One of the many benefits of retiring to a new country can be the opportunity to lower your cost of living, perhaps dramatically.
It's hard to say by how much you might reduce your monthly expenses. It depends on where you're coming from, where you move and how you choose to live. But your cost of living anywhere is highly controllable. While some costs are set, many expenses, including those that constitute the majority of your budget, can be scaled up or down. (Are you saving enough for retirement? Find out with MSN Money's calculator.)
A retirement budget for anywhere in the world, including in the United States, includes the following expenses:
- Homeowners association fees if you live in a building or a development where one is charged.
- Health insurance.
- Groceries.
- Utilities (gas, electricity, water).
- Telephone (land line or cellphone).
- Internet.
- Cable (if you want it).
- Transportation.
- Entertainment.
- Travel (within your new country and return visits to the U.S.).
- Household help (if you want it).
- Miscellaneous (haircuts, dry cleaning, cleaning supplies, etc.).
In addition, you have housing costs, including property tax, homeowners insurance, and the costs of maintenance and repairs if you own your own home, or rent if you don't.
Some of the costs on this list, such as cable and Internet, are negligible in the scheme of an overall budget. So when trying to determine which overseas retirement havens you could afford on the retirement budget you have, focus on the costs that make a real difference: rent, transportation, health insurance, food, entertainment, travel and household help.
I strongly recommend that you rent rather than own when moving to another country, at least at first. It will cost you $1,000 to $1,500 per month to rent a nice two-bedroom apartment in a good neighborhood of Panama City. But you could rent a two-bedroom house within a few minutes' walk of the beach on Panama's Pacific coast near Las Tablas for $300 to $500 per month, or a two-bedroom house on the Pacific coast of that country's Veraguas Province for as little as $150 per month. Your cost of housing in Veraguas could be one-tenth your cost of housing in Panama City, and that would make a substantial difference in your budget overall.
Expenses for food, entertainment and travel can also vary dramatically from one country or even region of a country to another. Your entertainment budget in Paris could be 10 times our entertainment budget when living in a small French country town. Your weekly visit to the local farmers market in Otavalo, Ecuador, could yield you a cornucopia of interesting, healthy, tasty foods for, again, a fraction of the cost of a trip to the supermarket in Quito.
Transportation costs also vary widely depending on the choices you make. You can take the local buses from one end of Panama City to the other for 25 cents or a taxi across town for $5. The bus ride from Boquete to Panama City costs $17.25, while one-way plane fare is $122. It's a balancing act between how you want to live and what standard of living your monthly retirement income will afford you.
