The only affordable retirement for most Americans isn’t in America

[n2doc]

Christine Schofield, mother of three, disappeared the day after the Bowl-A-Thon: February 13, 2012. She’d co-chaired the annual fundraiser with Holly Riordan at the Brunswick Zone in the Chicago suburb of Woodridge. The Grand Prize at the auction was a wheelbarrow full of wine bottles, which Christine wreathed in flowers. Altogether, the event raised more than $35,000 for We Grow Dreams, a not-for-profit greenhouse providing employment for teenagers with disabilities.

Sometime after 7pm, Christine and Holly hugged through puffy coats in the parking lot. It was a frozen February, even by Midwest standards. They’d been close for decades, meeting first as stage moms when their kids were in school plays. Then, as kids became teens who dabbled in selling marijuana and using cocaine, Christine had stepped in as an unlicensed, pull-no-punches drug counselor, having been through several 12-step programs herself.

But as Christine stood there holding Holly, heir to a family fortune built through early stakes in the companies Waste Management and Boston Chicken, Christine knew they would soon enter a phase in which they could no longer walk arm in arm as mothers: retirement.

According to the Pew Research Center, 2011 marked the first year that Baby Boomers turned 65. Though still only 52, Christine could feel her doom impending, along with many of the 10,000 Boomers who would be turning 65 every day for the next 18 years.

A petite, blunt, coffee-fueled personality with a smoker’s voice and blinding white dental veneers, Christine was something of a novelty, even among her “peeps.” For a while, she had been passing as upper middle class in one of the nation’s richest suburbs—Naperville, Illinois. She worked odd jobs remodeling her friends’ middle-class mansions and stretched her husband’s low-six-figure salary to make do. But carpooling and kids’ field trips and dinners with other parents were part of citizenship in this suburban Disneyland, where the median home price was over $320,000, and nothing came free. Now, with the kids out of the house and her marriage crumbling, the time to crack into savings loomed, and Christine sensed she wouldn’t be joining friends like Holly in the Great Valley of assisted living.

more

http://qz.com/546416/a-21st-century-american-retirement-running-away-to-belize-because-you-cant-afford-america/

[geek tragedy]

1. Um, this woman dropped $600K on a place in Belize in her 50's

The owners, Dean Cabral and his soon-to-be ex, Ruth Turner, had run the inn since 2002. But they were divorcing and splitting assets. They listed Dianni’s on the market for $595,000 and its private beachfront, separately, for $225,000.

Christine met Dean first and then Ruth. The two women hit it off. “She thought that this would bring her family back together,” Ruth told me, “and so I was really happy for her.” On February 20—five days after arriving in Belize—Christine signed an agreement to buy the beachfront for $150,000 and Dianni’s Guest House for $450,000, all without calling her husband or friends or family members. “Both of the properties, both of them,” laughed Christine. “Like a crazy woman.”

She's incredibly privileged.

And yes, $600k will buy you a nice home in Ecuador or Panama. It'll buy you one in both, actually.

[Doctor_J]

2. I think that's what we're going to do

We still have few years to go before Medicare and SS. After 35 years of work we have decent 401k's that would be livable except for the Middleman Multiplication and Profit Protection Act. So we'll probably head somewhere not too far away so we can still see our descendants regularly, but a place that has a civilized healthcare model.