Guam - A Paradise Found. Again!

THE TRUTH ABOUT OUR PHILIPPINES DREAM.

Our dream was to retire early, to the Islands of the Philippines... where we could both relax and take life easy. To bring our newer viewers

Our dream was to retire early, to the Islands of the Philippines... where we could both relax and take life easy. To bring our newer viewers up to speed, it was 2011 and we had just recovered from The Great Recession. For me personally, being fully vested in the real estate business and navigating through it all made for some very stressful times. Teri's business was literally recession proof and came away unscathed, but for me, the unpredictability going forward was more than I wanted to deal with. By the time 2012 rolled around, we had reached a point in our lives where had the opportunity to get off the great hamster wheel, so we made the decision to bail out early from the work force and retire to the Philippines.

THE GREAT RECOVERY

After a year of planning and the liquidation of our major assets, a we were enroute to the Philippines. When we began our transition from the U.S. to the Philippines, we welcomed the big change. We arrived in Samar in 2013 when we were still relatively young (I was 58 and Teri was 53) and knowing that we needed to let go of our expectations. Shortly after arriving, we soon finished construction on the home we had started in 2008. We shipped our entire household from the U.S. Mainland, and we had all the creature comforts we had in our U.S. home and more than we could possibly need at the new homestead. We landed softly and dove in hard and we were enjoying all the advantages of a warm tropical climate, a lower cost of living, and a great easy-going lifestyle. It definitely turned out that life was much more relaxed, absent of all the stressful financial woes that made living a middle-class lifestyle in the U.S. difficult. We spent the next 4 years there on what can be best described as our great recovery.

ROSE COLORED GLASSES

We originally believed that we had it all figured out, but in reality, it was only a pipe dream. During the years we spent there, we never shied away from doing anything that was difficult or uneasy. We traveled, made new friends, and spent much time with and getting reacquainted with family. We were enjoying life to its fullest. By our own choosing, we pursued a lifestyle where we had to voluntarily endure levels of suffering in order to enjoy it. In retrospect, we chose this burden because it had a valuable and tangible meaning - which was being close to family - family that Teri had been away from for over 27 years. We pressured ourselves to believe that our new life would be utopic, but those thoughts succumbed to new realities over time.

During those first few years, life was good on the new homefront. Living in a such a welcoming new culture was a big change, and the reconnection with family was rewarding. But we soon found ourselves longing for the simple everyday conveniences that we were accustomed to living in the modern world.

THE INCONVENIENT TRUTH

Life in this part of the world was anything but normal. There was almost this inherent guarantee that tomorrow would be different than today, and we found it increasingly difficult to plan and live our lives accordingly. On any given day, we could find ourselves without water, electricity, internet, phone service or even cable TV... each or all, without notice. And that was just at home. The absence of consistency and reliability outside the homestead also began weighing on us. The realities of day-to-day life in the Philippines changed us over time, and we were better off than we were in America but living there only highlighted our ideas of what a good, comfortable retirement should be.

Over time we realized that life in the Philippines was burdened with uncertainties like recurring brown outs, monsoon rains and disastrous tropical storms. We missed having satisfactory places to eat and shop. Supply chain issues were a constant and a lack of good customer service was experienced on almost all fronts. Driving in the Philippines is always a challenging and risky business. There are poor roads, bad traffic with little or no enforcement and, even worse, unskilled and unlicensed drivers. There are traffic hazards, and then there are traffic hazards. One of the bigger challenges I found living in the province was that communicating with everyone around me was tasking. And if life in the province wasn't frustrating enough, the lack emergency services and decent medical care became a valid concern with aging.

CRITICAL THINKING EMPLOYED

The realities of life in Samar changed us. Over time it also changed our expectations of a comfortable retirement. After making several R&R trips to Guam during the 4 years we lived in the Philippines, our priorities began shifting. We began to re-focus on making our quality of life even better. We both concluded that to find our happy place, we had to give up the narrative and that version of ourselves that valued family and adventure over everything else. We eventually and mutually agreed that we needed a reset - a reboot that assured us a level of certainty and a more fulfilling lifestyle. We worked our entire lives to be able to enjoy our retirement... and as such, we decided to look elsewhere for that peace of mind.

We concluded that we needed a return to a more stable lifestyle. A life with more familiar commonalities. After making several trips around the Philippines looking at alternative locations, we eventually came full circle and revised our retirement perspectives entirely.

We moved to Guam.

Paradise Comes in Different Flavors!

Guam is considered to be maritime SE Asia, but it is the USA. The welcoming and friendly southeast Asian culture that we came to embellish in the Philippines is prevalent here, and the island provided us with a better sense of safety and security. Drivers are normal. Traffic is normal. The 9-1-1 system actually exists here. Reliable power, water and internet are hugely appreciated. Guam returned that normalization we sorely missed in our lives. Food, transportation, communications, activities, and medical care.

This is not to say we don't confront any challenges here. Guam is much more expensive than the Philippines and we have to deal with some of the same cost issues that align with living in a more modern world, such as housing, transportation, shopping, insurance, and food costs. Then there is everything a tropical climate can throw at you, from the heat and humidity to tropical storms and such. Just a couple years ago, we endured the furry that Super Typhoon Mawar threw at us but, infrastructure-wise, Guam is much more hardened than any province in the Philippines. Recovery from such disastrous events here is much less protracted. If the Philippines taught us one important value, it's to take the bad with the good, and in Guam, the good far outweighs the bad.

Here in Guam we no longer have to deal with many of the inconveniences mentioned earlier, and our concerns for decent health care have been satisfied. Now that both of us fall under the Medicare umbrella, and with supplemental insurance in place, we can rest easy knowing that our well-health concerns are satisfied. Now we can concentrate more fully on the enjoyment of life, which is all anyone could hope for.

We make multiple trips a year back to our homestead in Samar, and we fully embrace the time we spend there. But Guam is our home now, and this beautiful little island in the middle of the Pacific provides us with everything we need to fulfill the comfortable retirement we always envisioned.

We Learned Something About Ourselves.

When one can learn to embrace their fears, step willingly into the unknown and make the necessary adjustments, it's easy to affirm how much better life can be. We learned that life can be adventurous once you stop trying so desperately to control it. But in the end, satisfying our desired lifestyle needs was difficult to control and maintain while living in the Philippines.

Living in this part of the world will change you... and most times for the better. The SE Asian culture is welcoming by nature. Attitudes here are generically friendly and happiness is centric. Guam provides us with an American-based lifestyle with the SE Asian core-values which we came to embrace. It is a culture of Chamorro, Filipino, Pacific Islander, bits of Thai, Korean and Japanese mixed in... absent the divisive and confrontational ideologies of the western world.

Looking back now, with all the "tribalism" in the U.S. that has come to bare over the last 12 years, and witnessing the continued deterioration of core values across the U.S., moving abroad was a good decision.

We've found our space, and it's one that we're very comfortable with. For me, it's quite "Gilligan-Esque!"