Me

In 1979 the only foreign country I had been to was Canada.  I was selected as a Rotary      Youth Exchange Student to spend my junior year of high school in India.  Needless to say,  it was an amazing year and started a life-long enchantment with living abroad.

I am now 46 and have a wife and four children (18, 20, 21, 23) and the adventure  continues.  We have lived and worked in Japan, Mexico, Argentina and the U.S.  I work for  myself, my wife is a published writer.

We have never had a corporate or government transfer package and have always done  everything ourselves when it came to moving to a new country.

We have changed careers several times and have never had a 5 year, 2 year or even a 12  month plan.  We are not trust-funders or recipients of a huge windfall.  We have had our fat  years and our lean years but through it all have been careful with our money and always  made travel and education a priority for us and our children.

We have educated our kids both in the U.S. and overseas (my wife, Maya Frost, wrote the book “The New Global Student, Skip the SAT, Save Thousands on Tuition and Get a Truly International Education)

We like to dig into our host country, get to know our neighborhood and as much as possible live as locals (way cheaper).   We try to travel internationally as little as possible and instead explore the country we are in via ground transportation.

We have rented, bought and sold property abroad.

We have lived on teaching visas, temporary 12 month visas and short term tourist visas.

When people ask how long we are going to stay somewhere, our standard reply is “temporarily forever”.  “Home” is where we are at that moment.

My Interview:

1. Where are you from, where are you living now and what took you there?

I am from Portland, OR and moved to Mazatlan, Mexico in 2005.  My wife and I met while living abroad in Japan teaching English in the 80’s and had always wanted to live abroad with our kids.  As they got older we recognized that time was running out and made the leap.  We started with Mazatlan because we had vacationed there and were familiar with it.  Also, because we had aging parents, we wanted to live within a short flight (5 hours to Portland) in the event they or our businesses needed us.  As it turned out, our parents and our businesses thrived without us nearby!

2. How long have you lived there and how long will you stay?  What keeps you there?

Well, we live in Buenos Aires now and have been here for three years after our first year in Mexico.  I expect we will have a base in Buenos Aires for a long time as we really enjoy the culture of the city and Argentina.  Plus, all of our kids love it here and enjoy visiting/living here.

3. What do you do to make a living?

When I moved to Mexico I was importing jewelry from China and selling it wholesale to stores throughout the US and on a retail basis through our website.  Though we had a warehouse, office and employees, I was able to make the business virtual so I could run it without me being there physically.  Making this change was surprisingly easy and the business switched from a standard bricks- and-mortar distribution business to a virtual distribution business in just two weeks.

4. Describe your average weekday and weekend day.

In Mexico I would start my day at 6am with a 5-mile walk along the ocean with one of my daughters, pick up some fresh orange juice along the way and eat breakfast next to the pool when we got back.

Around 9am I would check my email (mostly from my bookkeeper who picked up mail and deposited checks from our US Post Office Box), double-check retail website orders we had received during the night and then head over to the daily farmer’s market to get fresh food for the day.  Upon returning from the market I would check in with my sales manager and process wholesale orders from her.  She took the orders via phone, virtually faxed it to me and I would input them into our fulfillment company’s order processing site.

Around 1pm we would eat lunch (my daughter came home from school at that time).  After lunch I read and/or took a siesta.  At 4pm I would check in with the office again, make phone calls via my VOIP phone, input additional orders then email the order links to my bookkeeper in Oregon who input them into our online accounting program.

Generally I would close my laptop at around 6pm and have a drink and light dinner next to the pool and then wander down to the central square to listen to music and have a beer or two with family and friends.  Lights out at 10pm or so.

Weekends were pretty much the same as weekdays with the exception that I did not have any contact with the US office (closed) and generally went to the beach with the family.

5. What skills have you learned while living abroad?

Though I am not fluent in Spanish, it certainly has improved and living in a foreign environment has increased my awareness of my surroundings.  The separation by geographical distance allowed me to reduce my angst about instant responses and I learned to take more time to develop the best response possible to matters both business and personal.  Additionally I learned how to use new programs online that helped my business.

6. What are you missing (professionally) by not being in your home country?

I would say that I am less competitive and more relaxed about business than I would be if I were in the US, and that probably translates into lower sales figures than if I were really pushing things.  In-person networking/meetings are just not a viable option while living abroad, so I tend to forge relationships with business vendors and partners online.  We do have pretty reliable internet and VOIP phones, but the quality of the calls is sometimes poorer than I would like.

7. If you could live anywhere, where would that be?

Right now, Buenos Aires.  I have felt the same since I arrived three years ago.  Though I have no plans to move anywhere else at this time, I certainly intend to keep my options open as we explore other locations in the world.

8. What is your favorite gadget that makes your life abroad better?

My laptop is pretty much my work-world.  It is a Toshiba Satellite U-405.  It is small and light and has served me well.   I am really appreciating Google’s free telephone service.  I get an Oregon number so our parents can call a local number, leave a message which I am notified of via email. I can then listen to the message online and call them back with Skype.

9. Do you have a favorite book that inspired you to travel?

I have two.  The first is Blue Latitudes: Boldy Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before.   The second is Paul Theroux’s The Old PatagonianExpress.  Theroux took public ground transportation from his home in Boston all the way to Patagonia in the south of Argentina.  I love the idea of traveling light and using only public transport though I have not been able to convince my wife to do the journey backward from Buenos Aires to New York.