Episode 2: Test-Driving Our Dream Retirement in Portugal

International Living’s Bigger Better World podcast delves into the stories behind the story. This week, we take you to Portugal, and follow the adventures of a U.S. couple who were the lucky winners of International Living’s ‘Test Drive Your Dream Retirement Overseas’ competition. 
 
Host Jim Santos talks to Chris and Jan Schroder, who traveled to Portugal for a month-long immersion into expat life there, and got to experience the country’s unexpected perks and quirks—from just-caught seafood lunches at incredibly low prices, to Uber rides for just $3. 

Chris and Jan traveled to the city of Lisbon, enjoying sophisticated urban living among the historical avenues and streets of the capital, then split for the sunshine coast of the Algarve, on Portugal’s southern edge.
 
 There, they fell in love with the port town of Lagos—cobblestone streets, brightly tiled townhouses, an ancient fishing port surrounded by soft-sand beaches and cliff-backed coves. Over the weeks they spent there, they talked with long-term expats, explored the locality, and immersed themselves in the safe, laidback life of western Europe’s most affordable destination.
 
 After a month test-driving their dream retirement overseas, could Jan and Chris see themselves moving to Portugal? Settle in, press play, and find out as we welcome you to the latest episode of International Living’s Bigger Better World podcast.

If you haven’t become a member yet—you can do it today with a special discount offer for podcast listeners. You’ll receive our monthly magazine plus a bundle of special extras. Subscribe here: https://intliving.com/podcast. 

Music: Royalty Free Music From timtaj.com.

Transcript

[00:00:04.210] - Jim Santos

Hi, I'm Jim Santos, and this is Bigger, Better World from International Living. Welcome to the show. Today we've got an interesting topic. In 2021, International Living held a contest called International Living's Win Your Dream Retirement Overseas. The idea was that a lucky person or a couple would be sent to spend a month in the Algarve in Portugal. There were thousands of entries. They narrowed it down to 20 finalists. And then input from readers helped determine the lucky winners. And we have those winners with us today. Chris and Jan Schroder of Atlanta, Georgia, are going to be joining us here. Jan is an award-winning writer. She is the editor in chief of the digital publication and website the Travel 100, and she's done freelance work as well for Photos, Travel, Orbis, Global Traveler and other outlets. She's also the author of several books. Chris is a fifth-generation Atlanta, began his career with six south-eastern daily newspapers, working as advertising director, creative director, promotions director, editor and reporter. He's won awards in several states for his reporting and print advertisement designs. And he's currently working at the 100 Companies, a digital marketing firm that he founded to publish dozens of newsletters and websites across the US.

[00:01:18.490] - Jim Santos

Both Jan and Chris are graduates of the University of Virginia, and they're here with me today. Welcome to the show.

[00:01:24.390] - Jan Schroder

Thanks, Jim. Glad to be here.

[00:01:26.160] - Chris Schroder

Good morning, Jim.

[00:01:26.970] - Jim Santos

Now, did you two meet in the University of Virginia?

[00:01:29.230] - Jan Schroder

We did not. We went to the same high school in the same college, but did not know each other.

[00:01:34.200] - Jim Santos

So it's just fate that brought you together?

[00:01:35.680] - Jan Schroder

That's right, yeah.

[00:01:36.880] - Chris Schroder

The newspaper business brought us together, I guess in our mid 30s. But yeah, we determined we were probably in one class together in college, but never met.

[00:01:46.570] - Jan Schroder

It's all about timing, right?

[00:01:48.070] - Jim Santos

Right. Jan, you are a travel writer.

[00:01:51.400] - Jan Schroder

That's right.

[00:01:52.000] - Jim Santos

Did any of that travel writing include trips overseas?

[00:01:55.050] - Jan Schroder

Yes. Well, prior to COVID of course, but yes, I was lucky enough to travel to Europe several times and been as far away as Bora Bora and got to go to Peru. So, yeah, it's a fun job.

[00:02:08.500] - Jim Santos

What part of Peru were you in?

[00:02:09.810] - Jan Schroder

I went to Machu Picchu, but we started in Lima.

[00:02:12.860] - Jim Santos

Okay. Yeah. My wife and I, in 2017 actually hiked the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu.

[00:02:17.610] - Jan Schroder

Oh, wow. You did it the hard way. I took the bus.

[00:02:20.940] - Jim Santos

Okay. We called them LTRs.

[00:02:23.080] - Jan Schroder

What's that?

[00:02:23.530] - Jim Santos

The lazy train riders.

[00:02:25.060] - Jan Schroder

Yes, one of those. Absolutely.

[00:02:28.390] - Jim Santos

And Chris, did you get much opportunity to travel?

[00:02:30.960] - Chris Schroder

Yeah, every once in a while I would be invited along on one of Jan's travel trips, so I got to join her. We went to Germany and Russia, believe it or not, 2018 or 2019, and did twelve days on the rivers there. I got to Hawaii and a few places like Thailand, but a lot of times I'm just reading her despatches with envy.

[00:02:57.860] - Jim Santos

What then made you decide to enter this contest?

[00:03:01.010] - Jan Schroder

Partially. I've been to Portugal before, but Chris had never been. And so it was top of our list to get to Portugal, but we hadn't really made any serious plans. And then we saw this contest opportunity and we kind of thought, well, why not? Even though I'm not sure I've ever won a contest for anything before. You won a contest. You won an ugly kitchen contest one time, but I've never won anything. So we filled out our questions and we got lucky enough to make it to the top three and shot some videos. And definitely what helped us is Chris is a very good videographer and video editor, so really we owe it to him that we won. I haven't said that before, but I'll give you credit for this.

[00:03:46.170] - Chris Schroder

Alright. Are you recording this Jim? I hope so.

[00:03:49.410] - Jim Santos

Yeah. I'll send you a copy. Chris. Susan.

[00:03:51.960] - Jan Schroder

Okay.

[00:03:52.600] - Jim Santos

Yeah. Looking over your resumes, I thought it was almost like you had an unfair advantage over everybody else here. So it's tailor made for the contest.

[00:04:00.640] - Jan Schroder

That's possible, but we'll take any advantage we can get.

[00:04:04.240] - Jim Santos

Now, with your travels, have either of you ever considered or talked about the idea of retiring overseas?

[00:04:09.970] - Chris Schroder

I'd say we have talked about it. We are blessed with grandchildren, and so it just seemed like a remote possibility that we would ever think about going overseas. But, you know, we've heard about it being affordable. We've heard about it being easy and fun and that a lot of people do it. And I've met people who were expats in Panama or Costa Rica or other places, and even we knew one who had moved to Portugal. And so it seemed like a remote possibility, but really not likely for folks like us.

[00:04:42.870] - Jan Schroder

Well, one thing for me is, even though I travel a lot, I've never been away from home more than maybe two weeks, which sounds crazy, but I love to travel, but I also like being home. So I had some concerns about being gone so long, but it turned out it's pretty awesome.

[00:05:02.290] - Jim Santos

Right. You mentioned in the article here that you have four daughters, and then there's the three grandchildren.

[00:05:09.480] - Jan Schroder

We have two sons, two daughters, and four grandchildren.

[00:05:14.140] - Jim Santos

Okay.

[00:05:14.530] - Jan Schroder

And they're all five and under, so.

[00:05:16.410] - Chris Schroder

They're little and we have to travel to see them.

[00:05:19.760] - Jim Santos

Yeah. When we decided to move from Ecuador to relocate in the US. We were about to start roving retirement. We spent two or three months at a time in different countries. One of our concerns was picking a location that was central to all of our kids so that they're all about a day's drive away. So I understand the difficulty of keeping in touch with the family and the grandkids.

[00:05:41.770] - Jan Schroder

And how many children do you have?

[00:05:43.410] - Jim Santos

We have four. Two boys, two girls, same as you. But we have at the moment, nine grandchildren.

[00:05:49.140] - Jan Schroder

Oh, my goodness.

[00:05:51.190] - Jim Santos

Yeah. Our daughters had them in batches. We have a set of triplets and a set of twins.

[00:05:54.840] - Jan Schroder

Oh, my goodness.

[00:05:56.890] - Jim Santos

That bumps the numbers up very quickly. Speaking about the children, your children and your grandchildren, what did they think of this trip?

[00:06:04.650] - Jan Schroder

I think they were excited for us, but I'm sure they didn't want us to move permanently, I assume.

[00:06:11.730] - Chris Schroder

Yeah. Well, my daughter just had a little boy seven or eight months ago, and I was really enjoying spending a lot of time with him before we left. And so I was like, ‘Well, I'll see you in six, seven, eight weeks.’ And it was kind of a tearful goodbye. She was like, ‘Oh’. And I was sad to leave them, but I think they were excited for us. But they were also kind of uncertain as to what we might find when we left for so long and moved to another country.

[00:06:38.770] - Jan Schroder

Or maybe they were worried we wouldn't come back.

[00:06:43.160] - Jim Santos

The area of Portugal that you're in is the southernmost section of Portugal, the Algarve, that's all Atlantic Ocean beaches at that point, right?

[00:06:50.890] - Jan Schroder

Yeah.

[00:06:52.460] - Chris Schroder

We spent two weeks before our practice retirement that International Living awarded us. We toured Lisbon and Porto and Cascais, but we then embedded for four weeks in Lagos, which is in pretty much the middle of the Algarve along the Atlantic.

[00:07:13.330] - Jim Santos

What did you think of Lisbon?

[00:07:15.030] - Jan Schroder

We really enjoyed it. We thought it was a beautiful city.

[00:07:17.880] - Chris Schroder

It was gorgeous. The architecture and the people were so friendly. But it was beautiful, historical, really clean and safe. We really enjoyed our time in Lisbon, for sure. 

[00:07:32.860] - Jim Santos

One of the things that Americans have difficulty understanding about other countries is their public transportation systems. It's been our experience that in many countries they are much more advanced in terms of moving people around quickly and cheaply. Did you have any difficulties moving around in Portugal?

[00:07:49.300] - Jan Schroder

We did not, and I totally agree with that. I love to travel by train, and we took several trains in Portugal, and I quite enjoyed that because you have great scenery. It's comfortable, it's relaxing. And we did not end up taking buses, but I understand buses in Portugal are a great alternative as well.

[00:08:09.040] - Chris Schroder

We also took Uber and Bolt, the drivers who work for a living over there. So that was interesting to see that on an international basis.

[00:08:18.150] - Jim Santos

Yeah, that's a good point. My wife and I have found Uber to be very useful not just overseas, but also traveling around the country.

[00:08:24.910] - Jan Schroder

Yes, we've used it a lot. And over there, it's so cheap. An Uber ride might be three euro.

[00:08:29.380] - Jim Santos

Yeah, the convenience is what's really attractive to us. Not having to worry about parking or anything like that.

[00:08:34.740] - Jan Schroder

Right. We did not have a car the entire time. We mostly walked everywhere as much as possible. But we did. My brother and my niece came over and we had a car one day so we could drive to a few other cities in the Algarve, but we really didn't feel like we needed it. A few times we walked to the grocery store, and then we Ubered back because we bought heavy things like wine and beer.

[00:08:58.310] - Chris Schroder

But that one day of the rental car we actually rented borrowed from an expat who we met and became friends with, who was from the Midwest and then moved to Portugal. And so we never actually we had plans to rent a car and take a bunch of train rides, maybe go to Spain. But other than that one day, with our friend Lennox's car. We just walked all over Lagos, and it was great.

[00:09:22.450] - Jim Santos

My wife and I lived in Ecuador for six years.

[00:09:25.600] - Jan Schroder

Wow.

[00:09:26.160] - Jim Santos

And something our friends and family find hard to believe is that we didn't have a car during that whole time.

[00:09:31.320] - Jan Schroder

Wow. So you were able to walk or take public transportation as well?

[00:09:35.530] - Jim Santos

Yes. Right behind our condo, there was a bus stop where five different buses stopped.To get us just about anywhere that we wanted. And like you say, cabs. And things were extremely cheap. 35 cent bus to the grocery store and $1.50 for the cab to get back with all your groceries.

[00:09:51.420] - Jan Schroder

Oh, my gosh.

[00:09:52.590] - Jim Santos

That is one of the things I think people are most surprised about when they go overseas. How much and it's almost healthier just because you're walking so much more.

[00:10:01.000] - Jan Schroder

Yes, we really did walk just about everywhere. We met one couple who didn't have a car, and they had chosen to rent a place that was maybe two or 3 miles out of town. We met him for a hike one time, and I said, yes, we've already walked 3 miles to get here. And they were trying to do how many steps a day?

[00:10:18.480] - Chris Schroder

Six to 9 miles.

[00:10:19.780] - Jan Schroder

6 to 9 miles a day?

[00:10:21.160] - Jim Santos

Yes. I seemed to remember reading that one of the walks you took was a little bit longer than you expected.

[00:10:26.380] - Jan Schroder

Oh, yes. Chris wanted to go find some oyster farms, and Chris is a kind of wing it guy. I don't really need to know where I'm going, and I'm a map person. But anyway, we just kept walking and walking and walking, and then we finally found the oyster farm, but we weren't able to get the oysters because there's nobody to get them.

[00:10:48.360] - Chris Schroder

It was low tide and they were harvesting, and they weren't ready to sell them. And so we had walked five or 6 miles. We thought we were just going to walk two or three, but with no water. We didn't take water. We didn't think it was that long of a ride, so end up being most of a morning. But we did end up back at back at a restaurant in Lagos that served oyster. So at least I was happy.

[00:11:10.330] - Jim Santos

I sympathize with you, Chris. I love oysters myself, and my wife just tries not to watch while I'm meeting them. We lived for a while in Cambridge, Maryland, on the tributaries of the Chesapeake Bay. So got kind of spoiled for oysters. And then living in Ecuador, right on the Pacific Coast, got kind of spoiled for seafood. And I understand, Chris, that's something that we have in common. It seems that you're very much the seafood lover.

[00:11:37.530] - Chris Schroder

Yes. Oysters are my favorite food group. Seafood is my second favorite. And I've always dreamed of when I thought about retirement or something, I just thought if I could live somewhere on the coast near a fish shack, a very casual fish that just cooked up the local catch that day, there are not many more joys in life. I would ask for them being having access to that. It just seems so wonderful for me as an idyllic retirement.

[00:12:05.320] - Jan Schroder

Yeah. We had amazing seafood in Portugal.

[00:12:08.110] - Jim Santos

Yeah, I've seen the Algarve’s history goes back to pre-Roman times. The sea and the fish have been a very important part of that area.

[00:12:16.960] - Jan Schroder

Well, what's so interesting is the beloved fish of Portugal is cod, which isn't even caught there. It's from Norway. But they love their cod.

[00:12:26.810] - Jim Santos

Well, it's imported, right?

[00:12:28.110] - Jan Schroder

Right. Yeah.

[00:12:28.800] - Chris Schroder

They go up and catch it and salt it and keep it for a year in their home if they need to, all salted, hanging. And so it's kind of exotic for them, but it's become very traditional. And I guess the wonderful Portuguese sailors just brought back lots of cod. But right off their coast or in their tributaries, they're just wonderful fish that they serve and cook, and it just tastes great. But for some reason, cod is the national dish.

[00:12:56.890] - Jim Santos

Now, if you're not a seafood lover like Chris and I, what other food options were there in the area?

[00:13:02.880] - Jan Schroder

They do have some pork. They have a sandwich called the bifana, which is a spiced pork sandwich. We had that in Porto. That was very good. They did have beef. We had some good beef. But it came from one restaurant that we loved in Lagos. It came from Uruguay, I think.

[00:13:18.820] - Chris Schroder

Argentina.

[00:13:19.630] - Jim Santos

Argentina.

[00:13:20.410] - Chris Schroder

And they did have cows. They have a lot of pork. They raise pigs. There are chickens. They do have those items, but they may not have cultivated them to the fine art that they have with their seafood.

[00:13:38.200] - Jan Schroder

And boy, do they love potatoes. Boiled potatoes, just about every meal.

[00:13:45.110] - Chris Schroder

Love that. But they do have a lot of international restaurants. So we ate at Korean dumpling. We ate at delicious poke, wonderful poke. But we also ate at a curry restaurant. A lot of Indian restaurants. South Asian continent restaurants. There primarily, I guess, to serve the English, who vacation there a lot. The folks in the UK.

[00:14:12.310] - Jim Santos

I've seen the UK is the number one tourist group in that area.

[00:14:16.980] - Jan Schroder

Yeah, well, they're lucky because it's about a two and a half hour flight, so it's easy for them to get down there and get their dose of sunshine.

[00:14:25.910] - Chris Schroder

Portugal and Great Britain or England have the longest continuous alliance in the history of the world. And so it's always been really safe for English to go there. And during World War II, Portugal was actually not aligned with any of the warring factions. And so they, like Switzerland, were a peaceful zone, a neutral territory, and so it survived World War Two well, and another dictatorship that ended 1974. But now it's really quite a remarkable culture.

[00:15:02.740] - Jan Schroder

You can tell that Chris paid attention during our tours. We took a lot of walking tours. For example, we first got there, we were in Faro, and we only had one day there. So I Googled it and found a free walking tour. And then we ended up doing that in Lisbon, Porto and Lagos. One thing that surprised us about that is I had done one in DC. It was like an hour long. In Portugal, they were three to 4 hours, and they were wonderful tours. Of course, you tip the guides at the end. That's how they make their money. But that's a great way to learn a new city.

[00:15:40.010] - Chris Schroder

It's great because you meet a lot of the people who are coming to town and trying to get to know the place. But the free walking tour guides have to earn your tips, and so they have to do performance art and really educate and entertain. And we took four of those throughout the country, and we're now looking to take those everywhere we go. They seem really great way to get to know the locale because they claim that they will show you what a lot of locals will do where they go. Not just the tourist spots, which they also show you, but they also want to show you from a local perspective where they might eat or go to plays or music or hang out at.

[00:16:14.860] - Jan Schroder

They sent us emails afterwards, sharing some of their favorite restaurants and places to go. So that was really helpful.

[00:16:23.680] - Jim Santos

Yeah, I agree completely that walking around these cities are really the best way to really get to know them.

[00:16:29.980] - Jan Schroder

Although I'm not sure we completely ever found our way around the old town of Lagos. We knew we’d find our way eventually with the narrow brick streets which were built for carriages, not for cars. The cars still go down there, so thankfully we only ended up accidentally driving down them one time.

[00:16:49.990] - Chris Schroder

I don't mind getting lost, but that makes Jane a bit nervous.

[00:16:53.280] - Jan Schroder

Well, not there, because it's so easy to find your way.

[00:16:56.100] - Jim Santos

Yeah, it's getting harder and harder to get lost with GPS and Waze and all those things.

[00:17:01.020] - Jan Schroder

But that's true.

[00:17:02.310] - Jim Santos

So you really have to work at it.

[00:17:04.230] - Chris Schroder

Well, we did in Lisbon. We decided to turn off our phones for a couple of days. And so we wandered Lisbon without the benefit of GPS. And after about a day and a half, we broke down and pulled out the map and did it old school. And it was kind of a fun experiment. But in some of the small, winding, historical streets with the older buildings kind of hanging over them, the GPS don't really work that well anyway, so it can be a challenge. So you just kind of have to be a little adventurous as well as try to charge your way if you like to be a map person, right?

[00:17:41.290] - Jim Santos

Yeah. My wife and I like to pick out, like, a general area that we want to explore, maybe a couple of things that we want to see, and then take a cab someplace close to that and then kind of do. Our circuit either ends up back at the hotel or at another convenient place to get a cab, but it really is a great place or a great way to get the feel for the city. The buses and the cars and things just kind of zoom past, and you don't really get to see it and experience. And I also, like, you love to find the places where the locals are eating.

[00:18:12.860] - Chris Schroder

And we went to Porto for three or four days, and what was amazing about that town is it seems like it's a real foodie town. And every nook and cranny in the old part of the cities that we wandered, every nook and cranny is being used by some entrepreneur to either put on some type of snack bar or a restaurant or a bar concept. It's really interesting. You would never find these if you were driving. So when you walk around and you just kind of look and you see some place that's popular, and it's like, well, let's go try this.

[00:18:41.310] - Jim Santos

I noticed or reading your articles and watching your videos, you paint a really vivid picture of life in southern Portugal. I guess, Chris, with your background, that's part of the reason they were really pretty compelling videos. Did you have any trouble setting up your interviews to talk to the locals and the other expats in the area?

[00:19:00.390] - Chris Schroder

We did have a few reluctant folks we had to kind of cajole into talking, so we didn't go with the mission of interviewing experts. But when we mentioned to one of the International Living associates that we had a friend who had moved to Portugal in March 2020, right before  the pandemic, had never been back, and we were going to interview her and tell her story, he said, ‘that's a great idea, interviewing expats. Why don't you do more of that?’ So when we got to Lagos, we met all the folks. They have an actual expat community on Facebook, and they very lively, and they meet every week and do trips and dinners. So we started asking some of them if we could interview them and most of them said yes. A few of them were like, no, I don't think so. But it was great to ask them because I'm not a professional videographer. I used to hire them and I've kind of taken some videos myself and I couldn't hire a videographer for a purpose, so I've kind of learned my way around it. And now I just bought the latest iPhone before we left.

[00:20:03.220] - Chris Schroder

And it had such great cinematography and great videography with three cameras. So it's really easy and it's very casual, so people aren't intimidated when you set up lights and all the sound and all the cameras. You just say, hey, can we ask you a few questions? And you pop up your iPhone and it's easy to get people to kind of talk a little bit about their lives and I think they enjoyed it.

[00:20:25.560] - Jim Santos

That's actually a very good travel tip. When we did the Inca Trail hike, I took my 35mm SLR camera and that's a lot of extra weight to be carrying when you're hiking. And the modern phones, the iPhone and the Google phones, their cameras have gotten so good that it's really not worth carrying the extra weight and having to manage all of that on airplanes and things like that, when you can just have this phone in your pocket that's doing such an excellent job of taking your pictures and your videos.

[00:20:54.790] - Chris Schroder

And then I edited them on iMovie, the little app that is resident on the Apple environment. But it was really interesting to interview people. We interviewed a couple that moved from San Francisco and moved to Lagos and their friends back in San Francisco. We've to get to see them on International Living and see how they're doing. We had a couple who showed up at one of the expat weekly cocktail parties who said they had seen our video on International Living and decided based on that, that they would come to the next cocktail party the following Wednesday. And so they came and they came up to us. I'm like, oh, we recognize you from your videos.

[00:21:31.390] - Jim Santos

That's great.

[00:21:32.100] - Chris Schroder

Talk to them. They became really close friends. It was great.

[00:21:35.140] - Jan Schroder

Yeah, they brought it up to the house twice.

[00:21:37.630] - Chris Schroder

Yeah, it was fun.

[00:21:38.770] - Jim Santos

Where you meeting primarily North American expats or did you run into British expats while you were there?

[00:21:44.020] - Jan Schroder

We met a few British people.

[00:21:46.390] - Chris Schroder

There are a lot of British and German folks there, but we tended to kind of hang. I guess we just had a bond with the Americans, more so, but they all gathered together. It's just that we became kind of good friends with some of the American expats. But we did see a lot of folks from different countries, but primarily Germany, the UK, America. 

[00:22:15.940] - Jim Santos

Now you were there in October that's right. So it wasn't exactly tourist season.

[00:22:22.240] - Jan Schroder

No, we deliberately picked that time to go because we did not want to go in July and August. First of all, it's pretty hot. It was still hot in October, and that is the height of tourist season.

[00:22:34.380] - Jim Santos

Okay. When someone from Atlanta is telling me it gets really hot, I have to be a little skeptical. It gets pretty hot in Atlanta also.

[00:22:40.930] - Jan Schroder

Well, this is true. It is hot in Atlanta.

[00:22:44.190] - Chris Schroder

But we were surprised how warm it was in October in August. And Jan had taken clothes for, you know, fall, and it turned out it was still summer for most of the time we were there. The good thing about the fall, as opposed to the spring in the Algarve is the water heats up. The ocean water heats up a little bit more over the summer and actually gets warmer in September and October than it was in May and June and July. So we actually jumped in. In the cold Atlantic, and it wasn't that cold. We enjoyed it.

[00:23:14.890] - Jan Schroder

He means he and my brother, because I actually never did jump in.

[00:23:19.440] - Jim Santos

You were smarter than that.

[00:23:21.030] - Jan Schroder

I'm not into cold water.

[00:23:23.810] - Jim Santos

What would you say is the biggest surprise of the trip for you?

[00:23:29.550] - Chris Schroder

Quickly, we fell in love with it and just everything about it. The food, the affordability was amazing. The people were so nice. We met local Portuguese who were so happy to entertain us and show us around and introduce us to their food and wine and welcome us to their country. It was just a 360 experience of surprises. And in the end, I think we were so surprised that we joke about the three stages of New Orleans that my friend taught me. The first stage is, ‘this place is great’. And the second stage is ‘I could live here’. And the third stage is ‘get me out of here’. The three stages of Portugal went the first and the second, but the third one was, ‘I really could live here’. We need to come back.

[00:24:19.310] - Jim Santos

How about you, Jan? Same for you.

[00:24:20.940] - Jan Schroder

I agree with that. And one thing that really struck me is how safe it is. You could leave a bag and walk away from it, and no one would bother it. We never felt unsafe even walking around the streets of Lisbon at night, and I think particularly for women, as one of the expats that we interviewed said, it took her a couple of months, and she was sort of looking over her shoulder, and then she realized that no one was going to bother her. To me, especially as a woman, that would be a big factor.

[00:24:51.420] - Jim Santos

Yeah, I've heard that over and over again from people who visited Portugal in general and especially that region, that they felt just incredibly safe there, no matter the time of the day or the night or where they were.

[00:25:01.470] - Chris Schroder

It's the third-safest country in the world. And it's so interesting to be in a culture that lowers your blood pressure, because the culture is, no one, you know, other than pickpockets in Lisbon, maybe no one participates in crime, and you feel safe and everyone joins in on that. And it's really, compared to America and traveling in a lot of places where we see so many guns and just feel unsafe in certain places at certain times. That never happens to Portugal, and that is a remarkable feeling that is hard to describe, but it's a game changing experience.

[00:25:39.120] - Jan Schroder

One thing that was hard for us to get used to is the whole tipping policy. Because as Americans, we're so used to a 20% tip. But we were told about some Portuguese, they don't want us coming over and doing that because it kind of messes up their system. Or Americans might get treated better because we're tipping so much. And that was hard for us, too.

[00:26:03.990] - Chris Schroder

They pay their staff well enough to where they don't need tips or expect tips. And so it does change the balance of the economy a little bit when Americans want to tip. And everything was so affordable. Entrees were five euro to 15 euro, and then no tipping. And the drinks for beer was €2.50, glass of wine was €2.50 or three euro. We had sticker shock. When we came back to America, we went out and we ordered entrees and tipped. It was like, oh, my gosh! Yeah, we would do tips like 5% a little bit, but not the full 20%. Now, the Uber drivers, we did give them good tips because, like, one guy drove us to the train station and he put our luggage in the car and he took it out and it was like three euros. 

[00:26:58.500] - Chris Schroder

We didn't understand how they could even make money at €3. So we did tip them.

[00:27:12.060] - Jim Santos

That is a good travel tip also to look into what the tipping situation is in the countries that you're visiting, because it does vary all around the world. There are some places where they absolutely depend on the tips. And then there are others, like you mentioned here, and also most of Ecuador, you generally don't tip. In fact, some countries, it's almost considered an insult. Yeah, of course I'm going to give you a good service. You don't have to give me extra money for it.

[00:27:38.290] - Chris Schroder

Interesting. Well, in Portugal, you can't tip when they bring you the bill on a credit card. There's no procedure or protocol for adding a tip to it. And so it's just not there. You can't do.

[00:27:48.370] - Chris Schroder

And so you have to leave a few coins on the table.

[00:27:50.770] - Jan Schroder

I think maybe in bigger cities there may be some restaurants where you can do that. But none of the ones that we went to. And another surprise was in the Algarve. A lot of places don't take credit cards, so you have to have a lot of cash. And I think in the big cities, again, that might be different. But many shops and restaurants took only cash.

[00:28:12.900] - Chris Schroder

So you have to be careful which ATMs you go to. They're bank related ones that are very low fees. We found if you reject the fee twice, you'll not pay a fee. Amazing. But other ATMs are there and they not only charge big fees, but the ATM people are in business to make money as well as the stores they're in front of. So those ATMs, I kind of felt sorry for people who were using a lot of those. I don't think they were realizing how many fees they were paying.

[00:28:44.210] - Jim Santos

That's another good thing to check out in advance before you travel is whether your bank charges a fee for foreign transactions.

[00:28:50.970] - Jan Schroder

Right.

[00:28:51.940] - Jim Santos

Especially if it's going from dollars to euros or some other form of currency.

[00:28:56.310] - Jan Schroder

Right. I think another thing that surprised me is really just how beautiful the Algarve is. You see photos, but then you get down there and you see these beaches and these towering cliffs and it's just phenomenal. I couldn't stop taking photos of the cliff and I think, how many photos have we taken? We took like four or five thousand photos and videos. You can relate to that if you're a photographer, you just keep taking them. Thank goodness for the digital age of photography. We don't have to pay.

[00:29:27.460] - Jim Santos

I don't know what we'd have to do if we needed film because we took a couple of days to Venice when we were in Italy once and we took about 500 pictures just on the boat ride from the train station to where our hotel was.

[00:29:41.100] - Jan Schroder

Oh, my gosh. Like, you just can't stop. Right?

[00:29:44.310] - Jim Santos

You can't help it. Right now you two seem kind of busy. I would say you have a lot going on there in Atlanta. Just how far are you from retirement?

[00:29:54.210] - Jan Schroder

Well, not sure I'd ever completely retire because travel writing is a pretty awesome thing to do.

[00:30:01.660] - Jim Santos

Right.

[00:30:02.230] - Jan Schroder

And when you're a writer, there's no reason you have to retire as long as you can string some sentences together and someone might pay you for it. Now, Chris, you might have a different answer because he runs a company.

[00:30:14.010] - Chris Schroder

Yeah, I have a small PR firm and also a digital publishing company that works in 24 markets. But I've got a great staff who covered for me. We're all remote. We went remote in 2017, three years before COVID So we all work from different locales and enjoy that. And so I was able to take a little time off, even though I did some work from Portugal. I can see working another few years, but after spending time in Portugal, I can also see retiring earlier if I had the opportunity. Yes.

[00:30:47.590] - Jim Santos

With working remote and digital work and things that Jan we're talking about is getting harder and harder to draw a line and saying, I'm retired.

[00:30:56.590] - Jan Schroder

Right.

[00:30:57.340] - Jim Santos

I mean, in theory, I'm retired. Yet here we are, right?

[00:30:59.860] - Jan Schroder

Oh, really?

[00:31:00.600] - Jim Santos

Yeah. I'm collecting Social Security. So officially, I'm retired. I think the important thing is you're not punching a clock, and that gives you that freedom and that mobility to be able to move around and to travel a little more.

[00:31:12.750] - Jan Schroder

I think you're right. The main thing is, it's your choice. You're choosing to do these things that we want to do and not being.

[00:31:20.910] - Jim Santos

Forced to do it.

[00:31:22.200] - Chris Schroder

The pandemic bestowed a structural change on the workplace. And other than the primary motive of the young folks coming out of school to be in an office environment, to kind of learn the ropes and have mentors, everyone realized how freeing it is to be able to work from home whenever you want to. Work from anywhere whenever you want to. Even if you work longer and harder, you're able to walk out and do other things to take advantage of it. So a lot of countries, such as Portugal, or passing laws to make it friendlier for digital nomads to move there. And it's become a real economic development measure for a lot of countries to encourage people who are able to work from anywhere to just pick up and move to their countries for a year.

[00:32:07.200] - Jim Santos

We were in Uruguay in 2017 for a couple of weeks, and we found out the government there is actively encouraging also businesses that are online. They would actually run gigabit lines out to your location if you were setting up an Internet company in the country.

[00:32:22.390] - Jan Schroder

Wow. So what took you to Ecuador for six years?

[00:32:26.140] - Jim Santos

Mostly the weather. I think you made a comment that one of the people you talk to said they didn't want to wear a sweater or never wanted to wear a sweater again. Something like that. My wife was like that. She grew up in West Virginia, and the cold and snowy weather, she's just not into that. So we moved to Salinas on the southern coast of Ecuador. I worked remotely for a while. I was a network tech. All of the offices were in other states anyway, so everything was remote work for me, at any rate.

[00:32:55.410] - Chris Schroder

Well, climate change is having an impact. I mean, people can play golf year-round in southern Portugal. But we also noticed when we went to the Douro Valley in early, late September, and we thought we'd be maybe stomping some grapes and some of the vineyards. They were like, ‘oh, no. This year we harvested in August and early September. We had a warm year’. So it's changing the culture in many ways. That climate change.

[00:33:20.830] - Jan Schroder

Yeah.

[00:33:21.210] - Jim Santos

You mentioned COVID's effect on people working remotely. I think another effect has been a lot of people chose to retire early rather than to go into work. So we have a younger batch of people looking at retirement now.

[00:33:34.180] - Chris Schroder

Well, I remember when I used to go travel to Italy and to France, and we have part of their culture is long lunches, leisurely. You have to almost badger them to get the bill, get the check, and they would all look askance. Americans are eating our car, and we work all the time, and it's a cultural thing. And in America, our city of Atlanta is known as the city of hustle, we're not on the coast. So in Atlanta, it's all about business. And so people are focused on working and family and then healthy pursuits with exercise. But when you get to this part of our lives in COVID and Pandemic, it broke the mold, and people started taking walks in the afternoon and realizing they could go, you know, write books or read books or do other things. And I think it I kind of think it was sort of might have been nature's way or God's way of saying, you don't have to get in the car and drive the office every day. You can live other ways and get things done. And I think it forced everybody to realize that they can live a different lifestyle.

[00:34:39.880] - Chris Schroder

And people enjoyed it. And when everybody sounded the alarm, I come back to the office. A lot of people still are saying.

[00:34:46.260] - Jim Santos

No, I don't think so.

[00:34:47.430] - Chris Schroder

Yeah.

[00:34:49.760] - Jim Santos

You guys have done a lot of travel, so maybe this wasn't a big deal to you, but did this prompt you to check out any other destinations?

[00:34:57.250] - Jan Schroder

Well, as far as possible retirement.

[00:35:00.160] - Jim Santos

Possible retirement? Retirement is really changing. It's not so much picking out a place to go and run out the clock. People are living longer. They're retiring earlier. You might be spending 10, 20, 30 years in retirement. So that's why my wife and I were looking at roving retirement and spending a few months at a time in different countries. So I was just wondering if this experience in Portugal maybe open you up to the idea. Maybe there might be some other places that we might go and enjoy spending at least a month or two just to think about whether we were going to retire there.

[00:35:30.910] - Jan Schroder

That had been my original idea, and I've never heard that term, Roving retirement. But I love it. I love that idea. That's what I originally said, and that started back years ago. I had gone to Montreal, and I came back and told Chris, I said, we need to go to Montreal for, like, six weeks in one summer. And I've already figured out how we're going to do it. We're going to rent a student apartment. We're going to get bikes all around. And so that had been an idea we had originally. We haven't really talked about it since we got back from Portugal.

[00:36:01.140] - Chris Schroder

Well, it opened us up to the tools that you would be able to do that. I mean, we realize the value of Facebook groups that can kind of get you. We thought it would take three or four weeks to meet good friends, and it took three or four days. And so when you apply that to other countries, maybe Portugal has the advantage for folks like us because almost everyone speaks English, particularly everyone under 55. They all took it in school. But in other countries where they don't speak English, it might be a little bit more difficult to get embedded. But with Facebook groups and the ability to work digitally and Google Translate, you can visually hold up your phone and it'll translate grocery store items, or you can actually have it record play in real time and listen to people talking and translate it on your phone. So you realize that with certain tools, you could if a place on the map checks your boxes or where you want to live, we've learned now the tools that allow us to go there and do that.

[00:37:02.160] - Jim Santos

Yes, technology really has changed the face of travel. It's much easier to travel now.

[00:37:07.200] - Chris Schroder

Yes, it's amazing.

[00:37:08.650] - Jan Schroder

I would love that idea. And I do believe that if we considered other places to live, I want to go check it out first and not just move there. And that's what some of the experts we talked to, they visited a few different places and then decided on Lagos, which I think is a good idea, because you don't really know. Of course, I've only lived in one place my whole life, so Chris had moved around when he was in the newspaper business. So that was one of my concerns, is how do you build a community? And as Chris said, we found that remarkably easy to do by joining these expat groups on Facebook.

[00:37:44.310] - Chris Schroder

And some of them told us it's easier to make friends and join a community in Portugal or other places than it would be in the US. You just don't go to a US. city and then join a group and say, hey, let me take you to lunch, or, come do this, or, I'm going to go there. Can we have dinner? Whereas over there, they're in a minority, and so they kind of have that bond that is more active to have built a community. And so in some ways, it's easier to form a community when you're a member of an expat community.

[00:38:11.910] - Jim Santos

Right. You automatically have something in common, because you're facing similar challenges, and you have.

[00:38:17.170] - Chris Schroder

So much to talk about. Which restaurants have you found? Where do you do your laundry, and how do you buy a pillow, and

[00:38:24.410] - Jim Santos

How do I pay my utility bills?

[00:38:26.500] - Jan Schroder

Yeah.

[00:38:28.010] - Jim Santos

So that was one of my questions, was going to be what you think about this idea of test driving your retirement? But it seems like from this part of the conversation, that you agree that's a very good idea to go and just try it out for a month or so.

[00:38:40.300] - Jan Schroder

No, absolutely. One woman said, well, that's not a long enough time. And I feel like in a month we got a really good idea of the location, what's available, the people, things that you can do, just the everyday things that you need to know about transportation. Going to the grocery store. The grocery store was funny because that's one place where you did not find English and Google Translate was very little help. So we ended up buying some items. We weren't quite sure what they were.

[00:39:11.510] - Chris Schroder

We like some of them. We found some things that they have that you can buy in a store. Like Gazpacho. They have Gazpacho in like, a milk carton, and it was so good. You just don't know quite what you're buying because it does say Gazpacho. But you look at the pictures and you try to put together some words. But sometimes we find little gems by just being adventurous.

[00:39:34.680] - Jan Schroder

I do think you need to spend some time in a place to get a feel for it.

[00:39:38.470] - Jim Santos

Yeah, we do think a month is really kind of the minimum amount of time.

[00:39:42.520] - Chris Schroder

I think so. A week or two, you're still kind of winding down, and then you also begin preparing for departure. But with a month, some people who were there for six or eight or nine months looked at us like, ‘you're here only a month?’. We felt like we really got a feel for the place after a month. And if we weren't so engaged with our family and friends in America, I don't know that we wouldn't be like some of the people we met packing up everything at home, selling everything we own, and moving to Portugal.

[00:40:18.260] - Jim Santos

Yes. Chris, I have to agree with you about the grocery stores. It's probably seem more confused expats in grocery stores than any place else.

[00:40:25.910] - Jan Schroder

True.

[00:40:26.790] - Jim Santos

I think it's because we're so used to our grocery stores, and then we go there and they keep stuff in different places. The eggs are on a shelf instead of in a refrigerated case, and the milk might be in bags or cartons on the shelf.

[00:40:39.480] - Jan Schroder

Right.

[00:40:40.410] - Jim Santos

And it's just difficult to decide, what kind of spice is this? What kind of meat is this? So we had a joke that you could usually find more expats by hanging out in the beer and wine aisle in the grocery store.

[00:40:51.600] - Jan Schroder

That's true. That was a fun place to be there, because a really nice bottle of wine might be, like, €6.

[00:40:59.890] - Jim Santos

I saw you had some family and friends that visited you while you were in Portugal.

[00:41:04.120] - Jan Schroder

Yes.

[00:41:04.890] - Jim Santos

Have you been recommending this to anybody since you've been back in Atlanta or any of your Atlanta friends considered following in your footsteps and checking out that part of Portugal?

[00:41:13.560] - Chris Schroder

Oh, yes. I've had a number of friends who asked me to lunch in the last couple of weeks since we've been back, and I'm like, all right, tell me about it, and would you move there? And then by the end of our time, they're like, OK, we're going to go there next year.

[00:41:27.490] - Jan Schroder

We do know a lot of people have traveled to Portugal, but most people are familiar, obviously, with Porto and Lisbon and the Douro Valley, but not as familiar with Lagos and everything that it has to offer. So people have been very curious about that.

[00:41:41.820] - Chris Schroder

Well, we feel like we were quite blessed to win the International Living contest. We know a lot of people competed. We actually met a couple over there who said, “oh, we entered that’, and they had moved to the Algarve, but they were hoping to win the contest. So we feel very blessed that we won it. And it was a potentially life changing experience. I mean, we just it opened our eyes to a whole ‘nother way of living and to how other people are living. And so it made us much more open to breaking the structure of what we've built here to be entertaining ideas of how life could be lived overseas.

[00:42:17.310] - Jim Santos

Jan, anything you want to add?

[00:42:18.810] - Jan Schroder

We just found it really an amazing opportunity and such luxury to have that much time in one place, because often as a travel writer, you might be someplace for four to five days, and you're pretty booked up every minute. I have a month and think, okay, well, we can go see those caves one day next week. Because we heard some people, as we'd walk around, they're like, oh, we got to do this today, we got to do this tomorrow, and we've all been there, and to just have the luxury to have a little more time was really wonderful.

[00:42:49.260] - Chris Schroder

One thing we did not mention that I think is a big factor for a lot of people is healthcare. So one of the people that took me to lunch, he said, ‘I loved your videos because you interviewed a woman who actually fell on the street and broke her hip and her experience at the hospital’. And one of the things that holds people back from moving to an incredibly affordable place like Portugal, for instance, one couple moved from Hawaii and they said, this is half price. Everything is half price compared to what Hawaii is, the cost of living. But when they hear that healthcare, you can get for $1,900 or euro a year, you can get healthcare, vision and dental. And the healthcare professionals are trained in English and very good, and that it's a safe and healthy place to live with good healthcare that's incredibly affordable. I think that lessens a lot of fears that people have about moving from where they are and realizing that it can be safe and healthy, even perhaps more so, to live elsewhere.

[00:43:51.990] - Jan Schroder

Well, the $1,900 is for private insurance. The public insurance doesn't cost you anything, right?

[00:43:58.030] - Jim Santos

Yeah. There's two things that are pushed a lot to Americans that seem to be kind of embedded in everyone's mind. One is that the outside world is a very dangerous place, and if you travel to other countries, you're putting your life in danger. And the other is that the healthcare in the US. Is the best in the world and you can never do anything better than that. And it's really eye-opening sometimes to travel to these places and see that that's not necessarily the case.

[00:44:22.240] - Chris Schroder

We found the opposite to be true. And speaking of writing, I wrote a book and published it in May of 2022 about my experience of going to Istanbul, Turkey, to undergo medical tourism. I had a hair transplant and changed my look after 30 years of being bald. And it was so much cheaper and more advanced than in America or Canada. It's a tenth of the cost. And it was actually more advanced in some cases. So we found that to be that totally broke our impression. And we found, as we just said, the opposite to be true.

[00:44:59.460] - Jim Santos

Yes. I'd have to say that the big advantage of travel, especially to foreign countries, is that it opens your eyes to well, I hate to use it as a plug, but to a bigger, better world, there really is a lot more out there than people are aware of if they've ever traveled outside of the United States.

[00:45:15.130] - Jan Schroder

That's true.

[00:45:15.970] - Chris Schroder

We recommend it.

[00:45:20.590] - Jim Santos

You have been listening to international Living’s Bigger, Better World. I’m your host, Jim Santos, and we've been chatting with international Living’s Win Your Dream Retirement Overseas contest winners Chris and Jan Schroeder. I'd like to thank you both for being with me on the show today.

[00:45:34.870] - Jan Schroder

Thanks, Jim.

[00:45:35.640] - Chris Schroder

Thanks, Jim. It's a pleasure.