Don't Become An Expat Do This Instead

hey guys welcome back to the channel today we are talking about don't be an expat do this instead so let's talk about what an expat is first and then we'll talk a little bit about why you know we're opting for something different the definition of an expat is an individual living and or working in a country other than their country of citizenship often temporarily and for work reasons but not always this does differ a little bit from an immigrant since you don't plan to live uh to live there uh fulltime yeah an xad is basically what we've always heard of as people who retire and move overseas they buy a house in Portugal and that's just where they are and then they may come back to the US or wherever they're from uh from time to time but they're kind of centrally located in one place for the entire year and then they may go back to their their place of origin yeah so they basically set up a life in a different country of sorts as as far as we're talking about uh the retirement sphere people do this obviously sometimes for work as well but we're talking today in the vein of uh you know retirement and uh for the expat world it's just you know you just set up a whole the life you had or a life in in another country and like you said there are a lot of countries uh around the world that offer great benefits to expats uh which is why I think a lot of people choose to do that um because then they can get you know citizenship or uh you know rights in those countries as well and so um you know that that can be very lucrative and luring I think for a lot of people too yeah I think a lot of people become expats also because to become an expat you really only need to pick one place and you just pick that place and and then that's just what you do you don't worry about the rest of the world you don't worry about any other opportunities um but also in doing that you limit yourself to that one place and that essentially is why we ultimately opted to not become expats because we didn't want to say right off the bat all right we're going to go to Mexico and that's it or we're going to go to Portugal and that's going to be it uh and we've met a lot of people traveling around now who have done that actually went through the process of getting their long-term residency visas for some of these countries and then said you know we're not that's not that wasn't for us and they're going to keep looking so uh I think like you said the Allure for most people is being able to visit tons of different places and do it in a in a very economical manner yeah for sure and I think the the other uh Allure of it as well is just um being able to set your stuff up somewhere you know I think people if they're just starting out a lot of times they're like well I don't want to move my stuff around from place to place um you know so they want to do that but it's it's obviously got us downsides I mean a lot of time a lot of countries um that offer these types of visas also have time requirements like you can only leave that country for so many months of the year so it does limit how much more you can travel from there to other places as well which does make it a little bit challenging I think so let's talk about what we do instead and what we recommend people do instead just from starting out at least you definitely don't want to start out as an expat start out doing this and then if you feel like you found the place you can move into that later on but it's just slow travel it's slow travel through the world as if you're spending a month in each place we usually spend one or two months per for City and don't move through places quickly and it has worked out so well for us so far it really does make a huge difference um for you to really one of the one of the allures also of being an expat is that you can really immerse yourself into the culture and the communities and with slow travel you can do the same thing in a month or two months you make friendships we do that all the time uh we have friends all over the world people that we meet and we do fun things things with and we build communities everywhere that we go because a lot of them are places that we come back to as well so you come back and you just basically take off where you left off yeah essentially kind of the the model that we thought up or we've been doing this for six years now is that it's kind of like the people that live in the North in the US and then in the in the winter they go to Florida for three four months and then they go back to the north we're kind of doing that same thing except for we're doing it in two month St and we have four or five places we're doing it so we go back to the same cities every single year and guess what when we go back there the same people are there at the same restaurants and the same uh you know apartments that we're at our friends are still there that we met the first year they're still there the second year they're there the third year and so it's kind of like that Snowbird mentality but you're just using the whole world instead of just Florida exactly it's so cool sometimes when we go back to some of these places where we've stayed long term and we run into people one time we had just landed and we said oh let's go grab our our metro card stations our Metro cards at the station and we ran down there and when we got down there we ran into a friend of ours that we that we knew that we had met from a couple years before she was like hey I didn't know you guys were back and so it was just really funny to to like run into somebody like that extremely random in you know Bangkok Thailand um and it's such a huge City with so many people and to run into her not even at her home station either this was a station several several stations down it was just kind of cool um to have an experience like that and even like restaurants that we you know we patronize and go back it's the same owner they're still there they still remember us and they still give us a 10% discount for coming back to their shop which is also a very uh you know a really good experience yeah that's what's interesting is because in a lot of these countries you're going to be super memorable to the locals because you know you don't feel like you are but because you're not local and you're in this place where there's not a lot of you know non-locals when you come back you've been there two months you come back after a year everyone's going to remember you and you'll pick up right where you left off because you you stick out uh so it's it's we definitely we definitely they remember us everywhere we go everywhere we go so that's a good thing because you don't have to like take time to make new relationships you just show up and it's like all right yeah I remember this uh this is what I order here and this is what happens so it's great but another thing a benefit to the slow travel uh that we do is that you don't have to mess with long-term visas when you slow travel you can mostly do this on tourist visas which is actually you can do it fully on tourist visa and it just depends on how long you get in each country but it's generally 30 to 90 days per country and they can often be extended there really isn't anywhere I can think of where they would limit you to just 30 now uh some of them it's 30 initially but you get a 30-day extension and a lot of them it's 90 so 60 to 90 days you can spend basically Visa free for the most part it's visa on arrival which is almost the same thing as Visa free you show up to the airport they give you a Visa uh no questions asked and that's so much easier than securing a long-term residency Visa somewhere and for the most part they're usually free but they can sometimes run you know 20 $30 or something if you have to apply for it online yeah another another great bonus here is for us one of the we've always loved travel and the big dream was was for us to live overseas which we even uh you know attempted to do with our kids uh for long stays in different places we went and stayed in Panama uh for six week with our kids and just different things like that so we've thought about it for a long time uh really more in the vein of being expats but the great thing um about this lifestyle of the slow travel is that it's really the best use of the lifestyle uh to move from place place to place because you can try out uh you know the life in lots of different places you're not going to get if you're just popping in for a couple days you're not really going to get the feel of a community if you're just popping in for a couple of weeks still you're not really going to get that full feel you really need about 30 days to really get the full feel and just kind of what is this going to be like if I stay here even you know longer um and that really is what I think is so unique and interesting about doing the slow travel as opposed to you know setting up an expat life yeah and there may come a time when we want to stop exploring or we've we've been everywhere actually just this year we were thinking where have we not been like it's basically down to just South Korea and Cambodia so we'll probably hit that up next year and then we'll have been everywhere we wanted to go in the world and from there we're just going to be hitting places that we really did enjoy so uh but I think as years go on we'll probably pair that down to make less and less travel and maybe eventually we'll we'll pick one place and that would be expats but you don't want to start that way because you were closing yourself off to all the other places like I don't think had we just picked a place from the US it probably wouldn't have been Thailand it probably would have been Mexico and now that we've been all over the world it's definitely Thailand yeah absolutely and I think our initial thought when we started this over 6 years ago our initial thought was we'll travel around for about you know a year and then we'll find someplace to plop ourselves down and do expat life but then we just enjoyed you know the the movement so much that it was great but in that movement you also have a little bit of a downside too that people talk about in this you know mo you don't have regular like furniture and you know uh stocked kitchens and things like that um and you know you kind of take the the good with the bad in in this situation and and one of the ways that we can test that is we do have a line um you know in our budget for purchasing things um when we get to somewhere we try to find you know if we're like okay well we get to an Airbnb and it doesn't have you know proper kitchen stuff if if it's something that we can purchase for you know $20 or less and we usually do and just kind of leave that behind for the most part it's usually like uh knives like kitchen knives that are super dull and you can't really use them for Stuff uh or if you need like an extra pillow or extra padding on your bed or something those are things you can get uh you know you can pretty much Rectify so it's not like it's a horrible situation it's something that usually can be rectified uh with a small expense of some sort yeah exactly uh one time we did buy a microwave to go but it we usually keep that expense under $100 um so the other thing about it is is that you can change up things you you do want so you can have a beach view one month and then the next month you could be in the mountains and then you could be in the big city whereas if you are an xat and you just buy a house whatever you buy that's what you're doing for the next 5 to 10 years and that was the limiting factor for us is we loved the variety we can have it's almost like having a house and then having three vacation houses all over the world and you just kind of circle between them yeah it's kind of like uh those books that we read um when we were kids like back in the 80s the you know Choose Your Own Adventure kind of thing this is really kind of like that and that you Choose Your Own Adventure and just kind of go basically this is choose your own life kind of thing where you go wherever you want when ever you want essentially and that's the beauty of not having a base somewhere is that you don't have to worry about the stuff that you're leaving behind either by renting it or you know having someone watch it and take care of it for you which is always a hassle it's better to just be able to you know pick have just the things that you have with you take them with you less things to worry about that's why it's so good to be in that you know minimalist uh sphere is you can take everything with you all the time and you don't have to to worry about having stuff set up somewhere yeah and I also like the fact that you can do uh things that you've always wanted to do maybe for a long period of time like I always wanted to live near a major league baseball stadium and just be able to walk to the games like that was always kind of something I always dreamed of doing and so last year we went to New York and we got uh placing Queens for a month and walked over to all the Mets games every single day it was walking distance it was amazing that's what I wanted to do now I wouldn't have wanted to do that for five years but I did want to try it out for a month and after that you know I was done it was great I got to do what I wanted to do and you can just switch on to different experiences like that that you want to do maybe you've always wanted to be at the beach or maybe you always wanted to live on a ski slope you can find a place for a month that's affordable to do that and then you're not committing yourself to it for the rest of your life yeah so that's what it boils down to though is just doing your research you know know what some of the experiences are that you want to have do your research and really make the decision that works best for you we're always big proponents for people to do what is best for you and your situation um you know we're never trying to convince someone to do what we're doing per se but just kind of giving you the perspective of of what that's like and you know if if an xat life you know that's really what you've been working towards and that's what you want to do and you know obviously still go for that but there are so so many benefits to doing the slow travel lifestyle that uh we just really wanted to share that and uh just kind of give you that perspective of those those two so hopefully this was helpful to you if you have questions about be being either an expat or a uh slow traveler go ahead and leave those for us down in the comment section don't forget to subscribe to the channel for more videos like this and we'll see you guys next time

Channel: Grounded Life Finances

Views: 15,964

Keywords: what are the downsides of early retirement, what are the downsides of full time travel, full time travel, downsides to full time travel, what to consider before full time travel, nomad downsides, why you should not become an expat, slow travel, slomad, slow travel is better than being an expat, is slow travel better than being an expat, what is slow travel

Id: MIocK2vlZqI

Length: 15min 29sec (929 seconds)

Published: Mon May 06 2024