Living Abroad - Ideas and Advice For A Great Lifestyle Overseas

A lead article in the Daily Mail’s Money section has the headline ‘Four million expats want to come home as savings and income plunge along with the pound.’  Whilst some of the facts and statistics cited and quoted in the piece are close to accurate, the most hard hitting, attention grabbing of the lot, i.e., the fact that 4 million Brits are about to repatriate, is so incredibly untrue it’s actually laughable.

However, when someone pens and publishes a piece such as that, it is scaremongering and serves to put people off their dream, or feed all those who like to do down anyone who has ambition with lies to spout and rubbish to disseminate.

4 million Britons are not planning on repatriating – and as we will show, we have very good reasons for hating scaremongering headlines such as the one in the Daily Mail.  People are still moving abroad to find a better life, it is still possible to afford a home overseas, and if you are abroad and struggling financially, there are options and alternatives to repatriating.

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There are those of us who move abroad to find better paying employment opportunities, who realise that as an expatriate we become less restricted by the fetters put upon us in our own home nation where everything seems to be regulated, even the amount we can perhaps earn…

However, building up a successful career can take time – what’s more, some of us are moving abroad simply to find a better work-life balance, or even to retire.  So in other words, we are all likely to be in very different financial positions when we relocate.  This fact alone has to be taken into consideration when penning an article such as this, because I’m about to talk about the expatriate insurances you shouldn’t leave home without.

However, I am also aware that not everyone can afford health insurance, life insurance and travel insurance…so I am going to look at what you really need as a bottom line, how you can cut your costs, and answer the question posed by this article, namely ‘can you afford to go abroad uninsured?’

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“Hello, I’m Mrs. Mugabe and I want to offer you $1 million…”  You know what I am talking about I presume?  The “Nigerian” email scams which regularly appear in your inbox, offering you a chance to have a share in millions of dollars left by some displaced dictator, dead explorer, long lost relative or whoever.  Don’t tell me you’ve never received one?!  Well, just in case you haven’t, here’s how they work: -

Someone emails you a rather pathetic offer they presume you can’t refuse.  Often they refer to you in a most friendly manner and make some obscure reference about how they got your email address, implying that you may perhaps know them.  The offer is usually a share in money, gold, or gems, which the person asking needs you to receive and look after for a while.  In order to do this you need to give them a number of your personal details, and usually send them a small amount of cash for them to process some paperwork to get the large amount of loot released into your care.

If we haven’t received such email scams ourselves we’ve certainly heard about them – and therefore we tend to assume that everyone is immune to being taken in nowadays.  However, as I will demonstrate, there are those who have now taken this scamming model a significant step further, who are now robbing innocent people around the world of significant sums of money, and making otherwise savvy and intelligent people look like absolute idiots.  Introducing you to the innocent victims of the new breed of email scam – to highlight how anyone can potentially be taken in, and how you need to ensure your family, friends and fellow expats are forewarned and therefore forearmed against these evil cheats.

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