Barry Golson - Gringos in Paradise: An American Couple Builds Their Retirement Dream House in a Seaside Village in Mexico

We delivered our news at a Mexican restaurant in New York City.

I said, Were going to live in a small village on Mexicos Pacific Coast.

The table was quiet, then it became noisy, then margarita toasts were offered all around. The dinner was a rowdy, jovial affair; someone among us was finally doing it. A grown-up couple was going to do the madcap thing, and run off and join the circus. But afterward, I am told, there were whispered family conferences and long, concerned telephone conversations.

If it sounded to our friends and family like we were being rash and impetuous, it was understandable; and perhaps it was not entirely untrue. They knew that we were at a crossroads. They knew I had topped out, and then bottomed out, on my work. They knew we had wanderlust, and that at my age I probably would not stay around to restart my career. They knew that my wife, Thia, always cheerful and intrepid, was willing to try something new. They knew all this.

But Mexico.

There is a body of escapist literature about people who burn out and leave the career game voluntarily, usually with enough set aside to buy themselves a new life. But in our case, it was the game that left me on the sidelines.

I had worked up to fifty weeks a year for thirty-five years. Although I was one of the fortunate people who liked what I was doing, dues had been paid. Sons had been sent to college. Brothers and sisters had been sheltered and succored. Mothers had moved in with us, at separate times, and had passed their final hours in our home. Our rambling house in the suburbs, and later our apartment in the city, were hearth and haven for a far-flung clan of comrades. But at work, the tradeoff for a stimulating job in the youth-beset magazine business was my double surprise to find that, first, as I passed my mid-fifties, I was no longer as appealing to employers as I had been a decade earlier, and second, I actually was the age on my drivers license.

We had lived an active life in New York City and its environs. We were used to going to the theater, to concerts in Central Park, to Zabars for its pt, cheese, and thirty different kinds of olives. Though my work was satisfying, it was intense. I was at my office till seven or eight at night, and I often worked on weekends. I almost never felt I could relax, especially not at the crest of my career. I looked around, like a stag at a stream, always making certain I wasnt in someones sights. I usually was.

When the last magazine I edited was folded in a publishing recession, I expected to get another editing job. But the choices were sparser, the recruiters younger, the salaries smaller. My phone didnt ring. As for Thia, after several careers in teaching, remodeling and editing a newsletterher true lifes work was raising our two boysshe, too, found that her earning opportunities after age fifty-five were greatly diminished.

Maybe life, as John Lennon said, is what happens when youre busy making other plans. But no planning can creep up on you too. Thia and I had put aside some money, though not nearly enough to think about living for long on our savings, much less retiring in anything like the style to which we, like a lot of members of my providential generation, were accustomed. (In fact, many of us will choose not to retire at all; but the problem of living during our later years on a sharply reduced income, whether at work or at rest, is common to many of us. That, not shuffleboard, is what I mean by retirement.)

In the period after the turn of the millennium, it was broadly reported that a majority of our baby-boom generation was not saving enough to live on during its retirement years. That, combined with general insecurity about Social Security, set off widespread anxiety, introspection, and not a little whining. In the last year that we spent in Connecticut and New York City, more and more conversations with friends were about what happens next and whether we had our numberenough of a nest egg to take us the rest of the way.

The size of the nest egg varied with the family, of course, and some of our more affluent acquaintances declared that it would take several million dollars in the bank, beyond even a house or two, for them to feel set for life. For that reason, they intended to continue working long years and long hours, some at jobs they did not enjoy, until they felt secure. Others, who had toiled at low-glamour service careers with the promise of a good pension and benefits, had begun coming into their own, and we were happy for them. Still others, oldies without goodies, talked of adopting a new financial planning strategy entirely: doubling up on their weekly purchases of lottery tickets.

We had a modest securities account and, after paying retail for two private-college educations, an equally modest retirement account fund. But that was it. No pension, no benefits. I had taken some risks in my career and was glad I had. Some had paid off, some not, but none resulted in payouts or pensions. Our health insurance premiums, now that we were no longer covered by corporate, could make us sick if we thought about them. We had some debts. We owned a small condo in Connecticut, where we could cocoon. In all, nothing to cry about; the world offered far tougher prospects to the vast majority of humankind. But it was nevertheless apparent that we were going to have to look at other places to live, and other ways of living, if we were going to afford a future for ourselves that was anywhere as interesting as the life we had come from.

The other vein I had felt throbbing was a personal pulse, the sense of rhythm we had about our lives and where we were headed. Even without the push, we had spent many nights asking ourselves if this taut, glossy life was something we wanted forever. Our two sons had made us proud, and we had an extraordinarily close and affectionate relationship with them, but they had flown the nest. One was a few years out of college, a reporter in New York, and the other, just graduated, off to study in the Middle East. We knew how fortunate we had been with our kids, how wed lucked out on the fundamental things of life. Wed always have parenthood.