Living Abroad - Ideas and Advice For A Great Lifestyle Overseas

Fixers – you know the type, you arrive in a new place and they are the guy (or girl) who miraculously materialises and offers to solve all your problems.  Usually well-dressed if not downright sartorial, speaking English of a level unusual in the place you are in and seeming to know everyone in authority, the fixer seems to be a god-send.  But I subscribe to the adage that if it looks too good to be true it often is.

I have seen a lot of fixers at work, in fact in the city where I live there’s a veritable tribe of them.  We even take bets on which one will attach to which new, lucrative, expat managed project.  To give them their due, some fixers actually do a reasonable job, they magically get documents out of government departments in fewer days than anyone thought possible, and seem to smooth the way in all kinds of potentially difficult situations.  They often go on to become the indispensable right-hand of the expat who hired them, preventing the need to learn the local language or work out how things need to be done.  They are a welcome cushion against the difficulties of local life, and what they say is often taken as gospel.

So, if fixers are able to do so many things, what do I have against them?  As I will demonstrate in this report, a fixer or a runner may become so indispensible in your life that you cannot function without them – or more likely, you’ll reach a point where you no longer need them but will find them impossible to shake off.  You are their life-blood – or rather, your money is.  And because they wield so much power over you, you may get to the same point I did where I had to employ a second fixer to get rid of the first one!

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In the first part of our review of GlobalPost’s affordable places to retire abroad, we introduced you to the fact that their top ten listing had been compiled featuring data from the UN’s Human Development Index Scale and facts from the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Cost of Living Index.  We took time out to review the first 5 of GlobalPost’s suggestions, covering Costa Rica, Ecuador, Thailand, Mexico and Uruguay.

As we discussed in the first part of this review of where you can live abroad cheaply in retirement, cost of living should not be the only criteria a would-be retiree places on a potential nation in their short list of retirement paradises abroad.  Somewhere can be cheap – but life can also be cheap there or the standard of living may reflect the low cost of living for example…

Therefore, to bring perhaps more insight into a given country that’s been selected specifically as an affordable place to retire by GlobalPost, particularly for our British readers who may never have considered some of the American publication’s chosen cheap nations, we’re today going to break down the pros and cons of calling South Africa, Panama, Malaysia, Argentina or Bulgaria home in retirement.

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In the first part of our series examining whether America - the land of the free - is the right country for you to choose as your new relocation destination of choice, we walked you through the commonsense questions you need to ask of the nation and yourself to determine whether a move stateside would really be appropriate.

Following hot on the heels of our report, last weekend saw a long article published in the Sunday Times specifically about the growing popularity and prestige of American universities with British students.  It seems that Britons of all ages are therefore asking themselves the same questions – namely whether America is the right choice for them.

If you’ve decided that you really would like to move across the pond and seek your fortunes in the US, this, the second part of our special feature on emigrating to America should be of maximum use.  We’re going to be talking about getting a visa – whether you want to apply for a business visa for a fixed period of residence, a Green Card through Marriage or you ultimately want to get to the point where you apply for citizenship, our report’s got all the information you require.

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