Time For A New Transition

This weekend was a most interesting one. It actually started early in the week. I was talking to one of my close business colleagues and mentioned to him how frustrated I was feeling about life at the moment. As he is works in financial planning, he asked me 1) what was frustrating me and 2) what could I do to change it.

Good advice. The kind I give to my clients all the time LOL. So I did just that. And what came up was what I've said consistently over the last few months. I am missing the balance I had when I was doing all my travel. I have slipped back into the imbalance of working all the time where I was before my transition from full-time work. This was mostly just fate. The biggest being the effect of the pandemic on Theodora and all the extra work necessary that would not have taken place without the pandemic. So I now knew what the problem was.

On Friday, my friend and I spoke again. I relayed my thoughts. His next advice was, "Well, what are you going to do about it?" Don't you just hate it when your confidants give you your own advice?

What was I going to do about? Well fate in the form of newly minted Middle Eastern Princess, Pu' al-Isha aka Daughter #2 who from her quarantined apartment in Erbil, Kurdistan, Iraq out of boredom, sent Wife and I a link on something called the Golden Visa.

The Golden Visa is a program that for a certain size of investment allows you to get permanent residency in another country. Pu had sent one on Greece. This came to us around Noon time on Saturday. Wife and I were doing our own thing during the afternoon. Sometime during that period, I actually looked at the link and realized that the site referred to many countries that had these programs. This really intrigued me. Wife came downstairs. I mentioned to her my discovery. She replied that she had already gone a step further and looked at the countries and identified three as being the most cost effective for us. There was this moment of silence as we realized we were both rushing down the same logic path.

Conversations over dinner confirmed, we were ready. We are not happy where we are. We are unhappy with the on-going divisiveness in the U.S. We both doubted we could travel as we have in the past because of our physical deterioration. But if we were in a place already where travel was much easier. And I realized that I am really ready to totally give up work. That the only thing that really motivates me now is coaching and mentoring the Theodora women.

By Sunday, we had had conversations with all our children who were in one way or another very supportive. We threw together initial financial analyses and built out a 'to do' spreadsheet of things we would need to research. At first blush the numbers looked totally doable. There are a ton of details to be considered. We won't really be able to do serious research until we can travel again and actually go and look at where we might consider being (somewhere in southern Greece). But there is this palpable excitement.

Wife and I have done this more than once in our life - just picked up and moved to somewhere totally different. We have been in New Mexico for 27 years. We are ready for a change. We want one more challenge and adventure in our life. It is going to take a lot of effort, research and planning. It may not come to pass. But I am reminded of when we first came to New Mexico. We had an instinctive feeling we wanted to be here. It took two years, research and unplanned for events but we made the move. I am feeling the same way about this.