Beat the "Boomer Trap" by Traveling Full-Time

As 2023 came to a close, my wife Rita and I came up with a radical plan to make the most of our golden years.

Over the next three years, we’re going to roam about the world sampling different cultures and exploring new vistas. We’ll dedicate ourselves to what is sometimes called "slow travel" or "roving retirement." By doing so, we hope to substantially increase our nest egg… and avoid the "boomer trap."

I turn 66 this year and my wife is 73. Like many our age, we’re thinking about downsizing our home to a low-maintenance, single-story home or condo. Many boomers have very little left on their home mortgage or, like us, no mortgage at all. With today’s historically high home prices, it’s tempting to sell and make a nice profit.

The trap is that when you try to buy a new home, you will have to pay a historically high price. It’s even worse if you need to do any financing, thanks to today’s high mortgage rates.

With that in mind, we decided to think a little outside of the box.

What if we sold our home, but didn’t immediately buy back in? What if we took the money from the sale and invested it in secure accounts, earning interest while we wait for the inevitable burst in the real estate balloon?

You may point out that renting in the US is also extremely expensive right now. But who says we have to rent in the US?

By going overseas we could rent for much less, while still living richly. Even better, we would be increasing our net worth for the three years or more that we travel, and be in great financial shape to buy or build our dream home when we return to the US.

Budgeting for Our New Life

We took a look at our fixed regular income from social security and a pension, and determined that if we could live overseas on a budget of $3,000 a month, we’d have a comfortable cushion for the US expenses we still have to pay.

For example, storage, our medical insurance, a virtual mailbox—all in all, less than $700 a month.

We also earn income from other sources, but since those amounts vary each month, we decided not to rely on them in our planning.

Rita and I lived in Ecuador for almost six years, and we’ve also traveled quite a bit—so we’re comfortable with living abroad. Since we managed to live on less than $2,000 a month in Ecuador, we’re also confident that we can live well within our proposed budget.

In my experiences writing for International Living, and from meeting the folks I’ve interviewed as host of International Living Podcast, I know there are many people who are already enjoying this type of roaming international lifestyle.

Our list of target countries is large, and seems to be growing every day. From those I’ve interviewed on the IL Podcast, we know we’d like to spend some time in Malta, Albania, Croatia, Italy, and Montenegro. We would love to visit Spain, Portugal, and really most European destinations. Ideally, we want to live at least one month in each location, more if we’re really enjoying it.

As we’ve learned in our travels, most of the expense of travel is getting there and back. We certainly found that to be true this fall, when we took a month to visit Eastern Europe. Once we paid dearly to cross the Atlantic, we were able to travel within Greece and to Istanbul, Vienna, and Prague for very reasonable rates. Our train from Vienna to Prague, for instance, cost us only $18 each.

Since we have nine grandchildren, we plan to spend at least part of the summer months back in the US while they’re out of school—so we need to factor in one trip back each year.

But with no fixed plans, we have the advantage of being able to pick our next port of call based partly on where we can get the best flight deals.

Testing Our Plan in Panama

Our plans may be nebulous, but they’re not just talk. As I write this, Rita and I are sitting on a couch on the 26th floor of a modern condo building in Panama City, Panama, gazing out at the bay and Casco Viejo.

While our house is being shown, we’re testing out our plan by spending the winter here in Panama: one month in Panama City, and six weeks on the beach at Playa Coronado. We’re carefully tracking our expenses to make sure our proposed budget is feasible.

So far, it’s looking pretty good. Our furnished Airbnb here cost us $1,165 for the month. That includes all utilities, internet, access to the pool and gym, and an equipped kitchen, so we don’t have to eat all of our meals in restaurants.

We save a lot of money on groceries too, since we quickly found the local mercado for fresh fruits, vegetables, meat, and poultry is just a short walk away. Even closer is the large Mercado de Mariscos—the seafood market—with last night’s catch on display today at great prices.

Just yesterday, I bought two pounds of shrimp for $7 and four pounds of corvina (sea bass) filets for $8. That’s enough for at least five meals for two!

We still have a lot of planning to do. If we get an attractive offer for our home, we’ll need to shift into high gear, paring down essentials, packing things up, and arranging for storage. We’ll have to set up a virtual mailbox in the US, forward our mail, arrange for eSIMs so we can have cell coverage while we travel, and make sure our important records and accounts are available online.

High on the list: planning what and how to pack. For a couple of years, we may live with only what we can comfortably carry in a couple of suitcases and carry-on bags.

To accommodate for this, we’ve discussed planning our destinations solely in moderate to warm climates… but we’ll still need a variety of clothing.

Fortunately, we had a test run last fall when we took that long trip to Eastern Europe. For a nine-week journey to at least seven different countries, we packed only one large checked bag for the two of us, and carried everything else in backpacks or smaller roller bags.

This proved to be a mistake. Schlepping the heavy backpacks and dealing with several bulky carry-ons through train stations, airports, trams, narrow aisles, and tiny overhead bins on prop planes proved to be more bother than it was worth.

For our current 10 weeks in Panama, we took the opposite approach, packing light carry-ons and two checked bags, and that’s working much better for our style of travel.

High on the agenda of these roaming retirees: France. Above, the Fontainebleau château.|©VLADISLAV ZOLOTOV/iSTOCK

Weighing the Risks and Rewards

We’ve also made a Plan B.

If we can’t get the price we want from our home sale, we’ll take it off the market and use it as a home base. Maintaining the home while we’re gone and paying insurance and property taxes adds to the monthly expense, so it would mean a reduced travel budget and/or fewer trips. Not to mention we would lose any potential economic gain from selling in today’s market.

So Plan A is still far and away our first choice—even though a leap of faith is definitely involved.

After all, we’ll be gambling with several variables. Will the real estate market actually drop in a few years? If it does, will we find a home that we like as much in the same area? What if a medical or family emergency comes up and we have to return to the US for an extended period?

Still, the potential rewards are substantial. We already have one US account earning over 5% interest, and we’re investigating banking in Uruguay, where some banks advertise fixed rates of as much as 9%.

By investing the money gained from the sale of our home carefully, we could increase our net worth by as much as 20% over the next three years.

But the biggest reward is the opportunity to travel the world, sampling cultures and gaining life experiences that can only be found when you embrace change. It’s dizzying to think of the options available to us—but it’s also exhilarating.

Our Tentative Itinerary

Right now, we have five weeks scheduled in Mexico in late April.

If the stars align and we can close our home sale and pack up before Mexico, we can return to spend the summer visiting family and friends. We have a son who plans to go to Japan for a month in June, so we’d pet- and housesit for him while he and his daughter are gone… and spend some time with him and our granddaughter when they return.

Which gets at our plans to register with Trusted Housesitters to look for gigs near our family when in the US, and while we travel abroad. (Free lodging goes a long way to stretching our budget.)

After housesitting, staying with some friends and family, and a few Airbnbs in the US, at the end of summer it will be time to take the first step abroad. I just wish I could tell you where we will go.

You see, there is one further complication: One of our grandchildren plans to spend her last year of high school as an exchange student.

Naturally, we want to visit her while she is in Europe. The problem is, she won’t know where she is going for another month or two.

That is where the flexibility of our new lifestyle makes a difference. Our tentative plans are to secure accommodations for two months in the French village of Fontainebleau.

From there, it’s a short train ride to Paris, where we can strike out in any direction. Once we find out what country she will be traveling to, we can finalize our plans.

After that… Well, the Schengen Zone means we’ll have to be strategic with our itinerary, but Albania, Northern Ireland, England, and Scotland are all interesting places to wait out the 90-day period. And of course, there’s Costa Rica, Colombia, Peru, Uruguay, and the rest of Central and South America, or jump across the Pacific to Thailand, Malaysia—the list goes on and on and on.

We stand now on the edge of a tremendous change in our lives. Although we recognize the risks involved, enriching our lives—and our bank accounts—is a risk worth taking.