It was an easy decision for us to decide to retire in Panama. We continue to learn; and will continue to share. We just renewed our domain for 5 years and will continue to operate under the same address even though it is no longer a question for us. We realize that many of our readers are doing their own due diligence and are reading for information. We have shared our experience and it is mostly positive. For those following along who want to learn from our mistakes, we are trying to share those as well. We have done extensive research so, fortunately our mistakes have been few. We are currently on the ground in Panama. We have completed the visa process and are officially expats in Panama. Our visa is issued based on a pension we receive in the States. The Panamanian government gives us a ton of perks to get us here spending the pension. Please, feel free to check out our archive post from November 2017 Pensionado Visa Process to get a feel for the visa process and the benefits. We are finding that the whole thing is very much as we expected. Keep in mind that we used a very reputable attorney for this process. The government does frequently change things here so when things change we just have to accept it. We also have to learn how to take full advantage of our discounts. One example is Copa Airlines. They offer a 25% discount for expats with a pensionado visa. You have to purchase tickets in person at a Copa ticket counter or a sales office. This was one of our hard lessons. We purchased tickets on-line to return to Michigan in a few weeks and went to a sales office within 24 hours after purchase to receive the discount. Because we had already paid for our tickets, Copa would not give us the discount. Lesson learned…cost $320. We have responded to every legitimate question from our readers. If you are interested in a recommendation about anything we write about, send a message and we will do our best to accommodate.
We are hesitant to say we are fully moved from the States, as we still have our home there so officially we have two homes. The sale of our house in Michigan was solid and after almost six weeks our buyers financing failed. We lost the most valuable window of time to sell lake property in Michigan. With the home back on the market we are committed to making frequent trips back to keep things moving along. In Panama, we are renting. This takes the financial sting out of the fact that our Michigan house is still not sold. To put things in perspective for cost: we save enough on insurances in Panama to more than pay our rent. Really, nothing here costs more than in the States, except maybe electricity. Yesterday I bought 2 pairs of flip-flops and 3 t-shirts (practically all I wear here) for $9.58. Groceries cost about the same. We get a lot of fresh seafood and there is very few preservatives in anything. We find vegetables at the market straight from the farm. We get fruit (pineapples, melons, avocado, bananas, etc) at stands along the roadside. Our lifestyle/diet is better with very little effort.
We have started settling into the community here. Coronado Bible Church has provided us with relationships that extend far beyond the community of faith. We have been able to find English-speaking people to refer us to nearly everything one needs on a regular basis. Yesterday we had our car serviced at a shop owned by an American family. They did a great job. We have also attended a couple of meetings of English speaking business owners here on the Panamanian Riviera. These meetings are intended to help people like us find local vendors who make it easy for us to live here without speaking much Spanish. Even though it isn’t really a business, the folks in this group are showing a great interest in our blog. We are connecting with our Panama insurance agent later this afternoon. It appears by the quotes we saw, that we will be insuring our car (full coverage) and getting a renters policy for a total of under $600 per year.
We have been able to go into Panamanian businesses and successfully communicate. We bought a 2nd key for our car at the Nissan Dealership yesterday. Some things are not without challenge. The key had to go to a locksmith to be cut. We will have to return to the dealer to have the key-fob programmed. The dealership is over an hour from our house and we had to schedule an appointment for the programming. Our cable speed was 5mb and we were having a bit of trouble streaming U.S. TV programs. A visit to the cable company proved to be a challenge, but we were able to up our speed to 100mb for about $10 per month; problem solved.
In our last post we alluded to having to renew our drivers licenses. We bravely went to SERTRACEN (Panama’s DMV) to renew our drivers licenses. Without an interpreter, we had success. There was no English-speaking people in there, and we were able to make ourselves understood. Jen is much better at this than I, but we are both working on our Spanish daily.
One other experience that merits mentioning is our trip to Panapass. Panapass is the toll tag for toll roads here. There are no attended lanes so it is important to have this for using the toll roads. We had to go to the place in order to have a new tag installed on the car. The story was the same there and we found nobody who spoke English. We got it done and set out for our commute home. The traffic had cranked up pretty bad and it was difficult to navigate out of the place. Using our navigation app Waze, we went right through a transportation hub. There were hundreds of buses, taxi cabs and people walking everywhere. Waze kept taking us around and around until we were nearly crazy. We finally figured out that with five lanes of traffic gridlock all going in the same direction we just needed to be in a different lane to get where we were going.
We find ourselves considering every day an adventure. Most days we set out to do far more than we actually accomplish. It is beautiful here so we love to spend time at the pool or beach. This time of year there are very few tourists here so we have the place to ourselves. Last night we enjoyed fresh lobster at the beach club Terazza Restaurante. There were only 3 other couples in the place. As we complete this post it lacks photos. We will gather some appropriate photos today and publish later this afternoon. We appreciate that all of you are checking back, commenting, and asking questions. We know it sounds like a broken record, but please share and like if you’re reading on Facebook. If you haven’t joined the blog, please do so to get e-mail notification when a new post is available. This also helps us recognize our audience. We will never spam you, and you can unsubscribe anytime.
Chau,
Greg and Jen
