A Cosmopolitan Latin-Flavored City, 1,500 Miles of Both Pacific
and Caribbean Coastline, Perfect-Weather Mountains…

And the Cost of Living is So Low, Bill and Mitzi Easily Live on Their Social Security benefits… With Enough Left Over to Travel

In Panama, they say, “It’s a very good life.”

Dear International Living Reader,

“Welcome to Paradise.”

That’s the sign outside the door to Mitzi and Bill Martain’s home near the little village of Santa Fe, in the mountains of Panama’s Veraguas province.

“We’re about halfway… just a few hour’s drive from either Panama City or Costa Rica, and the same from either the Pacific Ocean or the Caribbean,”Mitzi says.

“We live on 10 acres that border the Santa Maria River, the most absolutely beautiful, bold year-round river you’ve ever seen. The Continental Divide is just a few miles away and there are lush mountains with waterfalls, and wild toucans and other birds…”

The community of Santa Fe, as Mitzi explains, is smack dab in the middle of Panama, an hour from the provincial capital of Santiago, where they go for shopping and medical services.

Santa Fe is a tiny rural town—only about 20 households of expats live here, Mitzi says. It’s an agricultural community of mostly indigenous people, who run cooperativas where local farmers sell what they grow.

“This is citrus and coffee-growing country,” she says, “so we have wonderful oranges, mandarinas, grapefruit… It’s very, very safe, with healthy clean air, clean water, clean everything… There’s not a lot of garbage and you have space… if you have dogs and cats, this is the perfect place.”

Of course, this paradise is not for everyone, Mitzi says. If you’re a city person, you’ll surely be happier in cosmopolitan Panama City, just four hours away.

There, you’ll find anything and everything you might possibly want… both discount and upscale shopping malls, ultra-modern supermarkets with all the in-demand brands, wine and cheese boutiques… and of course, top-quality hospitals such as the gleaming Punta Pacifica, affiliated with Johns Hopkins in the U.S.

The truth is, Panama has so much going for it, including the “world’s best” Retirement Program that offers a myriad of hefty discounts and other incentives.

For all these reasons and more, Panama is one of the world’s top retirement destinations.

You can satisfy just about any lifestyle dreams in Panama. If you prefer beach living, for example, you’ll find more than 1,500 miles of coastline, including some 1,000 idyllic islands.

And besides little Santa Fe where Mitzi and Bill live, there are other mountain towns, too, like Boquete, which are far larger, with well-established expat communities and all the modern conveniences you’d expect.

But as Mitzi tells it, she and Bill didn’t choose Santa Fe as much as it “chose them.”

Back in 2000, they were living happily in North Carolina. But then the airline Bill had spent 36 years working for went bankrupt and he lost his pension and health insurance.

To make matters worse, after the 9/11 tragedy, the travel agency Mitzi owned went out of business.

At the time, Bill and Mitzi were both 60 years old… two years away from Social Security and even farther from Medicare. They had lost everything.

But a year earlier, on a scuba-diving trip to Panama, they’d fortuitously bought a piece of farmland. They now saw it as their salvation.

“We sold everything we had left in the States,” she says, “and we came to Panama and lived on the proceeds until we reached 62 and could collect Social Security.”

It was the best decision they ever made, she says.

“We love our wide open spaces with room to spread our wings. We take walks with our dogs… We have a few chickens for our eggs. We have organic gardens where we raise all of our fruits and vegetables. My pastime is growing medicinal plants. We like to think that we’re self-sufficient.

“We have three buildings on our property: a large house we live in, a small guesthouse that we started out in, and a farm building for our equipment. All these have electricity, but still, our electric bill is never more than $35 a month.”

That’s largely thanks to the perfect mountain climate, she says. “We don’t need heat or air conditioning… just a couple of ceiling fans. Internet costs me $22 a month. Our biggest expense is putting fuel in our pick-up truck and the John Deere machines we use to mow.”

Health insurance, too, is readily available and affordable in Panama, but health care costs are so low, Mitzi says, “we don’t feel we need it.”

For minor issues, there is a local clinic in Santa Fe staffed by a doctor that speaks a bit of English. “When we go to pay… guess what? We show our resident card and the charge is just $1… a buck!”

For anything of a more serious nature, Bill and Mitzi take the bus (it runs by their front gate every 15 minutes) to Santiago, Panama’s fourth-largest city, just 45 minutes away.

There, a consultation—including some minor procedures—with a dermatologist costs just $30, says Mitzi. The dentist they see charges them just $20 for a teeth cleaning.

“We live very well here on just Social Security,” she says, “and we even save enough that we go back to the States every year to visit family.

“If we were still living in the U.S. under our circumstances, we would not be as healthy, as happy, as content as we are here. This is our home now and we love the way things turned out for us. It’s a very good life.”

So Just What Is It About Panama That Makes It One Of
The World’s Top Retirement Destinations?

Besides the fabulous city, beautiful mountains and beaches, the tropical climate, and the low cost of living? A lot of it has to do with those extraordinary retirement incentives I mentioned earlier…

Access your 2016 Fast-Track Panama Package Here!