Retirement is one of life's major changes. So is relocation. For some, these two major changes happen at the same time – or in close succession. Sometimes, retirement means leaving not only your job, your office, and your colleagues. It may also mean leaving behind the life you've invested a lot of time in building in a country you got close to calling home.
First, why would retirement force an expat to leave?
Retirement and relocation are often connected. Sometimes, this connection is obvious: many expats move abroad for work. If employment ends, the reason for relocation technically ends too. Together with the reason, your residency may also no longer be valid.
For someone who relocated for reasons other than work, retirement may come with a shift in priorities and needs. Things that didn't seem important may now come to the forefront of the living abroad experience. It could be the price and access to healthcare, changes in the cost of living or your retirement income; tax and pension calculations may make less sense. Finally, you may simply want to be closer to family and the familiar.
Here's the trick: Home may not feel like home anymore
This may not be the case in all situations. But in most cases, it's safe to assume that if you left home at 25 and came back at 65, you won't really be coming back to the same place. In fact, it may actually feel like moving to another new country.
A lot could change while you are away. Some friends and family may have moved away or drifted out of close contact. Streets may not look the same. Prices may be higher. The biggest change may also be you.
Living abroad for a long time can change what you consider normal. You've probably become used to a different pace of life, different food, different ways of interacting with others, weather, a different routine. Adjusting to that life in a new country took time, effort, patience. And now… now you may need to almost do it all over again as you re-adjust to what life used to be before you moved away.
There is one important takeaway here: you may not actually be leaving that expat life behind.
For some time, you may still feel like an expat, just back home.
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You may not know what you are actually feeling
Retirement is a big identity transition. And not being an expat anymore can feel even bigger. If these two transitions come at once, pile atop each other, the many components of these two important life changes may get all mixed up.
You may be leaving behind your professional identity, work routine, the country you called home, social circle, expat community. There may be so much going on that it may be hard to even define what exactly you are feeling and what you are struggling with.
Do you miss working? Or maybe it's the people you worked with and the fun office antics? Are you not liking retirement? Or are you not adjusting well to life in another country? Are you lacking a sense of purpose? Or do you need a new social circle?
This is the first and, probably, most confusing problem of mixing retirement with relocation: you will need to work much harder at identifying your feelings and figuring out where they actually come from.
One of the biggest pains of relocating to a new country is losing close contact with friends and family. You arrive in a new country without a social circle. So the quest begins: the quest to find company. It may take time, but eventually most of us find them. And once we do, the people we meet become an essential part of our new landscape. As shares Liam, a retired UK expat in Thailand: "There are no friends like expat friends, the people you meet abroad. You have no idea who they were back home, but here they become your closest allies. It's funny because you may not even have that much in common when you start out. But you understand each other so well because you are facing the same or at least similar challenges. I don't want to make a gruesome comparison, but it's like meeting people on a plane when you think it's about to crash. It's such a short time, but you become so close in sharing this experience – no one outside of that plane will ever be able to understand you".
"No one will ever be able to understand you" is a recurring theme following expat friendships. Once you've been through a specific experience with someone, they become part of that period of your life. You've shared things that will be very difficult to explain to your friends and family back home.
This is yet another adjustment awaiting someone who pairs retirement with relocation. You will lose a lot of connections at once: colleagues, fellow expats, and the relationships you had back home will probably not feel exactly the same either.
You will lose the lifestyle you've learned to love
If you moved abroad for work, and especially if you moved abroad on an expat package, you may also be going through a massive change in lifestyle. An expat package means you are treated… differently. You may have a nice apartment, live in the "expat" neighborhood, have a lunch and transportation allowance. This makes life convenient, and you could even feel taken care of, in a way.
Even without the full expat package, working and living in a different country introduces you to a different lifestyle. And assuming you've stayed for a while, there was something about this lifestyle that you liked. Maybe the cost of living was comfortable, maybe the weather was warmer, maybe the people smiled more often. Moving away will mean losing that. On top of losing a familiar working routine and social life.
Most of us who move to live and work in a foreign country experience the state of being "different". People at work (and outside of work) may be interested in where you come from, what your life used to look like back home, what you think about your life here, and so on.
Moving back home may put you in the "ordinary" category again. Sure, friends and family may ask questions about your life abroad, but as these dry up, you will have to go back to being just like everyone else around you. You will speak the same language, eat the same food, and be part of the same tradition. For some, this may be the much-needed return to the familiar. For others, it may feel like losing that feeling of being special and interesting. At the very least, it will take some adjustment.
You may suddenly have too much time, and too many decisions to make
There is an interesting contradiction here. Retirement removes structure from your life – at least the structure associated with work. At exactly the same moment, relocation creates the need for structure.
As you were working abroad, you may have underestimated how many decisions had been pre-made for you. You woke up at a certain time, went to work, had lunch with colleagues, went to a few meetings, and came back home. Even weekends may have had their own routines.
And now all of that is gone – and more. If you relocate at the same time, so do the coffee shop you went to every morning, your neighborhood supermarket, your favorite hiking trai, gym, and weekend hobbies.
The questions will inevitably pop up: what should I do with all this time?
Many people in these situations find comfort in rebuilding small routines. Others prefer to use their blank day planner to start something new entirely.
What if you don't want to move
If you moved abroad for work and now you are no longer working, moving back home seems like the logical thing to do. But what if you don't want to move back? What if you want to continue living in this new place after retirement? This requires some pre-planning.
Ideally, you should be looking into this possibility a few years before your official retirement. There are a few practical things you will need to investigate:
How to stay in the country legally if you stop working?
What would be the cost of healthcare without employer coverage?
How will you get your pension? Where will it be taxed?
Will you be able to sponsor the residency of your dependents?
Will you be able to support a comfortable lifestyle on retirement income?
What about working part-time? Will you need a work permit?
Will I have enough support here as I am getting older?
And so on.
The key thing to figure out would be this: will you be able to build a sustainable life here without being officially employed?
If you are moving back, prepare a "soft landing"
Going back doesn't have to be one dramatic move. Why not test the waters instead?
As you prepare for retirement, consider taking a few trips back home. If you are retired and now have more time on your hands, consider going back and staying for a few months. Take this time to see what it would feel like to live back home. Reconnect with friends and family. Look into the cost of living, accommodation options, healthcare, and transport. What would your average day in retirement look like here? Are you happy with the way it looks?
If the time and finances allow, you may want to split your time between the two countries for a while and see how you feel.
What happens to your social security contributions?
Another practical question comes to light when you've worked abroad and are now moving away for retirement: what happens to all the social security contributions you've made while working abroad?
What happens to your contributions depends on several key factors:
the country you've worked in;
if there is a bilateral social security agreement between that country and the country where you plan to retire;
and how long you contributed.
Based on this information, there are several possible scenarios here.
You may qualify for a pension in the country where you've spent enough time working. For example, within the EU, your record of insurance contributions is generally preserved in each country you've worked in. And, if all the relevant conditions are satisfied, you will be able to receive separate pensions from the different countries where you have accumulated pension rights.
In other countries, things may work differently. China is an interesting example. Foreign employees who have participated in the country's social security system but left before the pension age can keep their accounts open. If they later return to work in China, their contribution period will continue from where they left off. But they also have the option to close their individual pension account and withdraw the balance.
Then there is your home country.
You may have spent a long time working abroad – but it doesn't automatically mean that you no longer qualify for a state pension in your home country. This will depend on the specific country's rules and your history of insurance contributions. This is also where international agreements come into play. Depending on the conditions of such agreements, the time you spent working abroad may be taken into account when your eligibility for a “home” pension is determined.
A good action plan here would be to start pension planning way ahead of your retirement date. You need to know:
where you actually paid social security contributions;
how many contribution years you have,
if you meet the minimum period for a pension in your home country;
and if the related countries have a social security agreement.
Retirement doesn't mean you have to stay home
In many ways, it's actually the opposite. Leaving your expat assignment can be the start of a new life that builds precisely on that experience. If you've liked living abroad, who's to say you won't like living somewhere else? If for any reason you can't stay where you've been working, you don't necessarily need to go back home.
Retirement relocation is actually its own special relocation category. A lot of countries offer retirement residency options: Thailand, Türkiye, Greece, Spain, Portugal – just to name a few. Your expat background is a strong base for exploring a different type of lifestyle, discovering new destinations and cultures.
Retirement in this case doesn't have to be the end of your expat life – it can actually be the beginning of a new expat experience. And now you won't be limited by a job offer.
Natallia holds a degree BA (Honours) in English Language and Simultaneous Interpreting and worked as a writer and editor for various publications and media channels in China for ten years.
