Live Like a King for Dollars a Day
Americans can live like kings without spending big bucks?
PANAMA CITY, Panama, Nov. 2, 2006 — -- Joe Urby and his wife, Stacey Waldren, call it their four-year plan. They live in San Antonio, Texas, with their three children. But when their youngest son heads off to college in four years, the Urbys plan to pull up stakes in Texas and head to Panama.
"We want to make some decisions now, so that four years from now we've got a whole new life planned out for us," says Joe, a self-employed businessman.
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At age 47, Urby and Waldren are too young to think of retiring. They do not plan to move to this small Central American country to sit idly by the sea.
"My plan is really to take over my life again and for us to reinvent our life," says Waldren.
Waldren and Urby are just two of 250 people who paid close to $1,000 to attend a four-day conference in Panama City, Panama, on the secrets of retiring -- or reinventing life -- in exotic locales like Panama. The conference is sponsored by a group called International Living, which says it is in the business of helping people make their dreams come true. Most of the attendees are Americans.
"We have the retirees or people who are thinking about retiring," says Suzan Haskins, International Living's resident Panama specialist as she checks off the different groups at the conference. "We have the second-home market. We also have just pure investors. All are people who are looking for an opportunity to buy something they can't buy in the United States."
And that's the common thread here: affordable retirement, affordable investment.
Take a trip 45 minutes out of Panama City to the seaside community of Coronado, and Panama's appeal becomes obvious.Fred Morris, a retired minister, and Ron Davidson, a former computer programmer, take a spin in a golf cart at sunset. Davidson and his wife have just built a three-bedroom home that backs onto a PGA-certified golf course. The beach is a few blocks away, the club swimming pool is just down the street, so are the riding stables.
In Florida, this gated-community lifestyle would be within reach only for millionaires, but here the mathematics are very different.
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