Thanks for your note and interest in what we are doing. We miss Eliot Church too.

Surprisingly, very few people have actually asked us why: Why Mexico instead of Tyngsboro? I think it is simply because we started to dream about what we would do if we didn’t have to work; where we would live if we could live anywhere. Would we choose to hunch over a computer monitor and electrolysis equipment all day? Were we doing that just to sustain a lifestyle we didn’t love anymore anyway? Sure, pools, patios, and landscaped yards are great but they required a lot of work too! Paying someone to help with housekeeping is one thing - but yard care?! No way. Where is the good life? Is this it? Isn’t there some place we can live with some decent weather?

And taxes! Health insurance! Social Security? I could rant and rave about these all day - but I’ll spare you.

Then I started to borrow books from the library, including: The Joy of Not Working and How to Retire Happy, Wild, and Free (both by Ernie Zelinski), How to Retire Early and Live Well with Less Than a Million Dollars (Gillette Edmunds), and some by other authors that I can’t remember at the moment. More than one mentioned the possibility of retiring well for less in Latin America. So I found more books, including: Live Well in Mexico (Ken Luboff), Choose Mexico (John Howells), Live Well South of the Border in Mexico (Mike Nelson), and the classic The People’s Guide to Mexico (Carl Franz).

Meanwhile, long before all this of course, I had been tending an investment portfolio with only one goal: retirement. I made tons of mistakes here of course, but was always fully invested in stocks, and the 80s and 90s were golden. I now have an investment philosophy with which I’m quite confident. I highly recommend The Four Pillars of Investing and The Intelligent Asset Allocator (both by William J. Bernstein, with some duplication).

And then the real-estate market in Tyngsboro seemed like it might be reaching a plateau…

I did the math; made some educated guesses. We chose to give early retirement in Mexico a try for now… if nothing else, for a short-term diversion from the same old same old.

Whew! I’m sure that is much more than you wanted to know! I’ll probably put some of it in our Frequently Asked Questions sometime. I’ve been wanting to rant about this for quite a while…