You know what I’m talking about. We knew we had to be both – healthy & financially stable – to make this escape. We needed to finalize our Plan to make the big adventure happen. This was in 2017 with a five year time frame to make it happen.

Where will we travel to find our piece of Paradise as an interracial senior couple?

Of course our main concern is the acceptability of an interracial senior couple in the country we land in. This travel blog is a way to connect & to share our photos & experiences once we get on that flight for whatever foreign country we have decided to visit or possibly move. The Big Guy & I have been blessed with coming into these retirement years & not being bogged down in a whole lot of debt. Paying off credit cards is not easy but such a feeling of satisfaction once it is done! It’s just not comfortable to us to gain debt once the old debt is paid off. Make sense?

We have never been that couple who had to keep up with the neighbors with newest electronics, vehicles, latest game machines, etc. You get what I mean. Really, once we were committed to the mindset that living on a budget could make our Big Adventure of traveling [or moving] to foreign countries come true, the word budget developed a whole new meaning! We knew if we worked together we could reduce even more spending to make the goal of world travel a dream come true for us. This is now.

International travel as interracial senior couple becomes part of our life

The Big Guy was selected to work in the Middle East from 2006 to late 2011.

I was able to meet him once or twice a year for a vacation for me/R&R for him. We visited foreign countries that we never would have been able to except for his job. I won’t lie, the countries I met The Big Guy in were more of destination vacations.

Let’s just be honest, we decided an international destination sounded nice. Though we are not big spenders, we were able to see some sights on budget.

That was our introduction to world travel as a couple & it opened our eyes to how sheltered we were in our own little piece of the U.S. There was so much to see in other countries, culture, sights, amazing people, the list goes on and on. We wanted to see more!

Between the two of us we have visited over 25+ countries; UK, France, The Netherlands, Belgium, Australia, Thailand, Italy, Turkey, Greece, San Salvador, etc with OUR last trip being to Poland in 2015. Some of the countries visited were by way of our jobs at various times. Now that we are older, we are looking for a place that will provide a peaceful & friendly environment for seniors like us.

Then The Big Guy’s Middle East mission was completed & he returned home

Once his mission was complete, he was back home & our international meet ups were for a while at least put to rest… We didn’t sit home & not go anywhere but budget was a big factor for any travel plans. A trip to Rome in 2012 with Jordan [one of the girls] was awesome, another short trip to San Salvador later that year & finally Poland in 2015 ended our international travel or so we thought.

We would continue to chat & reminisce how much fun we had riding the elephant ‘with an attitude’ in Thailand, taking the Bosphorus Riverboat Cruise in Istanbul, walking the ruins in Greece, etc. We have such fabulous memories from every country we have visited.

I think we were asking ourselves could we live in a foreign country? Was that an unreachable dream? That’s really when I started researching the possibilities.

The Big Adventure Plan for this Interracial Senior Couple to Travel Internationally on a Budget Starts to Take Shape

The itch was there. The research showed me that I was not alone. I found numerous online stories of expats which prompted us to start watching travel shows – you know the ones showing folks moving to a foreign country to live as an expat overseas. We would look at each other & say “why can’t we do that” or  “we could live there” or “man that trip was awesome”, secretly thinking we could do that. At the end of one of these conversations late 2016, I made the statement “we keep talking about moving to another country, let’s make a plan and do it!” Well The Big Guy smiled the biggest grin & this is where it all began.

Initially, we thought we wanted to be expats living Thailand. We just fell in love with everything about Thailand… Phuket had been a dream vacation for the two of us. The culture just wrapped its arms around us & we felt like we really could belong there. So at the beginning – Thailand was our main goal.

We started looking outward to countries that neither of us had seen & that held an interest for both of us. I researched for best countries for American expats to live & found gold. F/B & YouTube were full of info. Just do a search for the country you are interested in & see what pops up in the forums.

Reality set in and we realized this might take a little more work. Wherever we moved, there would be certain criteria that we deemed necessary for us to be comfortable & it had to be on point with our budget.

Additional Things We Had to Consider to be ready for International Travel:

I love spirals and should have bought stock in the company…yep, there were a lot of things to take into consideration. Many sheets of paper have been wadded up, tossed to the trash to get a clear picture of what we needed to happen to make this Adventure come to reality – smoothly. Allow me to get you up to speed on our present day thinking or the culmination of our 2017 “five year plan”.

2017 – initial notebook contained a short “To Do” list – make sure passports are up to date, which vaccines are required for which country, etc.  Also, started scratching down names of countries that intrigued our wandering spirit. Had to take close look at finances, etc.

2018 – started researching online for other expats living in foreign countries & getting familiar with their sites. Researching visa requirements for a few of the countries we had listed previously on Bucket List. Our plan to be sure all debt was paid off at take off was a little harder. We both are on track to minimize spending.

2019 – things are looking really good! The Big Guy is thinking we could possibly get the house on market late fall or winter of this 2019 year! Yikes, that is too soon for me I tell him. I have to close my business, get rid of décor, find new connections for my realtors, etc. I’m freaking out a little – this is too fast!

In November 2019 we decide we’ll put house on market Feb or Mar of 2020. We will still be ahead of our original move of 2021 but it will give me time to do what I need to do to close my staging business by end of December, 2019. Wow, a lot of work but its done!

Have been following a couple expats/nomads living in Thailand, Portugal & Mexico that are awesome about their experiences, etc. Embassy listings are a great place for collecting information once you decide which country you want to visit &/or move.

by late 2019 we decided maybe April, 2020 would be good date to list house. House is ready. Cleaning out closets. Interviewed realtor… Then  Covid-19 hit & everything shut down as you all know.

By Late 2020  The good new was even though Covid initially slowed our plans, we were able to get house on market during the boom of December 2020.

Bucket List – Must Haves for Countries

As we checked off various aspects of our to do list, our Bucket List of countries started growing but still looks doable! It seems our idea of moving to just one specific country is now to see how many countries we can travel inexpensively. We are thinking bouncing from country to country on visitor visas is more what we really want to do. Thus, our Bucket List of the best countries for expats to live is becoming more of a list of cheap foreign countries that we can just visit, land for 3-6 months & then move on to the next on our list!

In the meantime, our Bucket List is getting tweaked. The new updated plan was to build a Bucket List of inexpensive countries to put on our “to travel” list. Once that list is done, we can tweak that list down to countries that we both agree are economically agreeable to our planned budget & entered as our official Bucket List.

1] I had wanted to revisit a different area of Greece but we didn’t agree so it is off the list. I’d been to UK, France, Holland & Belgium in my prior life and would have loved to visit again with The Big Guy but European countries just don’t appeal to him.

After much conversation, we agreed that Central & South American countries would be a great starting point for us. SE Asian countries pretty much finished off our list. A couple other countries are still in discussion phase. Ha.

2] Secondly, we made a Cheat sheet of items that would have to be considered to make our visit/move to a particular country smart. UPDATE: Oct. 2020 We go into more detail on this in our “Top 20 Issues to Research When Considering A Move Abroad” though it would be pertinent for travel abroad as well for really any age traveler.

3] Next was the 5”x7” index cards with a country name printed across the top & the list of items [#2 above] we deemed as important to research before we made any final decisions.

4] As we do our due diligence on our proposed countries we are getting down to final Bucket List!

Stay tuned and lets see how this rides out.