After 3 wonderful months, we are preparing to leave Costa Rica in a few days and head back to BC. For me, living in Costa Rica is a bit like undertaking therapy, a detox cleanse and having a daily massage, all rolled into one.  By the end of the 3 months here, I feel refocused, revived and refreshed and ready to go back to the “real world” and kick some ass!

One of the most important daily rituals I have been using lately is meditation.  Don’t worry, this is not going to be a post about the benefits of mediation, though I do think that anyone could benefit from a regular meditation practice. Like Diana, for one, who has never tried it (hint, hint). 

Incorporating meditation into my daily schedule has me thinking about how we have lost the art of downtime.  It is no longer a regular part of daily life because most people can’t or won’t disconnect from their myriad devices that deliver a sea of information on a constant, unrelenting basis.

I recently read an article that discussed the concept and value of the “creative pause” – a state described as “the shift from being fully engaged in a creative activity to being passively engaged, or the shift to being disengaged altogether. This phenomenon is the seed of the break-through ‘a-ha!’ moments that people so frequently report having in the shower. In these moments, you are completely isolated, and your mind is able to wander and churn big questions without interruption.”

We all require creativity to live our lives to the fullest, and more and more of us rely on that creativity to earn a living.  Perhaps it is time we treat downtime as an essential self-care activity.  Easier said than done, though. No one else can disconnect for you. You have to make the time (and space) to turn off all of your devices, sit or lie down by yourself and clear your mind.

Our thoughts are like waves.  They come in sets and many times they come in so fast and furious that they are overwhelming.  Downtime creates some space between the waves to allow us to experience quiet, when our mind is still like placid water. Then, when the next set of thoughts comes rolling through, we’re ready for them.

So, here is a challenge for the next week – take 30 minutes each day for downtime. Once you have incorporated downtime for 7 days in a row, come back and tell us what has changed in your life.  We’ll bet you’ll experience some great a-ha moments and can’t wait to hear about them!

What do you really want out of your life?  Hard question, I know.

Knowing what you want your dream lifestyle to look like can seem almost as challenging as achieving it.

So how do you go about getting to the bottom of what you really want and decoupling it from what you’ve been influenced to want by friends, family and society?

Here’s a suggestion. Start with identifying where you are today, and then figure out where you want to go.

Answer the following questions in a few sentences:

1. Why do you drive the kind of car you drive?

2. Why do you choose to live in the neighbourhood you live in?

3. Why did you choose your last vacation destination?

4. Why do you what you do for a living?

Review your answers and check in with yourself:

• Do your reasons resonate with who you really are and what you want? Or,

• Do they reveal that your choices were made in part to portray an image of yourself that you want to reflect to the world?

Getting to the heart of why you have made major choices in your life in the past will lead to clearer answers about what you want your future to look like – for you and not anybody else.

Picture what you’d do today if you had an entire hour to yourself to spend doing exactly what you wanted. What would you do?

The next thought after you answered was likely, “But I don’t have an hour today.”

If you find that you consistently can’t find an hour in your day to do something that is important to you…that fulfills you…that fills you up so you can take on another day – here’s a technique.

1. Write down everything you need to do today.

2. Beside each “To-Do” mark it with either an A, B or C in the following categories:

A = Must do
B = Should do
C = Could do

3. Knock 2 items off the B list and 3 items off the C list.

4. Now – write down in their place an activity that will fill you up and add depth to your life.

5. Mark beside it a HUGE A – and you’ve found yourself an hour to do that MUST Do activity!

As the global economy continues to expand, opportunities for geo-arbitrage also increase. This is great news for Pretirees!

Arbitrage, by definition, is the practice of taking advantage of a price difference between two or more markets. Geo-arbitrage takes advantage of a price difference between two or more locations.  Geo-arbitrage is most commonly applied to labour costs (i.e outsourcing parts of your business to lower priced virtual labour in other countries), but it can also be extended to real estate and living expenses.

Do you know someone who has moved away to a less desirable location in order to secure a better job?  That’s geo-arbitrage – moving to a different location to take advantage of a higher pay scale.  It can work the other way, too. Moving to a location with a lower cost of living creates the same net effect as getting paid more.

I’m going to share in detail in this post how my family and I used geo-arbitrage in 2011 to lower our cost of living substantially by splitting our year between living in Whistler, Canada, one of the top ski destinations in the world, and Santa Teresa, Costa Rica, a small surf town where we live across the street from one of the Top 10 beaches in the world.

I felt the need to write this post because people tend to assume that the locations we live in must equate to an extravagant lifestyle. To me, more money in the bank means more freedom in my life, so we actually lead a relatively frugal lifestyle.

In fact, the Pretired lifestyle that we live now costs less than the one we lived prior to Pretirement – to the tune of $12,000 savings per year.

How can this be possible?  Let me show you.

The table below compares the difference between renting in Vancouver for a year vs. renting in Whistler for 8 months, Santa Teresa for 3 months and living in Victoria for 1 month – which is the exact equation of where/how we lived in 2011.

Cost of Living Comparison

The Facts Behind the Numbers
- The Vancouver rental cost is based on what were paying to rent a 2 bedroom coach house in East Vancouver (unfurnished) prior to Pretiring.
- The Whistler rental cost is for a furnished 2 bedroom condo on the mountain.  The pricing is indicative of what you can pay if you live in the resort during the off-season. During the high season, we moved to Costa Rica.
- We incurred the cost of a storage unit in Vancouver, as we rented furnished places in Whistler and Costa Rica.
- We lived at my in-laws’ rent-free in Victoria for one month during the  Christmas season.
- I didn’t count the expense of airfare to and from Costa Rica into the equation as we would fly to a tropical location for a holiday each year if we weren’t Pretired.
- There are other, less significant, areas of savings and expense (power and internet in Costa Rica are covered, living in Whistler required us to buy winter tires, etc.) but for the purpose of simplicity I’ve left them out of the equation.

Full disclosure – our situation isn’t quite as simple as the above example. We own a condo in the downtown Vancouver neighbourhood of Yaletown.  We rent it out rather than live in it, as it affords us more freedom.  When the income vs. expenses for that property wash out, we end up saving approximately $11,000 per year living the way we do, as opposed to living in the property. We continue to build equity through that investment.

So, there it is. Pretty simple, right? By approaching location creatively and taking advantage of geo-arbitrage (both regionally and globally), I’ve effectively given myself the equivalent of close to a $15,000 pre-tax raise. The bonus is living in some of the most amazing places on earth!

If you build a Pretirement-based business that affords the freedom and flexibility to determine where you work and you’re willing to do things differently than everyone else, you can live like a rock star AND save more money than your 9-5 working, suburban dwelling friends. Yet another reason Pretirement rocks!