took a positive step

Not much of a step, but I did send my and my wife's latest social security statements (the one that says how much you are projected to get when you retire) to my broker. I asked him to let me know how much money we need to have saved up by age 62 to earn $2500-3000 a month, including our approximate $1800 of social security.

I know you get more by waiting until 67, but I cannot bear thinking of working 5 extra years!

The big problem is, if you retire at 62, you have 3 years with no health insurance since you can't get on medicare until 65.

back from Playacar

We just got back from our 25th anniversary, once in a lifetime vacation to Mexico with our kids. We had a blast and stayed at the Iberostar Tucan resort in Playacar. I know this is not the real Mexico, but even so, I really am pulled towards coming back and checking more places out. I did not speak much Spanish there, but I was actually starting to understand it pretty good when we left!

I am thinking of helping a friend teach English as a second language in a local church, one night a week...my friend says this helped his Spanish more than any class he has ever taken, plus he is giving back as well.

I hope to catch up on all the blogs I am subscribed to now!

back to earth

I am back to earth after my 4-5 weeks of daydreaming and fantasizing about moving South of the Border. I really want to do it, but realities of my life make it impossible to contemplate. A 10 year old in a great school system, who is a fairly good competitive swimmer; a 30 year mortgage on a house I am upside down in; a job I must have just to pay for the house, etc.

I will keep dreaming about retirement, but I have to live in the here and now. I have a wanderlust that my father and his father had, but I have never acted upon it.

I really do hate being a CPA, but how can I make 75k at age 47 in a new field? Not going to happen! And 75k isn't very much really, we barely get by.

I will satisfy my wanderlust by reading other people's blogs!

less obsessed

I finally am becoming less obsessed with moving South of the Border. I am still really interested in it, but am no longer spending (wasting?lol) hours a day searching real estate listings on mx.yahoo.com (to avoid gringo prices), endlessly searching for the "best" places to live, etc.

We are counting down to our Mexican vacation, less than 8 weeks off now! We are so excited. Even though we won't be going to the "real" Mexico, it will be our first trip down there ever. It is going to be steamy hot, and right in the midst of hurricane season, but that's ok, we will just stay in the water and drink lots of beer!

I am moving my regular IRA account into a Roth account and then I may purchase a lot down there. I am particularly interested right now in Xalapa or Coatepec, so if anyone knows of a good deal, let me know! We are pretty set on living in a cooler clime, so probably not Merida, even though Merida sounds great otherwise! We just would prefer not to sweat, we do enough of that here. We also would like to live in an area with a variety of types of terrain. I feel like Merida is a lot like Virginia Beach...flat, hot and humid!

I love reading other people's blogs! Thanks for keeping them, it really helps those of us who aren't there yet.

latest fantasy

I am thinking about how I could possibly make enough money to live in Mexico now. I am a CPA, and could subcontract to a firm or two to do tax preparation from anywhere. All they would have to do is scan and email me all the client documents, then I could log into the tax software, prepare the return, and voila!

I could do it pretty cheap, say 1/4th of whatever the fee they charge is. So if they charge $400, I get $100 wired to my bank account.

It's the beginning of a dream. I could do that during tax season, and open my meathead gym and fitness center too, and earn money in the offseason.

Now, could I make enough to send my daughter to a bilingual school? That's the question. And would my wife divorce me when I tell her this plan? lol

my diet so far

Starting last Saturday, I bit the bullet and went on a challenge diet concocted by my chiropractor. A 3-week blitzkrieg on the fat. After 5 days, I am down 7lbs! I know it will slow now, as most of the first lbs lost are water, but still it is exciting to be down instead of up.

Basically, it is rough 1000 calories a day, 100g of carb, 100g of protein, and about 20g of fat. For someone like me, who loves to eat, this is a mere pittance. My daily intake is: 1 cup of cooked oatmeal or grits or applesauce for breakfast; 1 vitamin water for snack in midmorning; 1 cup of plain yogurt or lowfat cottage cheese with strawberries or blueberries mixed in, and a sliced up cucumber with vinegar for lunch; an apple for midafternoon snack; and 8 oz of chicken or tuna, or 5 eggs, along with a leafy salad with low cal dressing for supper.

I am continuing my 5 days a week of heavy weight training, and am walking in to the Y and work, then walking home at night, about 4 miles roundtrip.

I started at 223, am currently at 216, and want to be 195 or less by August 12, when we leave for our trip to Playa del Carmen.

I am so hungry

why am I obsessing?

On one of the forums I frequent, I was told straight up that I could not afford to retire to Mexico, and that rather than fantasize and obsess, I should engage my energies in improving my situation here north of the border.

Deep down I know that person is right. I just am lost right now. Almost 48, with 20,000 in my IRA, 45% of my gross income going to pay for health insurance and mortgage, no extra money leftover to save for retirement, 28 years left to pay on my modest 1800 sq ft house, and no prospects of a hike in income, all have combined to put me in a real funk.

I know I am better off than most of the people my age, so I really worry about them.

I am starting to realize not only that retiring to Mexico is probably not possibe, just retiring, PERIOD is probably out of the question for me. If I stay here, I will be 75 when my mortgage is paid off, so I will be at least 75 before I can stop working. I figure I will have 5-10 years left on this earth at that time, assuming I make it to 75.

I am really depressed. I need some advice pretty bad on this stuff.

Diet time!

Well, I have put on 12 lbs in 5 weeks since I stopped being so strict.

Time to get strict again. I have a goal, lose 25lbs by August 12, the day we leave for Playa del Carmen for our vacation. I want to look awesome there on the beach instead of looking like a washed up sea creature of unknown origin!

I also have my 30th high school reunion on August 1, even more the reason to get it off.

Here we go. 1800 calories a day, 1 hour of cardio and continue to lift heavy weight. I can DO this!

Still dreaming

I have found that my dreaming of moving to Mexico or Central America when I retire has not lessened at all.  I am still looking at websites, blogs and books about living in those areas.  I am in the process of refinancing my house to lower my rate to 4.75%, and am planning to put the difference in my payment into my IRA.  If I do that right away, I won't miss the money!

Also I met with the director of the Verbo Nicaragua Development Fund over lunch on Monday.  He gave me a great overview of some of the humanitarian missions being done in Nicaragua by his organization.  We have tentatively decided that I should go with him in late August or early September.  I have figured out a simple system that the businesses could use to track income and expenses, so I should be able to teach the workers pretty easily.  I look forward to the trip!

Colombian food is awesome!

Just got home from my dinner date with my old band teacher, Mike Kirby. Wow, our 4 hours passed in a flash. I had a platter of food, way too much too eat,but I gave it my best. The dish was called Bandeja Paisa, and it was definitely not a heart healthy meal. A small piece of steak, sausage, chicharrones (really thick bacon almost burned), refried beans, rice, a small half -avocado, a fried plantain, and one fried egg on top of the rice. Gut buster! Also tried an excellent Colombian beer called Aguila.


Mike and I had a lot of fun talking about the joys and pitfalls of learning Spanish, and I am glad we have reconnected. Next time, though, we have to speak Spanish a lot more than we did tonight.

a blast from the past

Tonight at 6, I will be meeting my Jr High band teacher for supper at El Desorden, a local restaurant serving Colombian cuisine. I have not seen Mr. Kirby in 30 or so years, and I can't wait to catch up with him. Facebook placed us back in contact after all these years. What is really interesting is, Mr. Kirby has recently taken up Spanish ( 4 semesters at a local communtiy college), and we are going to try to speak it some tonight. He is single, and travels a lot, just recently arriving back from a visit with friends in Venezuela. This should be a lot of fun tonight.

One of my clients is a ministry to Nicaragua called Verbo Nicaragua Development Fund.  The director has asked me to go to Managua in August to give a seminar in basic accounting to some of the micro-businesses the ministry has helped start up.  He told me that many people in Nicaragua have no concept of simple profit and loss principles, even the one that says you have to sell something for more than it costs you in order to make a profit.

This is exciting to me.  I am not sure God orchestrates our lives in a puppeteer fashion, but I do believe he has circumstances arise which give us choices, and opportunities.  I am just so happy that I will get to visit a prospective retirement country and do something good while I am there. Next step is to come up with about $1,000 to go!

Now I have to overcome my fear of public speaking, and figure out what I am going to say in a couple of days in order to teach these people some accounting! 

At least I have a few months to figure it out, and to learn as much as possible about Nicaragua.  I might even be able to get my Spanish skills up by then!

Where to begin?

Wow, I have a blog!  Now I just have to figure out what to write.  I am 47, married for almost 25 years, have 2 boys in their early 20's, a wonderful 10 year old daughter, and am a CPA in a small firm.  A CPA for 26 years, going through the motions, not passionate at all about it, just doing it to earn a paycheck.  Wanderlust runs in my genes, seriously, my father had at least 15 jobs as I grew up, among them:  truck driver, Army corporal, Methodist minister, milk delivery driver, cook on a tugboat, insurance salesman, disc jockey, business equipment salesman, the list goes on and on. Me, I have the wanderlust too, but have controlled it well.  I don't hate being a CPA, but it is certainly no passion of mine.

Now that I have 2 sons almost out of college, and am rapidly approaching the big 50th birthday (well, 2 1/2 years from now), I am finally realizing: I will never be able to retire if I stay in the USA.  I have about $30,000 in my IRA, no equity in my house and 28 years left to pay on it, huge health insurance premiums, a fairly low salary, and not a lot of time to save that $1 million I need in order to retire.  Because we decided to go to Playa del Carmen for our 25th anniversary, I began looking at web info about Mexico, and one thing led to another.  I have stumbled upon the possibility of retiring in Mexico or Central America.  This would really be a dream come true for me, and the much lower cost is just a bonus.

My wife, much to my surprise, did not laugh and eliminate the possibility right off the bat.  She asked if it were really possible to retire on social security alone down there, and I said, I think so. She then commented that she would need to learn Spanish, to which I responded, you and I have 15 years to learn it (I need to re-learn it).

We both are fairly down-to-earth, and don't need a lot of "stuff", so we may be able to pull it off, and be happy in Mexico. Another thing we want to be able to do is volunteer work, and Lord knows, there is plenty of that to do, no matter what country we live in.  Going somewhere inexpensive, where we could retire at 62, and have some great years left, to have fun again, chase dreams, help others, and be like kids again in some ways, has great appeal to me.

Anyway, I have to somehow make a plan of action for this, and save as much money as possible in my IRA for the next 15 years, and hope SS is still around.  I had resigned myself to the fact that I would never retire, so I really gave up on saving for it a few years back.  Maybe with this hope of going south, I can get motivated to do some serious saving.