| Financing
an Escape from the Rate Race |
| My Move
to Morelia |
| by Sandy Caputo |
| It’s not
as if I hadn’t thought about it. It’s not even outside my character
to say yes to adventure and change. But marriage and kids and career
had continued to smack me in the face with practicality as visions of myself
holed -up on some foreign shore, scribbling away for a living like Hemingway
or Fitzgerald, grew steadily dimmer.
I’d held images
of that other self dear for so long that any of the hundreds of people
I called family, friend, or colleague – over more than fifty years of living
the good life in America – could have told you that’s what Sandy would
really rather be doing.
And then, incredibly,
I looked up one day and found myself staring at the possibility of realizing
it all. |
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| It was called
Morelia, Michoacan, Mexico – some 1,700 miles from my Tucson, Arizona,
home base and it had taken me all of about 24 hours of being there to pull
back and say, hey, I think maybe my time has come!
And, you
know what? It has. I’ve lived here for almost a year
and a half, now, and it’s as good as any of those earlier imaginings ever
was.
Morelia is
one of those temperate zone Mexican cities like Cuernavaca, San Miguel
Allende, Oaxaca, and Guadalajara that feature comfortably warm days and
cool nights, year-round.And its home state of Michoacan is one of the most
beautiful in all of Mexico – featuring green, rolling hills, tropical vegetation,
a variety of fascinating indigenous populations with an endless panorama
of fascinating cultures, and sites that range from sparkling beaches to
lovely 15th century architecture.
Michoacan's
landscape stretches from the Pacific Coast to Mexico City, almost.
In fact, Morelia is located on the eastern edge of the state of Michoacan
and about 200 miles west of Mexico City. |
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| It was July,
1999, and I’d been invited to this city of a million-plus people to write
about it for the edification of the U.S. traveling public. I’d taken
advantage of a break in a packed itinerary of sight-seeing to grab
some rays by the pool at the small luxury resort of Villa Montaña
– a place originally designed as a private residence for Tyrone Power.
There, high
above the city, a rare sense of quiet settled over me and I began contemplating
not only the slower pace of life that was so clearly evident, but also
the obviously lower cost of living.My normal life consisted at the time
of balancing the responsibilities of heading the PR efforts of one of Arizona’s
most award winning ad agencies, being there for kids and grandkids, working
toward a master’s degree in Gerontology (through which I’d intended
to become a uniquely qualified marketer to that growing, moneyed market),
and writing the rare freelance article for some magazine. |
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Offshore
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| This agenda
normally translated to eighty-hour work weeks, five-hour sleep sessions,
and a growing sense that it was impossible to accomplish everything – at
least with the level of excellence I believed each separate thing deserved.
My income
was good. My work, stimulating. My family and friends, important
to me. But the more I learned during my hours at the university
about how we as a people are handling aging in America, the more I became
aware that the rat race I was a part of was only going to get worse.The
new old , especially those residing in the USA, are more vigorous, more
open to the pursuit of things fulfilling, and more likely to live twenty
years beyond what even the most circumspect financial planning had
prepared them for. My studies only made me realize that I was looking
down a long road of continued need to keep doing exactly what I had been
doing. Yikes!
Thus the dawning
that perhaps there was a better way. Newly divorced and with a very
tiny nest egg, I sat there by that pool in Morelia and began toying with
the idea that I could, if I was careful and brave enough, risk walking
away from security to gamble on making life work for me on a saner and
more personally fulfilling scale. |
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| I returned
to my job from that freelance writing assignment and gave all those niches
of responsibility in my life six months notice – a sense that such was
the least each was owed preventing me from just never ever pulling myself
away from Ty’s intended swimming hole.
By then
I had worked out a scenario that could keep me from dipping into personal
funds. I’d consult for the agency, I decided, and focus on building
my writing output for various publications. I’d, meanwhile, work
on publishing a novel that had been for too long on a back burner and maybe
even find the time to begin a book on what taking off on such an adventure
can be like.
I knew from
my studies that untold numbers like me are out there – rapidly reaching
the same conclusions as I about how replete the golden years are going
to be with both danger and opportunity. |
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Offshore
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| Hopefully,
they would read about, if not actually dive into, what it was I was considering.
Well, let me tell you how those early plans eventually materialized.
Over those
intervening six months of tying up loose ends, my boss moved from first
saying consulting would never work from such a distance, to attempting
to change my mind about even going, to deciding that maybe I should remain
his PR director in a cutting-edge, virtual office capacity until I got
this publishing bug out of my system. I could travel back and forth
when my physical presence was required for important meetings or managing
special events and the like. Our original agreement was that I would
give this idea of escaping to Morelia a year or two and then return to
what those in the States call normalcy.
I couldn’t
believe that good fortune. In fact, I couldn’t handle it. I
felt so guilty about trading those long hours for peace, tranquility, rest,
and the opportunity to pursue my own interests that I immediately proposed
accepting less compensation in return for a guaranteed minimum workload
of 30 hours a week . This, so that I could maintain the company’s
carriage of my health insurance.
A word of
advice to those of you who may be persuaded to follow in my footsteps:
don’t fall victim to this impulse!
Not only is
health insurance, in my estimation and with some hands-on experience, not
that essential a factor in constructing a foreign lifestyle support system
– my particular agreement worked against my ability to accomplish what
I wanted.
The workload
and subsequent compensation indeed sustained my meager needs in Mexico,
but the hours went way beyond the 30-hour minimum requirement for insurance
coverage and began interfering with my ability to act on my growing sense
that a thriving freelance career was what was most essential to my long
term future.
The trips back
to Tucson kept somehow escalating from planned two-week periods to six,
eight, twelve week-sessions during which I rarely had time to even hang
out with my friends and family.
My days at
the computer on agency business, even when I was back in my newfound city
with my newfound friends, were giving me a reputation as a work-driven
gringa. And I was beginning to get curmudgeonly about
the disparity in my hourly worth in Morelia versus Tucson.
So I bit the
bullet a year later. Resigned my position. Cancelled plans
to return to the agency somewhere down the road. Dropped that dream-strangling
hold that relying on U.S. -supplied health and medical security had become.
And how
has it turned out? Well, you’ll have to read subsequent installments,
here, for the final results. But I now have my novel AND a half-way
completed book called Shortcut to Morelia with a major publisher and here
I am, discovering more and more ways to gain writing assignments via the
Internet that appear to be paying off.
I’m back to
that original proposal of consulting for my agency and my living expenses
of around $1,000 a month are being covered nicely under that arrangement
at about one-fourth the number of hours I was previously putting in.
Stay tuned
to see how this all plays out. I’ll enjoy giving you insights on
how one blends into a foreign lifestyle. I’ll be honest about the
good, the bad, and the unbelievably fantastic. And I’ll share with
you some wonderful things I’ve learned about traveling safely; dining anywhere
without later regretting it; and finding those little spots where
fabulously authentic traditions and cultures open doors of understanding
to why living in Mexico can be a freeing, rejuvenating, fascinating, and
totally charmed adventure. |
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Article
Index ~ Mexico
Index ~ |
