They’re homebodies. And they’re affiliative, depending on social and emotional bonds to get through daily life…or so we assume, because when they travel they like to travel with others. And by they, we mean men.
Editors for International Living—the on-line and print publication that encourages retirees to find new adventures and, crucially, save money by relocating outside the United States—claim that women travel solo more than men. Also, women boomers head out more than other cohorts. And, they say, more single women are retiring overseas.
This is interesting and believable. After all, many baby boomer women are retiring from careers in which they learned to travel on their own. They are comfortable in bus stations and airport lounges. They are travel-savvy, which we can guess makes them generally less fearful. And if they want to continue traveling, there’s a decent chance they’ll have to do it on their own, because there are good odds they won’t be married. “”Marriage rates are down across the board. And among baby boomers, fewer women than men remarry once they’re divorced or widowed.”
One reason for putting down roots in foreign soil is security. Oddly, you can move to a place where not everyone looks like you, and you don’t speak the language fluently (or at all), and the nuances of culture aren’t perfectly clear to you—and you can still be safer than many big cities in America. Maybe most big cities. Obviously, you can’t flaunt local standards of decorum and you should always be careful on a quiet street in the wee hours. That said, one female retiree quoted in International Living’s Going Solo: How and Where to Enjoy Life Abroad as a Single claims that she’s never uncomfortable wandering the streets of Penang, Malaysia at midnight.
The sun and adventure sounds great…but probably the biggest reason for becoming an expat retiree is financial.
Americans are really bad at saving money. So when many people retire (or when they lose their job and can’t get a new one because they are unappealingly aged), they find they can’t live on their sole source of income, which is their Social Security check.
This is particularly true of female retirees. As the New York Times points out, “Across all age groups, women have considerably less income in retirement than men, according to a report from the National Institute on Retirement Security. For women age 65 and older, their income is typically 25 percent lower than that of men. As men and women age, the gap widens to 44 percent by age 80.”
One solution is to lean on children or other family members. Another is to radically economize, meaning you move to a crappy apartment in a sad or dangerous neighborhood and reacquaint yourself with beans, ramen and bottom-shelf wine in the big-gulp bottles.
Or you could move to a country where your modest monthly check covers essentials (by which we mean the occasional steak and mid-shelf wine in unembarrassing decanters) and maybe leaves a few dollars left over so you can travel stateside once or twice a year to visit your pasty, malnourished friends and family. The magazine is in the habit of painting rosy pictures of life abroad—think Caribbean islands, Panama, Ecuador—where one can live for $1,500 to $3,000 a month. Skepticism is in order here, so you’ll probably want to visit before you sell all your worldly possessions and hop a plane. But do hop on a plane, ladies.
