FREEDOM... yeah, but how? The Wandering Writer

For the last two weeks, I have started to tell about my decision to regain my freedom. That kind of freedom that should be entitled to everybody, the one that takes you away from the crazy rat race and makes you the only player in the decision making of your everyday life.

You might reply that this is not possible, that you need money to pay your bills the healthcare, your pension scheme, the car, the holidays… and I can make the list as long as I want.

The problem as first is taking away what we do NOT need, those things that smart marketer made us believe we need, but they are totally useless.

If she is still alive, ask your grandmother to tell you about her life, and if she was one who was living in the countryside, then you’d be surprised how she could be happy without anything that shapes our everyday life. Sure, she still had to work, and perhaps even harder than we do nowadays with the help of machines. But did our quality of life really improve?

My aim is to reach the same quality of life my grandmother had, that peaceful flowing of life following the routine of the seasonality of her garden.

Yes, but how am I going to do it? I cannot just leave everything and buy a cottage in the countryside… I do not have the savings for that!

The way is to look at your financial situation and give yourself a good target, in our case we put ours within ten years. So we had ten years to save money, pay our debts away in a reasonable way, get rid of what we do not need, start already a living in a humbler way (without forgetting enjoying ourselves).

Once we had a target, we needed to find another target, where to go and spend the rest of our lives. This is actually the most challenging part of the deal, the part when you talk to yourself and realize that perhaps one day to reach that golden target you will have to relocate somewhere else. It can be a cheaper country where you can make the best out of your savings, a country with a better climate, where you can enjoy longer summers and milder winters, or perhaps you are looking for a more challenging climate to put yourself and your self-reliance skills to the test.

For us, after ages of living in a winter country, we opted for a summer one.

OK, fine, but where? Looking at the world map, there are 190 countries in the world, I have been traveling only in 45 of them, and I cannot even say that I know anything about how it would be living there.

We made a list separately, called “PRIORITIES,” In that list we put all the things we need absolutely in our lives, from the climate, the cost of life, the healthcare… everything that we were not ready to give up. Those would have been the fundamental criteria for the choice of the country.

 We compared our lists and the following points came out:

             1.       The country we are going to choose should be politically stable and safe

             2.       The local lifestyle/culture should be compatible with our culture

             3.       We should have access to a good healthcare

             4.       We should be able to get the permanent resident permit with a certain ease

             5.       We should be able to own a land

             6.       It should be environmentally safe (no volcanoes, no hurricanes, no earthquakes or other natural calamities)

             7.       Seasonality, but no harsh winters

             8.       The cost of living should be cheaper than ours (and that is rather easy, Finland is a terribly expensive country)

             9.       Good quality of the services like public transportation and infrastructures

             10.   We needed a place where social life is still highly appreciated and cooperation between neighbors is still existing.

The two lists we made individually were longer, but we chose only the points that were common within the two lists, and we discussed that the others were just biased by a false perception of what we need.

You can also do the same as we are doing and not necessarily your priorities have to  match ours. What I am going to tell you is what did we do, then if you aim also to leave the rat race, you might find this post series helpful.

At this point, with this list and the list of the countries of the world, we had to spend some time in researching every one, and believe me, it took longer than we could expect, and to explain you this, I need to give you appointment to the next week, because I think this was the most critical part of the whole deal, finding a place where to spend the rest of our lives.

I really hope you will enjoy this marathon in the search for the lost freedom. I hope I can be inspiring at least to some of you and entertaining to all of you.