This couple moved from Florida without speaking much Spanish.
Kris Cunningham never expected to be living in Panama. When her husband, Joel, started talking about retiring to Central America, “I thought he had lost his mind.” She didn’t have a passport and had never been abroad.
But after nine years of living in David, a city of 83,000 near the Pacific Ocean and close to the border with Costa Rica, “we are super happy here,” the 69-year-old says. “It’s worked out beyond my wildest expectations.”
She learned Spanish, taught herself to play bass guitar and joined her husband’s rock band, called Monkey Nerve, when the bass player moved to Colombia. She seems to fall into conversation with everyone, has biked from home across Costa Rica and into Nicaragua, and blogs about her life.
Backtrack a decade. Cunningham was working in Florida as a visiting nurse, burned out but knew she and her husband, already retired from his home-remodeling job, couldn’t afford to stay in Sarasota without a paycheck or her Social Security check. And even a reduced check was a few years away.
“We were just working to keep our heads above water” while she counted down the days until she could claim Social Security at 62, she recalled.
At her husband’s urging, they decided to check out Costa Rica and Panama. Costa Rica was pricier. Panama City wasn’t a good fit — too much city. Boquete, in the mountains, is an expat enclave and didn’t appeal. But David felt right — not too large, friendly and foreigners are integrated into the community, rather than living apart. “It just feels so free here, so relaxed, so not alone,” she says.
They ran the numbers and figured they could live off savings until her Social Security check kicked in.
She took Spanish classes before leaving Florida, but her friends in Panama don’t speak English. So she learned, even though it meant relying on a dictionary for the first four years.
The budget
In Florida, the couple was spending $3,000 a month on just the basics, never mind clothes and restaurant meals. In David, it’s between $1,100 and $1,200. Extra costs are minimal; they’re not big restaurant goers, so it’s mainly flights back to the U.S.
They rent a home — 3 bedrooms, 2 baths across 900 square feet plus a yard full of fruit trees — in a nice middle-class neighborhood for $385 a month, water and trash collection included. In Panama, it’s the norm that an unfurnished house means you supply the refrigerator, the stove and the washing machine.
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