Tag: Bahia

Daily Life In Panama

Our good friends Ray and Diane left to return home on Tuesday, but not before we showed them a couple of more of our top picks for retirement residences. We have made the decision to make a permanent move to Panama. The real estate market is tough here. Supply and demand are badly out of check and it is a buyers market. We will not buy a home here until we have had 12 months to fine tune our must haves and have not list. Our first step to that end is to find a top pick community and try to rent there for a year prior to completing the purchase. The buyers market is likely to continue because there is a huge supply of new build condo projects on this stretch of the city beaches 1-2 hours west of Panama City. Once we move down here we will be in a better position to find a bargain. Rio Mar was the top choice for quite some time until we faced the reality that the price was above our comfort. Our second choice is Casa Mar and it lies just to the west across a river from Rio Mar. Casa Mar provides almost all the same benefits at a lower price point. In addition there is a 9 hole golf course, walking trails, a children space (splash pool with water slides), and increased privacy. The entire project is on 190 acres and has a future shopping plaza at the gate. It is also closer to Rio Hato where we will find lower prices on groceries and other daily needs. It is close enough to Coronado to easily make the journey if we would need the clinic or a visit to the dentist. We also showed our friends Bahia. Bahia is a 2 building high rise in Nuevo Gorgona which lies just to the east of Coronado. We were able to look at the condo directly next door to the guys from Dallas who bought their condo on International House Hunters. We did not meet them, but you can check out the YouTube video of their house hunt. We shared it previously in our post titled We survived Carnival  . We do feel like a real life episode of House Hunters. Our episode would be more like Beach Front Bargain Hunt though. Seriously, The Bahia was a bit loud and lacked privacy. The unit was a bit smaller than we wanted and, while beautifully decorated, it was dark. We have ruled out Bahia. We will not maintain 2 residences even though we will be renting here in Panama. Before we make any decisions here we will be selling our house in the States.

We spend a little time at the pool and/or on the beach every day. We also continue to have our hour with the Spanish tutor weekly. Our Espanol is coming along well and we try to use our skills daily with one another. We plan to continue meeting with the tutor weekly by Skype once we return home. We are making arrangements to meet with an insurance agent in Panama to get actual insurance quotes for health insurance. We are currently paying $1267 per month for health insurance in the States. We think once we get settled here in Panama we will cut that cost by about $1000 per month for similar coverage. We can cover our monthly expenses here with that savings alone. We will share our actual expenses in future posts. One of the biggest reasons for our move is to save money. Everything isn’t cheaper here, but if you get out of the tourist areas you will find the cost of living to be less. I got the best haircut ever in a Barbaria  for $5 (I was the only gringo in there). I also have an appointment on Thursday with a dentist for a routine teeth cleaning. It will cost 1/3 of my dentist back home. More about that next time. Jen had her hair done at a very high end salon, that caters to Americans and Canadians, yesterday. Her cost was less than her salon back home and she was thrilled with the result. We had Chinese take out for lunch yesterday. It was delicious and priced about the same as we would pay in the States. Tonight our friends and family back home will be changing the clocks for daylight savings time. In Panama we are only 9 degrees from the equator. The result is that we have 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of night every day, so daylight savings time doesn’t happen here. We don’t change our clocks.

The crowd inside was drinking beer and watching futball (soccer). The haircut was perfect. No English was spoken. He had a blast.
The Dental Office in the Coronado Shopping center is just upstairs from the casino
There are shopping centers on 3 corners of the entrance to Coronado.
The McDonalds is just in front of the Super 99 Supermarket.
The biggest shopping center is on the north side of the International Highway. There is a 3 level store in the rear that puts Walmart to shame. Jen found an upscale hairdresser in this plaza that is awesome.
Panama style “Walmart” el Machetazo. There is also a casino in this shopping center, right next to the grocery store.

We had a former co-worker of Jen’s here Thursday with her family. Her family was a delight to meet and we enjoyed sharing our afternoon entertaining them on the beach and at the pool. They are staying in the mountains northeast of Panama City. It sounds as if they have had a great vacation here in Panama.

On Sunday we are planning to take off for our next adventure. Boquete and David are about a 5 hour drive northeast from Coronado. We planned this adventure and posted what we are likely to find there in December of 2017. Check out that post in our archive or click the link  #InSearchOfEternalSummer . We will be returning to Coronado on Tuesday after we go to the Tuesday Market in Boquete. We also hope to check out more of the country along the way. Panama and its people are beautiful and very welcoming.

Please continue to follow along. A great deal of time goes into this blog, and we want to share our experiences. Please drop us a note or comment if there is something you want to see or learn about Panama. Today’s Spanish lesson is two simple words…Se Vende. Translated it means For Sale. When we return to Michigan we will be putting our home on Gravel Lake up for sale.

Dios Bendiga,

Greg and Jen

We survived Carnival

As I write it is early morning, and I am enjoying the sound of the ocean surf and the cool breeze coming through the windows. We are in an area that it is really hard not to love. This time of year we have a lot of wind which keeps the humidity down. They call it Summer. Since arriving we have not seen a bit of rain, and we have enjoyed the pool or the beach every day. Our windows are always open and there are no screens. At first we couldn’t believe it, but there are no bugs here at ocean front. We absolutely love the balcony in the early morning and late evening, but it gets unbearably hot for a couple of hours in the afternoon when the sun is high, and to the West (our unit has a western exposure). People on the East side of the building say that theirs is hot in the morning. Both have advantages and disadvantages. This is all information valuable when looking for a beach front condo.

We did survive Carnival and hope none of you are expecting to see pictures of parades, floats, and scantly dressed people partying in the street. We did not venture to the activities. It is a party that happens across the entire country. The government closes down and many private business chose to close as well. Traffic is everything we have been told and just moving about during Carnival is near impossible. There were fireworks here in the complex and all our neighbors who own vacation homes were here. That meant that there were several predominant languages being spoken and a few families. The Internationale Highway is a 4 lane divided highway with limited places to cross from 1 side to the other. It is not limited access. When traffic gets heavy they close the places to cross. Just about anywhere you would go involves using this road, so mostly we stayed nearby.  Monday we ventured out to take a look at one of the places that may be nice to live. It was to our West and travel there and back was tolerable. I can’t say the same for yesterday when the Panamanians started heading home. We ventured out to see another place early yesterday morning and returning the traffic was gridlocked on the highway. The only way back for us was to get on the Highway heading east toward Panama City, with the traffic, and drive about 30 Km to the first place we were allowed to turn around. When we got back to our road we were not allowed to turn (cross traffic) which caused us to travel back several Km West before being allowed to turn around. When we got way West of Coronado we decided to take a look at another place before heading home. Every trip during heavy traffic has to be carefully planned. We were home by 1:30, had a late lunch and spent the rest of the day by the pool on the roof.

Everyone Heading Home
Everyone Heading Home

We are sure all of you are interested in what we have found as far as homes go. One thing everyone needs to know is that if you’re planning to move to Panama one should rent for at least a year. This will give time to make sure the place is right for you. It is a buyers market here currently and real estate prices are a little lower than they have been. The buyers market may continue for several years so if you buy now you may lose money if you decide to sell too soon. Many places can be rented out weekly or monthly to tourists, should you decide to move back home. Remember it isn’t easy to be a long distance landlord. All that being said, we are interested in finding out basically what our dollar will buy and learning what is important and not important to us. As we travel and explore the country over the next few weeks we will be taking a look at homes and condo’s to get familiar with the market in each area. If we settle on an area and decide to move we will rent in that area until we find the perfect place to buy. We are feeling like our own episode of House Hunters International right now. I embedded a YouTube video below, which is an episode of that show filmed right here near where we are staying. We met a delightful lady from Canada, who has lived here now for several years. She is a sales agent for the developer who built 2 of the condo projects where we have looked. One of the projects is Bahia and she was the actual selling agent for the guys in this video.  We will be touring the condo directly next to them in the next few weeks (it is occupied by tourists now). This video will give you a good feel for the Coronado area. Time will tell, but it may be too busy for us here. CLICK HERE TO WATCH VIDEO

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We hope you took the 20 or so minutes to watch the video. It really does paint an accurate picture of what we are finding on the ground here. We are continuing with our Spanish tutor today and heading out to the Azuero Peninsula tomorrow. It may a great time to look back at our post of October 24, 2017 when our excursion planning began.  On Friday we are planning another visit to a nearby condo project with a local agent. Our friends here are interested in buying there and the agent has come highly recommended. We will keep you all informed as we work through the process of looking for a place where we may one day live.

Thank-you for once again checking out our awesome adventure. We are still in awe of this whole thing. We hope you are all entertained and enjoying as much as we are. Please like, share and post questions. We love hearing from all of you. We just surpassed 2000 visits to our blog and we have new visitors signing on daily. Without all of you, it certainly wouldn’t be as much fun to write.

Buenos Dias,

Greg and Jen