When traveling abroad with an eye toward retiring or buying a second home, you’re going to need a local phone number. This allows you to make inexpensive local calls while you’re overseas. And, just as importantly, it allows local people to call you.

If you’re looking at properties, you’ll want realtors as well as professional contacts and new friends to be able to contact you easily. Also, a local phone is useful in the unlikely event there’s some emergency.

Here are three easy – and affordable – ways to get connected on the ground:

Take the easy way out: This method is the cheapest, the simplest, and requires no technical understanding of cell-phone networks. After you arrive in-country, walk up to the first cell-phone kiosk you see and buy an inexpensive phone. They’ll charge it up with prepaid minutes, and you’ll be in business… for about $20.

The multi-country solution: I started by taking the easy way out. But because I travel a lot, I soon ended up with a collection of cheap cell phones in my dresser…one for each of my most-visited countries. So I figured out a way to carry one cell phone around the world and have it work everywhere… at local rates.

I bought an unblocked, quad-band, GSM phone with a SIM card. (Sound like Greek to you? See the sidebar.)

The next time I drove to Brazil, I crossed the border and stopped in a gas station displaying a cell phone logo. I handed my phone over the counter, and he handed it back in five minutes with a Brazilian phone number… for less than $3.

Now, if I’m spending more than a few days in any country, I simply buy a local SIM card to get my own local number and use prepaid talk time with no contract. Today, instead of a collection of cheap phones, I have one good phone and a collection of tiny SIM cards. When I arrive in a country, I simply plug in the proper SIM card and begin using my local number… from Uruguay to Arizona.

This is not expensive. My quad-band phone—a Motorola KRZR—costs $65. It has a camera, a video cam… and an all-important (for me) voice recorder, so I can record what I’m seeing while driving around. Each country’s SIM card costs a few bucks. Calls are inexpensive and incoming calls are free, except in the U.S.

But some travelers need more than a local number abroad… they also need people to be able to reach them via their home number. Here’s a solution for that situation:

The Skype relay: Using this method, a person calls your home phone and the call rings through to your local number abroad… with no cost to the caller. For this you need a Skype account (Skype.com), with the Online Number feature enabled ($18 for three months).

Then you forward your home phone to your Skype number and have Skype forward the call to your overseas cell phone. Your caller pays nothing… while you pay the Skype charge for the forwarded call. If you’re in Panama for example, you’d pay 11 cents per minute.

So hit the ground running when you’re scouting overseas by setting up your own local number. You’ll be connected, efficient, and one step closer to settling in.

Bringing Your Smartphone?

Using your iPhone or Blackberry overseas will not give you a local number… but it may get you a hefty phone bill.

The charges may stem not from what you do with the phone… but from what the phone does for you in the background. A friend ran up a bill of $847 in just a few days in Brazil… just by having her iPhone switched on. She wasn’t using it.

To prevent this sticker-shock, make sure the phone’s roaming feature is switched off – before you go abroad. And while abroad, use the phone in WiFi mode, which is free when you have a WiFi signal.

If you plan to use your smartphone without WiFi, ask your carrier about data roaming packages. They’ll be expensive… but probably cheaper than what you’d rack up in fees overseas traveling with the usual U.S.-only plan.

UNDERSTAND THE JARGON

Blocked: Service providers in the U.S. usually “block” the phone, so you can’t use it on any network but theirs. Phones purchased outside the U.S. are normally unblocked… and several Internet suppliers sell unblocked phones within the U.S.

SIM Card: A small chip that gives your phone its number and stores an address book along with other technical data. Not all phones have a SIM; but for those that do, changing SIM cards will change the number. SIM cards are easy to change yourself, or any cell phone kiosk can do it.

GSM: A worldwide standard for cell networks, also used by AT&T and T-Mobile within the U.S.

Quad-Band: GSM networks can operate on four different frequency bands. Most countries use one or two bands, as do most standard phones. But if you’re going to use your phone worldwide, you’ll need all four bands: the quad-band phone.