Wade Sold the House and Nobody Understood Why

Wade called me on video back in February. He was sitting on a rooftop in shirtsleeves with a coffee.

I’d been out scraping ice off my truck about an hour before that.

He turned the phone around and showed me the street. Then he showed me a receipt for lunch for two that came to eleven dollars.

Wade sold his house in Ohio three years ago and moved to a town in central Mexico. His kids thought he’d lost his mind. Two of his oldest friends told him flat out not to do it.

He’s the happiest I’ve heard him since his wife died.

But he’d be the first to tell you that four things broke on the way, and that nobody warned him about a single one of them.

There’s less romance in it than people imagine, and a lot more paperwork.

He didn’t buy anything. That was the smartest thing he did. He rented a furnished place for the first fourteen months while he worked out whether he actually liked living there, as opposed to liking two weeks of vacation there.

He got his residency visa through a Mexican consulate on this side of the border, before he ever went. That part surprised him. You start the process here, not there.

The income requirements for those visas get set every year, and they aren’t the same from one consulate to the next. So the number some fellow on a forum quotes you is close to worthless. You call the specific consulate you’d apply through and you ask them.

He kept his U.S. bank accounts, his U.S. mailing address, and his U.S. phone number. Every man I’ve read about who did this properly kept all three.

This is the one that ought to stop you cold, and most people find it out late.

Medicare doesn’t work down there.

I don’t mean it’s inconvenient, or the paperwork is a headache, or you pay first and get reimbursed later. Medicare’s own fact sheet says that in most situations it won’t pay for care you get outside the country. The exceptions are narrow enough to be useless, and they all turn on a foreign hospital happening to sit closer to you than an American one.

So you keep paying the Part B premium every month for coverage you can’t use.

Medicare stops at the border. Not reduced. It doesn’t pay.

Now, you can drop Part B and stop that premium, and plenty of people abroad do. But if you ever come home and sign back up, you’ll owe a late enrollment penalty for as long as you hold Part B after that. It isn’t a one-time fee. It rides with you.

Part A is a different animal. It’s premium-free for most men, and getting out of it is punitive, so nobody sensible drops it.

Wade buys private health insurance where he lives. He’s 68, and it runs him about $310 a month. His view is that he’d rather pay for a policy that covers him than one that doesn’t.

Second thing that breaks. You don’t get to leave your tax return behind.

An American citizen files a U.S. return on worldwide income no matter which country he sleeps in. Moving doesn’t end that.

There’s a second filing most men have never heard of. If your foreign bank accounts added together ever top $10,000 at any point in the year, you have to report them. That’s the highest balance on any day of the year, not the balance sitting there on December 31st.

It’s called an FBAR. FinCEN Form 114, filed electronically with the Treasury rather than the IRS. It’s due in April with an automatic extension into October.

Wade tripped over that one his first year. He’d moved money across to cover a deposit and blew past ten thousand for about nine days.

You can move to another country. You can’t move away from the Treasury Department.

Here’s the third thing, and it’s the reason I sat down to write this.

For about a decade the smart play was Portugal. There was a tax status called non-habitual residence, and it taxed foreign pension income at a flat 10%. Every article written about retiring in Europe leaned on it. It’s why half the men you know have a folder somewhere about the Algarve.

It closed to new applicants on April 1, 2025.

What replaced it is aimed at working professionals in research and technology, with a degree requirement attached. It does nothing at all for a retired man living on a pension.

So a fellow arriving in Portugal today gets the regular Portuguese tax system on his pension income, and those rates climb from 13% up to 48%.

The deal closed. People are still planning around a brochure that expired.

That isn’t an argument against Portugal. Plenty of men will still want to be there, and some of them for good reasons. It’s an argument for one thing only.

I asked him what he’d tell a man thinking about it. He had a list ready, which tells you something.

▸ Rent before you buy. Fourteen months minimum, and live there through the worst month of the weather. A place you love in October can be a different place in May.
▸ Solve the health coverage before anything else. Price the private policy in the country you’re looking at, at your actual age, with your actual history. Get a real quote, not an average. If that number doesn’t work, the rest of the plan doesn’t either.
▸ Call the consulate yourself. Don’t take visa requirements off a forum or a relocation blog. The rules change every year, and they vary by consulate.
▸ Keep your American footing. The bank, the mailing address, the phone number. Cutting all three makes everything harder and buys you nothing.
▸ Pay for a cross-border tax person, once. Somebody who does U.S. returns for Americans living where you’re going. One year of watching it done properly teaches you the rest.
▸ Go learn the language badly. Wade says the men who are miserable down there are the ones who only ever talk to other Americans.

He sent me his numbers when I asked, because he’s proud of them. One month, one man, his figures.

That’s his town, his apartment, his age, his insurance. Somebody else’s numbers will look different, and a coastal town with a lot of Americans in it will look a good deal different. But it shows you the shape of the thing.

Wade turns 69 in November. He’s got a dog he didn’t have three years ago and a standing card game on Thursdays.

The fourth thing that broke was him.

The hard part, he says, wasn’t the money or the paperwork. It was the first eight months, when he didn’t know anybody and couldn’t say much, sitting in a rented apartment wondering what he’d done.

He tells me he almost came home twice.

I asked him what changed. He said one day he stopped translating in his head and just ordered lunch.

Then he turned the phone back around and showed me the rooftop again, and I went out to deal with my truck.

— Walter