#48 – Financial Freedom For Expats with Edd and Cynthia Staton

Wes Moss [00:00:53]:
We found Ed and Cynthia living abroad as expats in retirement in South America. Something that is intriguing for so many Americans. Maybe it’s a little cheaper, maybe more adventurous, but we’re going to find out today the ins and outs of living abroad as an expat in retirement from Ed and Cynthia. Ed and Cynthia. Are you guys in Ecuador right now or are you back in the United States? Where are you?

Edd Staton [00:01:24]:
No, we are sitting in my office in Ecuador, actually, in Cuenca.

Cynthia Staton [00:01:28]:
Cuenca. Ecuador, yeah.

Wes Moss [00:01:30]:
What’s the name of it again?

Edd Staton [00:01:31]:
Cuenca. C U E N C A.

Wes Moss [00:01:35]:
And how is your Spanish?

Edd Staton [00:01:37]:
It is functional.

Wes Moss [00:01:39]:
Functional. Okay.

Edd Staton [00:01:41]:
It will never be fluent.

Cynthia Staton [00:01:43]:
It’s a we. What we like to say, Wes, that we can navigate the whole food scene and we can always get home.

Wes Moss [00:01:51]:
You always get home and order what you would like and find the cervicios. Right. Or wait, now that’s beer. The. Well, what’s the, what’s the bathrooms? Don Delos. Servicios or banos. Right. I just remember being in Spain.

Wes Moss [00:02:09]:
I think that was like the first thing I learned is where are the bathrooms?

Edd Staton [00:02:12]:
The last thing, too.

Wes Moss [00:02:15]:
All right, so. So you’re. So you’re living this, you’re preparing for retirement and you’re all of a sudden you start thinking, maybe we can go somewhere outside the United States. What did that tell me about how you guys were prepping for retirement and then what started to. What led you to sort of think maybe it’d be fun to go to another country for a while and so take me through that journey.

Edd Staton [00:02:40]:
Well, if it were really that much of a Pollyanna journey, it would be much more. Well, that would be a different version, but that’s not actually the way it happened.

Wes Moss [00:02:49]:
Let’s hear the unvarnished truth.

Cynthia Staton [00:02:51]:
Okay.

Edd Staton [00:02:52]:
We were in our prime earning years in Las Vegas with what we thought was a solid retirement plan in place. Unfortunately, a lot of it involved real estate. And in 2008 happened. So we went from the peak of our careers and a solid portfolio, blah, blah, blah, to our careers disappearing, our house losing two thirds of its value, and our investments and savings plummeting by the day as well. So it wasn’t like we were sitting around thinking, gosh, wouldn’t it be fun? We were, we were in a desperate financial situation at that time, and we came to the realization we were not going to be able to recover at our age. And the employment situation was such that we weren’t going to be able to get to the income level that we had enjoyed for years. So we had to formulate a plan B. Yeah.

Cynthia Staton [00:04:07]:
And we did.

Wes Moss [00:04:08]:
And you did.

Cynthia Staton [00:04:08]:
We did. So, yeah. And just, you know, to add to what Ed said, we had thought one day, one of these days when we retire, we would love to travel, see, maybe even live in different parts of the world. But that was somewhere in the future. And what happened in 2008, 2009, just made all of that happen much quicker than we were prepared for.

Wes Moss [00:04:34]:
By the way, guys, what industry were you were y’all in?

Edd Staton [00:04:38]:
Well, I was in the financial service industry specifically for automobiles, and nobody was buying cars.

Cynthia Staton [00:04:47]:
And I was in new construction, real estate, luxury real estate, working on a project that was just coming out of the ground at Lake Las Vegas. And I was working for Sotheby’s International Realty. Well, the project just came to a halt. My job came to a halt, and.

Wes Moss [00:05:08]:
Luxury real estate came to a halt for a long time.

Cynthia Staton [00:05:11]:
Yeah, yeah.

Edd Staton [00:05:12]:
Vegas was the hardest hit of just about any place in the whole country.

Wes Moss [00:05:15]:
Right, Right. Okay. So. Because my natural inclination is to think, okay, why not just work, just extend working. Right. Why not just say, oh, we’re going to work another five to seven years. We hadn’t planned on it, but we’re going to do that. We’re going to try to make this up.

Wes Moss [00:05:31]:
But for you guys. And like so many Americans during the great financial crisis, because it was so broad, there was such a broad sell off, there was such a hit to real estate prices, really, like we’d almost never seen. And then every industry around that was crushed, you guys were kind of looking around thinking, wait a minute, there really are no other great options.

Edd Staton [00:05:51]:
Yeah. So our plan B was I told Cynthia, we need to find someplace to live with a lower cost of living.

Cynthia Staton [00:06:01]:
And I said, okay, that sounds great.

Edd Staton [00:06:04]:
And then I said, I’m talking about moving out of the country. And she said, what?

Cynthia Staton [00:06:10]:
We’re going to do what?

Edd Staton [00:06:13]:
I was a year away when we moved here from taking early Social Security. At 62, Cynthia was in her mid late 50s. Late 50s, so she was not even close to that. So we kind of are moving abroad. Idea was not so much of which of these great options are we going to choose from? We felt like it was the best and almost only option. We had to be able to just survive, right? Survive and have a chance to not just kiss all of our dreams goodbye that we had worked for our whole life, basically.

Wes Moss [00:06:57]:
So how did you end up picking Ecuador and what were some of the other places that you considered? It sounds like you were looking at this from a cost perspective. So where, where were you looking?

Edd Staton [00:07:08]:
That’s where Cynthia comes in.

Cynthia Staton [00:07:09]:
She, she said, well, I said, okay, Ed, I, I’m on board with this, but we cannot just uproot our whole life and move to another country solely based on the cost of living. It has to. This place has to be a place that we really want to make a new life. So there are more factors involved than just the money. And that’s when we sat down and we made our wish list of if we could pick the ideal location, what would that look like? What do we actually want?

Wes Moss [00:07:43]:
So that’s where you guys go through this checklist of hey, we’ve got to look at cost of living, we got to look at the climate, we’ve got to look at health care, we got to look at real estate, they are living and then do we buy, do we rent? So take us maybe through that a little bit. In the early days, as you were looking at different places, what else was on the radar besides Ecuador?

Edd Staton [00:08:04]:
Well, the early days is a good way to put it because we’re so used to on the Internet, everything being at our fingertips now and in 2008, 2009, that information just wasn’t out there like it is now. We happened to find one blogger here in Cuenca that we communicated with, but it was, it was slim pickings. So based on our personal wish list, which involved the things that you said, cost of living, health care, we were in good health, but we were newer, getting any younger, so we didn’t want to go to a place with poor health care. Climate was huge for us. Proximity to the States because we wanted to be able to visit. We didn’t have grandchildren at that time, but we hope that we would and we in fact now do. So we didn’t want to be way away from them. The size of the city, there was a lot of factors for US so the climate thing was a big driver and that ruled out for us quickly places that are very popular expat destinations like Costa Rica and Panama because for us they’re too hot and humid.

Cynthia Staton [00:09:20]:
We it’s tropical.

Edd Staton [00:09:21]:
We lived in Atlanta most of our lives were in the south Then we lived in Vegas. So we knew wet heat and dry heat and we didn’t want either one of them too much anymore.

Wes Moss [00:09:32]:
By the way, for those listening, Atlanta’s the wet heat of course, Vegas is the dry heat, right?

Cynthia Staton [00:09:37]:
Yeah. And just side note, we spent most of our life in Atlanta so we are very familiar with that kind of climate.

Wes Moss [00:09:44]:
All right, so the climate took out some of the really popular destinations because they’re, they’re too warm, really too hot, too tropical for you guys and that’s.

Edd Staton [00:09:54]:
What this wishlist thing is so individualized what’s important to us may not be important to you or to whoever, but this was our wish list. So I went out trying to research this stuff and I looked at Buenos Aires which sounded good, but it’s a big city and I realized it was so far away so just out of nowhere on Memorial Day of 2009 I discovered somehow Cuenca Ecuador didn’t know how.

Cynthia Staton [00:10:25]:
To pronounce it, had no clue where it was.

Edd Staton [00:10:28]:
We thought it was sons of if you had put up a blank map of South America and said if you can pinpoint where Ecuador is, I’ll give you $1,000, you’d have kept $1,000. And we had no idea. And yet everything about it seemed almost too good to be true.

Cynthia Staton [00:10:46]:
It did.

Edd Staton [00:10:47]:
So I said we got to go there. We time was not on our side we didn’t have the luxury of just taking our time and checking out this place in Mexico and that place here and this place there. We needed something to happen. So in July, two months later we were here doing a 10 day scouting trip looking for red flags. I mean, I mean this was the one that. Deal breakers.

Wes Moss [00:11:15]:
You’re looking for deal breakers?

Edd Staton [00:11:17]:
Exactly.

Cynthia Staton [00:11:17]:
I said all right, I’m going to go and look for all the reasons why we shouldn’t do this and you know what? When we showed up and we’re walking around, I’m thinking I can’t find any, I can’t find any reason why we shouldn’t do this. So we got on the plane 10 days later and said well, I guess we’re moving to Cuenca Ecuador.

Wes Moss [00:11:41]:
Tell me about the pricing. What was it to rent a place or buy a place? How dramatic was the difference between the United States and cuenca.

Edd Staton [00:11:53]:
Well, it was and it is. That really hasn’t changed that much. I mean obviously we have inflation, but not to the degree that it’s occurred in the States. Back then you could buy a place, 75,000 maybe and up. Our first rental that we lived in for 11 years, we had a two story penthouse apartment. The reason we rented instead of buying is why I’m going to tell you right now. We had a two story penthouse apartment. Gosh, it was over 3,000 square feet, much bigger than we needed.

Wes Moss [00:12:30]:
Wow.

Edd Staton [00:12:30]:
But we made the mistake, Pollyanna. It’ll work out. Our container that we shipped was on the way and we had no place. So we were desperate to find a place to unload our furnishings when they actually arrived here. We were so silly to think it was going to be so simple. But anyway, that place was. It started out $650 a month. So when you can have a 3,000 square foot penthouse apartment for $650 a month, we chose to go that route.

Edd Staton [00:13:07]:
And the savings that we had rather than invest so much of it in the roof over our head. We thought we would look around for other potential investment opportunities because we knew nothing about any of that when we hit the ground. It turns out there are those opportunities.

Cynthia Staton [00:13:25]:
You know, taxis are, I mean this is we marvel. A typical lunch will cost you 350. That includes, it’s a full course lunch, a fresh juice, a soup, an entree and a small dessert. And that’s 350. That’s our main meal of the day. And so it was that maybe $3 when we first moved here. It’s gone up to 350 most places. And the taxi rides, I mean they’re still the same.

Cynthia Staton [00:13:56]:
We can go anywhere in the city for under $3 for a taxi ride.

Wes Moss [00:14:02]:
So I’m thinking that if you start to try to do apples to apples, an Uber ride in Atlanta can be $80. It really could be.

Edd Staton [00:14:12]:
We do that.

Wes Moss [00:14:13]:
So I mean if you’re looking at it that way, three divided by 80, you’re talking about it’s like 95% cheaper. In some ways a lunch in Atlanta is, let’s call it $15. Easily, easily could be $20. Yeah. So you’re looking at again, 80% cheap, 75%, 80% cheaper. Now housing is still maybe not 90% cheaper, but it’s still call it 60 or 70% less expensive. How do you guys look at the average cost relative to the United States?

Edd Staton [00:14:45]:
Well, when we go back to the States to visit our family as soon as we walk in the grocery store, oh, holy cow. I mean, you spend $100 at Harris Teeter or Kroger or wherever, and you walk out with a bag in each hand and we spend $100 here and we have to have a taxi to take us home because we can’t carry it all between the two of us. So that’s for starters. And what kind of apartment are you going to rent in Atlanta for six, seven hundred dollars a month?

Wes Moss [00:15:19]:
Yeah. You almost can’t even do it. No, you can’t even do it.

Edd Staton [00:15:22]:
You’re in a room somewhere maybe. Yeah. So this is a term that we coined for those that have the courage or the boldness or the whatever or.

Cynthia Staton [00:15:34]:
Either out of desperation, whatever, whatever.

Edd Staton [00:15:38]:
The motivation to give this moving abroad thing a shot. You hit what I call the retirement trifecta because you get to, number one, lower your cost of living, number two, raise your standard of living, and number three, preserve or even grow your nest egg. Where is that possible? How is that possible?

Wes Moss [00:16:04]:
Only in cuenca. More Money matters straight ahead. If you’ve ever done a Jane Fonda workout or if you remember as a kid, Rocky running the steps, and if Michael keaton is still Mr. Mom to you, then guess what? It’s officially time to do some retirement planning. It’s Wes Moss from Money Matters. Weren’t those the good old days? Well, with a little bit of retirement planning, there are plenty of good days ahead. Schedule an appointment with our team today@yourwealth.com that’s y o u r your wealth dot com. You guys have become experts on this and ballpark, how many places would you put on somewhat on par with what you’re able to do at cuenca?

Edd Staton [00:16:51]:
Oh, it has nothing to do with cuenca, really.

Cynthia Staton [00:16:54]:
The shocker is there are lots of places and we spent until September, October of last year, the previous two and a half years we spent traveling full time to these popular expat destinations and a few others thrown in there to actually put boots on the ground in more places than just cuenca to make sure that what we’re saying is authentic and real. You can research all day long on the Internet and a lot of places sound great, but you really, I think, need to personally experience those places to be able to talk about them with some authority. So, you know, if you want us to throw some out there, we’re happy to do that.

Wes Moss [00:17:44]:
Yes, I want to throw them out. I want you to be. I want our listeners to be able to say to their family or their parents or whoever it might be, call Cynthia and Ed and just go through a handful of places. And I know you guys start. You probably have some income because you’re essentially guides now. And I’m sure you have a little bit or at least some income because you become experts on this. But yeah, give me a flavor of some other areas.

Edd Staton [00:18:14]:
Yeah. And the real. I want to tell you, realistically, this is what people don’t understand, that two and a half years that Cynthia said that we spent, we just put all our stuff in storage here after Covid and left. We just.

Cynthia Staton [00:18:26]:
Right. It’s not that we suddenly, you know, had a windfall. We, we figured out that once we got there, we could cover our transportation to get into these places. And we stayed weeks, not just going like for a long weekend.

Wes Moss [00:18:41]:
Oh, so during COVID you guys stored your stuff in Ecuador and went and start and traveled around.

Edd Staton [00:18:48]:
No, right at the end of COVID when you could travel during COVID you couldn’t go anywhere.

Wes Moss [00:18:52]:
Okay, so, so, okay, so at some point when the world opened up a little bit.

Edd Staton [00:18:57]:
Yeah, well, we started with Mexico because Mexico never closed. So that was the beginning of our journey. And for two and a half years, we did Mexico all around there. We went to Europe, we did different places in South America. And I mean, literally, Wes, if you don’t, if you lived in the suburbs, you can live in Paris on a Social Security budget. You’re not going to walk out the door and say, oh, there’s the Eiffel Tower. We did that because we did it. We stayed at an Airbnb in the suburbs.

Edd Staton [00:19:29]:
We took the train into the city inexpensively. You just have to. A lot of this thing I was talking about, about making your dreams come true, you’ve got to decide what am I willing to give up to make that it. Because if you can’t have everything, what are you willing to not have to have? At least most of it. The crux of your dream. And in situations like a big city like Paris, that’s how you do it. But we. Gosh, there’s all kind of places in Mexico.

Cynthia Staton [00:20:03]:
Well, yeah, it’s like some of the top five places that we can wholeheartedly recommend. Of course we have to give a shout out to Ecuador, our hometown.

Wes Moss [00:20:14]:
Sure.

Cynthia Staton [00:20:14]:
But. Well, our home country right now. But then Costa Rica, Panama, those two have been on the radar for quite some time. Probably prices have have gone up a little bit, but they’re still quite affordable and they have a lot going for them. And then Ecuador and Mexico, number of places In Mexico. And I mean, I think, gosh, you know, the places we visited, San Miguel de Allende, Lake Chapala. I mean, there are other places that have established expat communities that you could transplant to quite comfortably. And then Portugal, we loved Portugal when we were in Europe.

Cynthia Staton [00:20:55]:
That’s been out there for a few years. And then I think Spain and France have risen to the top of great expat destinations.

Wes Moss [00:21:04]:
So the ex. So here’s this combo. So first of all, right, if you’re, if you’re going to any of these places, and for some reason, I, I always think of Portugal because I did when I was in college, I did study abroad, so I was in that southern Spain or near, near Portugal. And that’s pretty, it’s a, it’s a magical part of the world. But maybe to your point, you’re not living in downtown Sevilla or Seville or downtown Lisbon. You’re. You’re maybe living out a little bit more in the suburbs or, or maybe not even. Even in some of the cool places now.

Wes Moss [00:21:40]:
You’re not getting a water view. Correct. That’s not happening.

Cynthia Staton [00:21:43]:
Well, I mean, that would be unusual, right, to have that. Because, you know, you have to do, you have to do the research and you have to really understand your budget and what is it that you’re looking for, what can you spend?

Wes Moss [00:21:58]:
And when you say. So let me, let me go back to this. Let’s do a baseline here. When you counsel people around this, for the most part, the places that you, let’s call it your top 10, you can live, you can go there and live essentially just on Social Security.

Cynthia Staton [00:22:15]:
Yeah, well, of course, that depends on how much your Social Security is. We combine our Social Security, but I have to tell you, in the beginning, we were spending most of it. Now we actually live on our Social Security and we’re able to save money, which in the United States, I mean, that would be unheard of, right?

Edd Staton [00:22:36]:
Yeah.

Cynthia Staton [00:22:37]:
So we can cover our monthly expenses. We’ve figured out how to use credit cards strategically to earn points and miles, and that will pay for a lot of the transportation outside of the country. And then, you know, we have some leftover to still invest. And it’s really, I mean, if we were living in the States, we would be scraping by and living a very minimal lifestyle and spending every penny of it.

Wes Moss [00:23:07]:
So maybe two things that. It makes it seem like this equation becomes more realistic for people relative to when you did this, because again, you were like the first high school class in a brand new high school. Whereas today, if you were to. You go to one of these places, you pick your country, pick your town, pick your city, and you are much more likely to be able to be plugged in pretty quickly with the expat community. That’s my first question of what that’s like today. And then, and then of course I want to know about healthcare. That to me that’s the scarier part about all this. So let’s, let’s start with that expat community.

Wes Moss [00:23:45]:
What is that? Why does that make it so great? And is that pretty accessible in a lot of these locations?

Edd Staton [00:23:51]:
Yeah, well, that’s. There are two extremes of people that want to expatriate in that regard. Ones that want to duplicate as close as possible to their North American lifestyle and on the other end, those that want to assimilate into the local culture and kiss everything about their former life goodbye. Then there’s the big group in the middle. That bell curve is not equal. It would list toward the people that want some of the comforts they had in the US or Canada as opposed to just wanting to go native, so to speak.

Wes Moss [00:24:29]:
Go native? Yeah.

Edd Staton [00:24:31]:
And within Mexico, during our travels there, I will tell you that the expats that we found and met in Tulum seem to be more of that off the grid people. Off the grid people. They don’t have a big community there and they don’t get together for happy hours and all that. They do their own thing. They move there for that reason. You go to Lake Chapala, which is home to more North American expats than any place in the world, and you walk into a grocery store there and you feel like you’re back in Kroger. I mean, not the size of it. Not the size of it, but you’re buying availability.

Cynthia Staton [00:25:12]:
Yeah. You’re buying products from Costco.

Wes Moss [00:25:14]:
Yeah.

Edd Staton [00:25:15]:
Wow.

Wes Moss [00:25:15]:
So it’s just like you’re in Marietta, Georgia pretty much.

Cynthia Staton [00:25:19]:
There you go.

Edd Staton [00:25:19]:
I mean, there is a Costco in the next city over from Lake Chapala. And we found out if you go in a grocery store there and say, can you get so and so it’s so close to the states that they order things and go weekly across the border into Texas and bring it back. So you got it all. And they got like we do, they got community theater, they’ve got blah blah, blah, blah, blah. So a place like that is just plug and play. You just show up, that’s all you need.

Wes Moss [00:25:48]:
Plug and play expat living. So in a place like Cuenca, do they have, is it almost like again you know, little Italy and in New York City 100 years ago, that’s where everyone from Italy located. And it was the borough of mostly people that were from Italy. Are there little Americas in these towns?

Cynthia Staton [00:26:12]:
You know, I think that that would depend on where you are in cuenca. That’s one of the things that was attractive to us. There are no gated communities where all the gringos live. People live all over the city. So it’s the opportunity for just fitting in more to local life is greater when you have that. And in these gated communities in some and some expat destinations, I think that you become more isolated. And those smaller towns within Ecuador have those communities. But that’s not something that appealed to us.

Cynthia Staton [00:26:53]:
And so.

Wes Moss [00:26:53]:
So it’s really about that bell curve. Ed, what you’re saying, the flavor. How much. How much of the flavor of the country do you really want? You’re as an example, an extreme. The folks in Tulum really want it to feel like they’re. They’re quote native. Whereas you, if you wanted to, you can find very American subdivisions, if you will, in XYZ country.

Edd Staton [00:27:19]:
Yeah.

Wes Moss [00:27:19]:
And you guys are kind of living maybe a little bit in between.

Cynthia Staton [00:27:23]:
I think so.

Wes Moss [00:27:23]:
Yeah.

Edd Staton [00:27:24]:
It’s funny about that. We. We’ve used the term gringo and I want you to understand it’s not gringo, go home like the old days.

Wes Moss [00:27:30]:
Yeah, yeah. I think of that as a little bit like get out of here gringo. Right.

Edd Staton [00:27:34]:
It’s not like that’s what we’re affectionately called here. There’s no derogatory gringos. Well, I’m telling you that as a lead into the fact that the area of town where we live now is affectionately called Gringolandia. But.

Wes Moss [00:27:54]:
Take a left at Gringolandia.

Edd Staton [00:27:56]:
But the reality is in the building where we live, people are. We told we were moving into this building. It was like, oh, that’s where all the gringos live. But they have a. We have a roster of all the people that live in this building and we’re maybe 10% of the population of even this building. So it’s. You go to a restaurant here and it’s. We may be the only expats in it, but it’s still probably no landing.

Wes Moss [00:28:23]:
All right, as we part one, what is your. Give me your one quick favorite thing about expatriate living. Ed, you first.

Edd Staton [00:28:32]:
For me, it is the stress free life that comes with financial freedom. We went from a situation where we didn’t know what we were going to do to a point where instead of a lifestyle in the States on Social Security income, where we would always be thinking about what we’re not getting to do, we live an upscale lifestyle and do whatever we want to do within reason. So the peace that that brings you, it’s almost indescribable and so few people know it.

Wes Moss [00:29:13]:
By the way, that was so good. I just, that was amazing.

Cynthia Staton [00:29:16]:
CYNTHIA well, I have to concur, of course, with what Ed says, but one of my favorite parts about our expat life is our pedestrian lifestyle, and we didn’t touch on that at all. But living in the United States, outside of a few big cities where there is good public transportation, you have to have a car and you have to drive most every single every place you go. And here we walk out our door and within 10, 15 minutes, our whole life is right here. And that is a game changer. Not only are you getting physical activity and exercise just by going to the store or walking to the gym or the yoga studio, I’m saying things that we do or just walking by the river, it changes everything. Your whole perspective.

Wes Moss [00:30:11]:
That is like a blue zone ending. It’s a blue zone beginning is what it is. Guys, we’re going to wrap. Thank you. And this is so much fun. This is like, so just I feel so warm and sunshiny after sunshiny after talking this through. So thank you guys. If you’d like to find me and our Money Matters team, it’s easy to do so throughout the week.

Wes Moss [00:30:38]:
We’re available right@your wealth.com that’s y o u R Wealth. It’s super easy to schedule a time to speak with someone. We’re happy to help. Enjoy the rest of this wonderful day.

Mallory Boggs [00:30:58]:
This is provided as a resource for informational purposes and is not to be viewed as investment advice or recommendations. This information is being presented without consideration of the investment objectives, risk tolerance, or financial circumstances of any specific investor and might not be suitable for all investors. The minimum pension of any company is provided to you for informational purposes and as an example only, and is not to be considered investment advice or recommendation or an endorsement of any particular company. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Investing involves risk, including possible loss of principal. There is no guarantee offered that investment return, yield, or performance will be achieved. The information provided is strictly an opinion and for informational purposes only, and it is not known whether strategies will be successful. There are many aspects and criteria that must be examined and considered before investing.

Mallory Boggs [00:31:46]:
This information is not intended to and should not form a primary basis for any investment decision that you may make, always consult your own legal tax or investment advisor before making any investment, tax, estate or financial planning considerations or decisions. Investment decisions should not be made solely based on information contained herein.