“The heart of our Greek-Island home is the patio, radiant with Aegean light and heat as filtered through the bougainvillea from sunrise to sunset. I have a panoramic view of the village, the harbor, the beachfront with its boardwalk, and the tiny white chapels set into the sage-green hills,” writes J. Kathleen Thompson.
J. Kathleen is one reader who has discovered and acted on a simple fact: Overseas you will find dream properties for bargain prices. She paid $65,000 including all purchasing fees for her traditional stone house on the Greek island of Tilos. She spends a few months there every year, and says, “Coming from Canada in the spring or fall, we are always greeted by sunny and cloudless skies.”
Warm weather and ocean views are what living in the Caribbean is all about. Discover the best-value Caribbean island, a place with direct flights to the U.S. and a healthy rental market, where you can buy a two-bedroom home right on the water for $199,000.
And picture a balcony overlooking a beach…a large swimming pool, a two-bedroom property, on an acre of prime land… “In Miami a comparable lot without this house would cost us close to $3 million,” says S.D. Williams. But in a secret corner of Panama, he and wife Bobi got the lot, built the house, and enjoy the views for a total of $150,000. They enjoy this good value in their daily life there, too. Luxurious living, including a full-time staff and eating out regularly, would set you back only $2,100 a month in the hidden part of Panama.
You won’t just find better bang for your real estate buck overseas. Buy in the right place, at the right time, for the right price, and you could see double-digit yields or serious capital appreciation. Sometimes both. If the potential to double your money with a Caribbean property play sounds good, take a look here.
—Eoin Basset, International Executive Editor
"Winning the lottery without paying for the ticket.” That’s how S.D. Williams, 55, and his wife Bobi, 53, feel about their decision to retire to Panama in 2011. Their two-story house, with its large, ocean-side balcony, sits on an acre of prime real estate. Birds flutter through tropical flowers, as mangos drop from the nearby trees.
As the bus trundled along, the city soon gave way to a parched, desert landscape studded with ancient, pre-Columbian adobe ruins. Before long, the air smelled of salt, and the blue sky dipped closer to the horizon, telling us that the ocean would soon come into view.
"It gave me the impression of a ’60s California beach town with surf shops and the waves,” says Bill Sherman of what drew him and his wife Pokey to the town of Tamarindo, on Costa Rica’s Pacific coast. “We both felt very comfortable. There are no high-rises on the beach. You just see trees.”
Tom and Christine Canton, from St. Petersburg, Florida, live in a home 1,000 feet up jungle-covered slopes, overlooking the Pacific. “We get up at sunrise and have coffee outside. It’s so peaceful and quiet,” says Tom. “There are no neighbors around us. But we do see toucans, macaws, parrots, and monkeys.”
I’ve just returned from Placencia, Belize—and the opportunity there has knocked my socks off. On my trip, I was following Placencia’s Path of Progress—a path that I discovered could lead you to double your money in one, four, or five years.
They say the grass is always greener on the other side. I’ve not always found that to be the case. But when it comes to getting your money out of the U.S., it rings true. I remember a U.S. that celebrated wealth creation and rewarded hard work. Now I fear that the opposite is happening.
On my travels through the highways and byways of antique collecting, I noticed an auction selling “industrial antiques.” My interest was piqued. What could they be? I wondered. Rusty farm machinery? Nineteen-fifties’ filing cabinets? Miners’ helmets from long-defunct collieries? Well, actually, yes. All the above and more.
New Yorker Jake Wolfe, 65, is at his happiest when exploring ancient temples in Cambodia’s remote countryside. “There is a saying that you should ‘see Angkor Wat and die,’ which means it is an amazing place to visit at least once in your life. It is actually the biggest group of temples in the world and nothing compares to it,” he says of the Southeast Asian country’s most famous ruins.
My husband David and I have a lot of people ask us these days, “What do you do all day?” On the surface, it looks pretty easy. “It” is running a boutique resort in Caribbean Belize—often doing it remotely. Sure, we still have the work that comes with running a resort: managing staff, managing bookings, and the like.
In 1976, my father—then 24 years old—embarked on the walk of a lifetime into the heart of Nepal’s Annapurna Mountains, a section of the mighty Himalayas. In 2010, I followed in his footsteps, spending nearly a month traversing the same mountains and revisiting scenes of his youthful adventures. The journey produced some of the happiest days of my life.