Retiring In Paradise? Before You Move, Make A Plan B

One couple followed their dreams to Mexico. Here’s what no one told them about starting a new life abroad.

- Suzanne Mcgee

IN THE SUMMER OF 2012, Brad Johnson and his wife joined the thousands of Americans who each year decide to spend their retirement living overseas.

They rented out their house in Phoenix, got a six-month tourist visa that they anticipated renewing indefinitely, packed up their two cars, and set off southward, to the first of a series of rental homes in and around Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. “It was absolutely wonderful,” says Johnson, now 70 years old.

The Johnsons had traveled in Mexico before and welcomed the chance to put down roots in a place they enjoyed, with a lower cost of living that would help them stretch their savings. They had plenty of company: As of August, some 680,000 beneficiaries received Social Security payments at a foreign address, the best way to gauge the trend in retiring overseas.

What’s tougher to determine is how many of those overseas adventurers become “boomerang expatriates,” as happened to the Johnsons. Less than 2½ years after making their move to Mexico, they were back in the U.S., dividing their time between Phoenix and Stockton, Calif., where Johnson’s mother-in-law, then in her nineties, needed their help. Four years after their return, there are more ties keeping them in the States: two grandchildren, a 2-year-old and an infant. It has changed Johnson’s idea of retirement. “We planned for a lot of stuff, but not for my wife realizing that her mother needed her eldest daughter back in Stockton,” Johnson says.