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>It's all about your priorities/tradeoffs and how much work you're willing to put into it. They lead a very no-frills budget-restricted life, keep very minimal possessions, put effort into finding overseas teaching jobs in low cost-of-living areas, finding dirt-cheap travel deals...

So how is their retirement plans coming along?

>...and honestly I think the kids getting all this early travel and cultural exposure is probably a big net win (vs e.g. prioritizing things like buying them the latest video game consoles and fashionable clothing, etc).

That seems to be a loaded assumption. I've known people who spent their entire childhood traveling, and rather than culturally rich they just couldn't fit into any culture - they were inappropriate and had difficulty functioning in a North American lifestyle due to having a mish mash of wordly exposure which has proven to be pretty career limiting. They can tell neat stories about their time in South America, but can't figure out why people don't want to hear outright that their ideas are dumb. There's this assumption that the more you travel the more well rounded you'll be, but you've just been you in more places, doesn't mean you'll be a better person.

> So how is their retirement plans coming along?

Someone has been watching too many financial planning commercials. And is assuming life expectancy will continue to outpace retirement age a few decades out.

And struggling with the close-minded back home after travel isn't a good reason not to do it.

> is assuming life expectancy will continue to outpace retirement age a few decades out.

Here's the thing - if you can save enough, you can retire when you want, regardless of retirement age. I don't believe life expectancy will decrease, and I definitely want to be able to enjoy my golden years without working.

>>And struggling with the close-minded back home after travel isn't a good reason not to do it

Why is traveling now considered such an absolute good that it is impossible to criticize it, or to assume that it will automatically make people more open-minded? The parent posters point was that traveling won't make everyone well-adjusted and open-minded. I find it silly to claim that everyone will benefit, there surely must be some people who won't benefit.

Taking the parent's post in good faith, I find it reasonable to conclude that yes, in my experience there are people who, after extensive travel in their youth, experience difficulties adhering to local cultural standards. For a neutral example, I find the American puritanical reaction to sex & nudity frankly stupid, but it would be unwise to ignore these aspects of the culture.

Interesting point; travel does come across as rather unassailable.

By way of analogy: it's fine to take the first job you're offered and work there until you retire. If you took a new job, you'd have to learn new skills and deal with new coworkers, a new work culture. And should you return to your old company after the new one, you might try to incorporate skills, processes, or attitudes from the other place you found beneficial, changes which the old guard may not appreciate (but management should).

Well life expectancy depending on variations is well past 80, especially once you make it into your late 60's and i don't imagine much of the working public wants to be heading into work Monday morning at that age, so yes - it is reasonable to assume life expectancy will outpace retirement for several decades.

One does not have to retire to a first world country. Seriously, why would you even want to retire to USA? Health care, which old people tend to use, is stupid expensive.

I'm Canadian, so I have no desire to retire to a place with awful health care. How does health care in second/third world countries work? Are you instantly granted all rights to health care if you retire to another nation?

>> are you instantly granted all rights to health care if you retire to another nation?

Yes, those rights being the sole right to purchase health care. Which can be very good if you have money and doesn't exist if you do not.

> Yes, those rights being the sole right to purchase health care.

But do all nations actually have that?

>Seriously, why would you even want to retire to USA?

Family. Literally everyone wants to retire near their family, kids, and grandkids.

As you get older, and your time becomes short, you're not going to want to retire to some completely foreign place you've never lived in. You will want to be close to people that matter to you, and enjoy the comfort of familiar things. Exploring new things becomes less appealing as you age. Exploration is for the youth.

Optimizing life for retirement seems like the single most backward strategy one could have. I don't even mean that in some sort of counter-cultural way - it just seems deeply irrational.

> Optimizing life for retirement seems like the single most backward strategy one could have.

I'm not suggesting optimizing for retirement, but I am advocating being aware of it. Choosing to make financial choices where only today is considered seems irrational as well, considering that tomorrow can and will come.

Unless you're on track to retire in your 40's.

> all of these things are more achievable than you think

Perhaps one of them is achievable, but only at the cost of a very high level of focus - and giving up on the others.

Travel is certainly a lot easier to achieve when you're young, and in many places cheaper (e.g. Interrail tickets, which I would recommend to anyone looking to see a lot of countries in a short time)

I think that's the point of the application? This is advice from older people to their younger self, so a lot of it won't resonate with you (your nothing like them). Find the bits that do, and try to gain a bit of perspective from them

At the same time, advice from people who have unrealistic regret at missing out on all the options they didn't pick isn't very helpful. Life is a series of choices. Saying yes to everything is impossible. Good advice is for ideas are short-term sacrifices (at least in perception) for long-term payoff, not for grasping at everything desirable.

Well, first, getting to the point where you can maintain your lifestyle (even a relatively modist one) requires taking on quite a lot of financial and personal risk. Like the kind of risk that may exclude you from being able to buy your own house for the foreseeable future (already a challenge for many), or could drive you to living hand to mouth. The problem is at the average end of the income scale and lifestyle today, risk isn't just this nebulous, financial thing: it's not even an effort in the present risk, or the risk of emotional vulnerability - it's the risk of your next decade or longer being blighted with excess debt and possibly dependence on the state or family or whatever assuming even that you're lucky enough for those things to break your fall. In many places if your personal business fails after you quit your last job, you're voluntarily unemployed so, woops, too bad! Not to mention people who cannot just give up everything because they have dependents and all the rest.