America Is No Longer The Land Of Opportunity: A Great Reason To Move Someplace Else

It's tough, often impossible, to level up semi-retirement here

That's from a Facebook group about moving to Spain.

Not only does the comment sum up my feelings exactly, it helps explain why semi-retirement in America has become tough—if not more likely—impossible. Particularly if you want to see your semi-retired life level up—(evolve and progress)—and you treat semi-retirement like something more meaningful, fulfilling and comprehensive than a mere work arrangement.

To illustrate, we take the comment's points one by one and tie them to what it means to me to be semi-retired and how I see semi-retirement developing for me and my wife, building on the previous two posts.

When you break it down, it’s really kind of nonsensical. Why we—speaking for Americans and others like us—continue to live like we do. Even if you’re happy and have a relatively good life, there’s a good chance you’re settling on issues that all come back to quality of life.

I can only speak for myself. If you—for example—love suburbia or the country, own a home with no or a low mortgage payment alongside an overall low or otherwise manageable cost of living or simply view life from a different perspective influenced by a different set of preferences, you might see it another way. That said, you subscribe to this newsletter for a reason, which strongly infers that you see something wrong with the American way you might be acting out in your day to day.

I can’t say I’m unhappy in America. In Los Angeles. I’m more annoyed.

I can’t say I struggle financially in LA. I don’t.

However, on both counts, I can see a future where my overall quality of life—as it ties to nearly everything—can be better somewhere else. Specifically Spain.

That’s not Spain.

---

Let’s consider the points from the Facebook comment.

• Choosing to get in a car here, putting children in a car here, is mental.

Our cognitive dissonance and ability to desensitize ourselves and blow things like this off aside, this is 100% the case.

There’s a busy intersection outside our kitchen window. As I work most days, about once a week I hear the crash of an accident or a pedestrian yelling at a driver who did not stop for the crosswalk. Sometimes—when I’m not working—that pedestrian is me!

I look out to see the aftermath of these accidents, hoping that nobody was killed or seriously injured. Last week, a girl emerged from a vehicle that ran up onto the sidewalk and into a fence post with blood all over her. Thankfully, it was from a small cut to her head that paramedics treated on the scene.

According to a girl who has lived in this building her entire life (I think she’s about 30) and others, people have died at the corner. More than one. As a stop-gap, Band-Aid measure, there clearly needs to be a light at this corner. Or, at least, a stop sign.

Apparently, the city’s response when confronted with the proposal: It would impede the flow of traffic. I believe that they say this. In college, I studied how traffic engineers and such impact urban planning and subsequent safety. They’re basically bean counters who treat these types of obvious decisions like an equation.

Ultimately, our way of life—which is basically being able to transport yourself freely by private automobile—is not up for meaningful, large-scale alteration as broad policy. It’s certainly and clearly not up for negotiation.

Parents worry about the dumbest things. About stuff that has incredibly low odds of happening. Like their kid getting a shoelace stuck in an escalator and getting pulled to their death or their bundle of joy falling down the stairs and cracking their head open. Yet, they barely bat an eyelash at the hard data when they pop them in the car, often for a super short trip.

In 2023, more than 40,000 people died in motor vehicle crashes.

Yet, we don’t even think twice—or once (?)—about taking an infant for a ride to get them to fall asleep.

It’s pure insanity. And I didn’t merely come upon this way of thinking overnight or when I discovered Spain. It has been a going concern of mine since I moved to San Francisco in 1999 and started college a few years later. I have lived car-free in car dependent environments as well as some of our best examples of urbanism. It worked. I enjoyed it. But I was only half-assing it relative to how we can live in Spain.

There are so many little, less pressing offshoots of this.

How many people have two cars for the dumbest reasons?

Earlier this year, my wife and I went down to one car. So, if she has the car all day, there are certain things I can’t do here because they require a car. Simple things like go to my preferred grocery store. She can’t—for example, stay in the art studio all day—because that requires her to have the car, which means I would not be able to make it to yoga. Because getting to both studios requires a car unless you want to put yourself through the hell of a 40-minute walk; 34-minute, two transfer bus ride or 42-minute, no transfer bus ride.

It’s not a big deal. It’s not life or death. Trader Joe’s can wait for another day. And she wants to go to yoga anyway. But it illustrates the point that cars don’t always equal freedom of movement. Sometimes they inhibit it.

How many people do you know—or how many times have you—scheduled things in the day-to-day or further out on the basis of who will have the car and where it will be? It's a joke.

---

• Walking is dangerous.

I wouldn’t go that far. I see it as potentially dangerous. And more so because of cars than other people. But I’m also a dude who is street smart and pretty nimble at navigating grit. Here again, you might have a different perspective.

That said, walking here sucks these days. I no longer enjoy it the same way or as much as I used to. For so many reasons, including what you see in the image above. That’s at the corner a block from where I live.

---

• Grocery stores are two-hour trips.

For most, that’s probably an exaggeration. Behind that trash is a grocery store. I can walk there in less than five minutes. But I get the sentiment. In less than five-to-ten minutes in the neighborhood where we plan to live in Spain, we can walk to several grocery stores, bodegas and a full-fledged neighborhood market. You can’t even say that for the best neighborhoods in San Francisco.

---

• The food is poison.

We wonder how eating a Mediterranean diet in Spain will impact us. Will we not experience digestive issues after eating as frequently or randomly?

We have experienced this while spending a month in Europe and have read accounts from others who eat the same type of food there, but don’t experience the same stomach-related problems as they do in America.

---

• The general environment is rough.

I think it’s hostile. Increasingly hostile. This environment has been percolating for a while now. At least in LA.

On those I feel like an idiot for living this way the closer we get to not living this way car rides to yoga, we pass dozens of homeless people at the depths of despair—some of them tempting fate as they wander the middle of the street—people blowing red lights not even by a hair and incidents of other types of reckless driving. It’s not even that rules no longer seem to exist, it’s that our consideration for other people no longer exists.

---

• 40+ hours of work with not much to show for it in people’s well-being.

I don’t need to expand on this. You know the score.

All of the above ties directly to semi-retirement if you conceptualize it similarly to how I do. But this is where the rubber meets the road.

Even as interest rates come down, you need to earn $12,293 each month to not spend more than 30% of your income on the $3,688 monthly payment that comes after a 10% down payment on a $500,000 home, inclusive of taxes and insurance.

If you’re a renter, it could be tough to swallow a $2,100 rent payment for the rest of your life. Even tougher when you know the rent will keep going up, even if you’re under rent control. The math on this is a huge contributor to our decision to move.

It’s tough to set out on a semi-retirement plan for most of us alongside this financial reality on housing.

Furthermore, my wife would have a much more difficult time transitioning from hair stylist and salon co-owner (though she’ll still be a co-owner after we move) to full-time artist who intends to open her own studio/workspace someday in Los Angeles. More math that’s to put it kindly—prohibitive or worse.

---

So—living all of this—increasingly I was asking myself, why continue to do this?

Why keep rationalizing a life that’s good, but not even half of what it could be from convenience, financial and overall quality of life standpoints? It doesn’t make much sense, particularly in pursuit of the goal of leveling up a semi-retired life.

I could keep doing what I’m doing as illustrated in recent posts. But if the goal is to become even more semi-retired, why? And how??

I work how I work today.

When we move to Spain that will likely change, but, more in terms of my schedule.

Once we settle in and see what our actual cost of living looks like, maybe it—slightly—changes again. Once we buy an apartment maybe it—slightly—changes again.

Changes as in how many hours I work, how much work I do and who I do it for. But there’s no rush to change the way I live the semi-retired life now. Not from a work standpoint. But certainly—as outlined here and elsewhere—from a day-to-day, on-the-ground quality of life standpoint.

After we buy the apartment, we pay it off. Then—if I want to—I throttle back big time on how many hours I work, how much work I do and who I do it for.

We’ll see how I feel when the time comes.

But one thing is for sure. This entire process—from moving to Spain to being free and clear of a mortgage on an apartment—is (if all goes as hoped, planned and anticipated) an optimistic five to something like ten-year process. Probably and hopefully, closer to five than ten. Again, we will see how everything shakes out.

In America, it’s not even a process to realistically take on. Especially in a decent size city. It’s next to, if not literally impossible. I have a better chance becoming a surgeon at age 49 than I do buying a home and paying it off within the next ten years. And, if I became a surgeon, it would still take more than ten years to get it done.

(I am not sure why I selected surgeon, because, if I had it to do all over again, I would be a commercial airline pilot).

Anyway—you’ll have a hard time being semi-retired to begin with, let alone leveling it up unless you already have a huge head start.

By the way, that Facebook comment came in response to somebody saying they feel homesick after six months in Spain and are seriously considering a move back to the US. Something to keep in mind. And something—along with culture shock—I will address at some point in the next week or so.