Why Some People Retire Abroad and Thrive While Others Come Home

I know it’s a bit odd, but I actually enjoy reading hotel reviews.

Whenever I book somewhere for a holiday, I do the usual research beforehand. But even after the hotel is booked, I often find myself going back to read the latest reviews before I travel. Partly it’s anticipation, but mostly it’s curiosity.

What fascinates me is how two people can stay in exactly the same hotel, sometimes during the same week, and come away with completely different impressions.

One person describes the staff as wonderfully relaxed. The next complains that the service was painfully slow. One loves being away from everything. Another complains there’s nothing nearby. One thinks the breakfast is fantastic. Someone else apparently survived for a week on toast.

Same hotel. Same swimming pool. Same breakfast buffet. Completely different experience.

Neither person is necessarily wrong. They’re simply experiencing the same place through different eyes.

I think there’s an important lesson in that for anyone considering retirement abroad.

Perception

Perception is a powerful motivator. It can talk us into things, but it can just as easily talk us out of them.

In my first article for Sixty and Me, I asked whether you could really retire to Southeast Asia on your own. What interested me afterwards was the response on Facebook after Margaret kindly promoted it. Quite a few people simply said “no.” Some reasons were exactly what I expected – “too hot and humid,” for example. But several of the other comments seemed to be less about the practicalities of moving to Southeast Asia and more about people’s perception of it.

And that’s interesting, because Southeast Asia isn’t really one “place” at all. It’s a vast region of hundreds of millions of people, dozens of cultures and languages. Life in Penang is very different from life in Bangkok, Cebu, Bali or Phnom Penh. Treating Southeast Asia as a single entity makes about as much sense as assuming retirement in rural Oklahoma would be much the same as retirement in New York City, or that a quiet village outside Valencia would offer the same experience as living in Paris.

Before we can decide whether somewhere might suit us, we need to separate what we actually know about it from what we merely perceive it to be. Two people can retire to the same town with similar finances and have completely different experiences – one builds a new life, the other eventually comes home. So, what makes the difference?

The Things That Attract Us Can Also Irritate Us

That hotel review about the “wonderfully relaxed” staff and “painfully slow” service is a useful example.

One of the attractions of retiring abroad is that life is different – a different pace of life, unfamiliar bureaucracy, social conventions that aren’t immediately obvious.

Initially, those differences can be part of the adventure. But the things we find charming on holiday can feel rather different when we’re dealing with them every day.

The relaxed pace of life becomes inefficiency. The bustling neighbourhood becomes noisy. The tropical climate becomes oppressively hot. The local way of doing something becomes frustrating because “that’s not how we do it at home.”

Yet someone else living in exactly the same place may continue to love those things. The destination hasn’t changed. The reaction to it has.

Perhaps adaptability is therefore just as important as affordability. You don’t have to like everything about another country, but you do need to be comfortable with the fact that some things will be done differently.

Eventually, You Have to Stop Being on Holiday

The first few months of living abroad can be tremendously exciting – restaurants to discover, neighbourhoods to explore, new people to meet.

But eventually the novelty wears off. You cannot spend 20 or 30 years treating Tuesday afternoon as though you’re still on holiday. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing.

In time, a successful life abroad has to become an ordinary one. You find a favourite coffee shop. Perhaps you join a club, volunteer, play golf, or meet the same group of friends every Thursday evening.

Perhaps that’s one of the better tests of whether somewhere really suits you. Not whether you’re still excited by everything that’s different, but whether you can have a completely uneventful weekday and still think, “I’m happy here.”

Finding Your People Matters

There are substantial expatriate communities across Southeast Asia – Penang, Hua Hin, Chiang Mai, parts of the Philippines – which can make arriving somewhere new considerably easier. But there’s a distinction between finding an expat community and building a life.

Over time, friendships might include local people, neighbours, different nationalities and people met through hobbies or volunteering. You don’t have to reinvent yourself or become completely immersed in another culture, but most of us need some sense of belonging.

That matters in retirement wherever you live. Moving several thousand miles away simply makes it harder to ignore.

Expectations Matter More Than We Realise

Southeast Asia is frequently promoted online as somewhere you can enjoy an extraordinary lifestyle for very little money. Housing, eating out, domestic help and private healthcare can compare favourably with the UK, Europe or North America.

But “good value” and “cheap” aren’t quite the same thing. Someone arriving with realistic expectations might be delighted by what their retirement income provides. Someone promised they can “live like a king” on a tiny budget may have a very different experience.

The same applies beyond money. If you expect perfect weather, you may be surprised by humidity and monsoon rain. If you expect moving abroad to remove every frustration you had at home, you will inevitably discover some new ones.

The answer isn’t necessarily to lower your expectations. It’s to have better calibrated ones.

You Don’t Have to Love Everything

You’re allowed to dislike things about your adopted country. People in Britain don’t wake up every morning delighted by everything about Britain, and Malaysians, Thais and Filipinos can all give you lengthy lists of things they’d change about their own. Why should expatriates be any different?

You can love living in Penang and hate the traffic. You can adore Bangkok and occasionally wish the weather were 10 degrees cooler.

The question isn’t whether you can find faults. It’s whether, taken as a whole, the life you’ve built works for you.

Coming Home Doesn’t Mean You Failed

Sometimes people come home. Perhaps they miss their family more than they expected. Their health changes. Grandchildren arrive. Priorities change. Or perhaps, after several years, they simply decide they’d rather live somewhere else.

None of that means moving abroad was a mistake. If someone spends eight happy years in Malaysia and then decides to return to Britain to be closer to their grandchildren, were those eight years a failure? Of course not.

Retirement can last 30 years or more. Expecting a decision made at 60 or 65 to remain the right decision at 80 seems rather optimistic.

Perhaps We’re Asking the Wrong Question

When researching retirement abroad, it’s tempting to ask: Is Malaysia a good place to retire? Or Thailand, the Philippines, Portugal, Spain or anywhere else. We can examine healthcare, visas, taxation, living costs, infrastructure, safety and climate.

But perhaps there’s another question that matters just as much: Is it a good place for me to retire?

That’s much harder to answer because it requires us to understand ourselves as well as the destination. How adaptable are we? How important is familiarity? How easily do we make friends? How much heat can we genuinely tolerate? Which compromises are we willing to make, and which ones will slowly drive us mad?

Those aren’t questions that can be answered by a league table of the world’s best retirement destinations.

Which brings me back to those hotel reviews.

Same hotel. Same swimming pool. Same breakfast buffet.

Five stars to one person. Two stars to somebody else.

The difference is the person experiencing it.

The hotel hasn’t changed.

Over to You:

Do you think you would ever consider living abroad in retirement? Have you looked at any locations? Do you read expat reviews? What do you do when you see opposing reviews of a destination?