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In this episode of the Secure Your Retirement Podcast, Radon and Murs discuss how you can design a fulfilling, adventurous, and meaningful retirement through immersive travel. Their guest, Andrew Motiwalla, founder of The Good Life Abroad, introduces an innovative take on retirement lifestyle planning through long-stay and slow-travel experiences in iconic European cities. More than just a vacation, Andrew’s approach empowers retirees to live like a local, offering a stress-free way to enjoy extended travel in Europe without the hassle of planning every detail themselves.

Listen in to learn about a lifestyle that blends cultural enrichment, flexible exploration, and social connection. Whether you’ve always dreamed of retiring in Europe, living abroad for a few months at a time, or simply traveling more deeply, Andrew’s concierge-style model offers a compelling alternative to rushed tours or crowded cruises. With thoughtful support, vetted accommodations, medical coverage, and built-in community, this is retirement travel planning designed for comfort, fun, and fulfillment.

In this episode, find out:

·      How living abroad in retirement can offer an immersive and stress-free lifestyle.

·      What makes Andrew’s travel concierge service unique for retirees.

·      Why slow travel Europe is gaining popularity among those 55+.

·      How the community-based cohort model adds joy and connection to extended trips.

·      The difference between traditional travel planning and a concierge-guided experience.

Tweetable Quotes:

“Retirement is your time—and living abroad offers the freedom to enjoy it your way, at your pace.” – Murs Tariq

“When you slow down and live like a local, you stop checking boxes and start truly experiencing the culture.” – Radon Stancil

Resources:

If you are in or nearing retirement and you want to gain clarity on what questions you should be asking, learn what the biggest retirement myths are, and identify what you can do to achieve peace of mind for your retirement, get started today by requesting our complimentary video course, Four Steps to Secure Your Retirement!

To access the course, simply visit POMWealth.net/podcast.

Here’s the full transcript:

Welcome everyone to the secure your retirement podcast. We love doing this podcast.

Sometimes we talk about investments or what’s going on in the world. Sometimes we

talk about very specific retirement planning topics, but today we get to have a

little bit more fun with it and talk about lifestyle in retirement. And what we’ve

done is we’ve found someone who helps people travel and kind of hit some of those

big bucket list trips that are very difficult to plan, take a lot of thought,

and so, we’ve got someone that’s going to help streamline it for you. His name is

Andrew Motiwalla. He’s the owner of the Good Life Abroad. So first off, Andrew, thank

you for carving out some time with us here and hanging out for a little bit. Hey,

Merse, thanks for having me. Great. So, Andrew, I want to kind of understand, you

and I, we spoke for a couple minutes before we started recording here and got a

good understanding of the company, but we’re going to tell everyone about who you

are, what your process is, why you do what you do. But before we could go into

that, would you mind just giving us a little bit of background as to where you

kind of came from and what led you to create this company called The Good Life

Abroad? And then we’ll talk about what it is. – Sure. I fell in love with

travel in college during a semester abroad. And that was the initial spark,

which then led me to do the Peace Corps, where I lived abroad for about two and a

half years, and then really fell in love with the idea of international living. And

then fast forward a bit, I started a travel company about 20 years ago that started

with student travel, eventually led to family travel, which over time evolved into

multi -generational, which is a big thing nowadays in the travel industry,

grandparents, kids and grandkids. Of course, the grandparents are paying for it all,

um, but during that period, I met with a lot of people who were retired or semi

-retired. And they’d say to me, “Andrew, we love these trips. These are great. We

take our grandkids and have quality time.” But why isn’t there a travel company for

retired people who have time? That’s the one thing we have, where we don’t have to

rush around and get on the bus, get off the bus, check into this hotel, check out

of the hotel, we have time. Can we just slow it down a bit and let us explore

things at our own pace? And that was sort of the impetus for the good life abroad.

So that sort of sparked the initial idea. And then when the pandemic hit, a lot of

people became, started working from home and became digital nomads. So, they would go

work from all these crazy places in the world. And what I’d hear from a lot of

our older folks that say, how come all the young kids have this fun? They can live

in these different places. And I was like, let’s combine these ideas and create a

really easy turnkey way for people 55 and older to go live abroad for a month or

two, but with a program that’s sort of tailored to their needs. – All right, well,

that’s great. You know, it’s nice to know that you’ve kind of been in this industry

for a very long time and you’ve just kind of hone into as far as what it is you

really like doing, which is rather unique, I would say. So that’s great,

Andrew. So, tell us then, you know, because what we do talk about quite a bit in

financial planning and retirement planning is, well, the first thing is, you know, if

there’s something to look forward to in retirement, it shifts our goals, it shifts

the way we think, it shifts how we save and everything like that. If there’s

something out there on the horizon that we can say, I want to get to this point

so, I can do that. And then when we get to retirement, we help people kind of

think through, well, what their budget could be for travel, whether it’s extensive or

an annual travel budget. And sometimes we’ll call it a fund of, you know, we

want to do something and we need to get home in on what that fund truly is to

you. And for a lot of people, it is travel because they didn’t get to travel a

lot when they were raising their family or you know tied to their careers and so I

think you’re exactly right that there’s more time on hand. So let me ask you this,

what is the difference, and it seems like you operated at one point as more of that

traditional type of travel agent, but this sounds a little bit different. So, tell me

what is it that the Good Life Abroad does that’s different than just your

traditional travel agent. Yeah, the traditional tour company sort of helps you

maximize and see as much as you can in a relatively short period of time. If you

think about a traditional tour, every day you’re kind of getting up, hopping on the

bus and going to see a bunch of sites and you just do that for whatever the

length of time. And similar with a cruise. Cruises are great because you could jump

into these different ports, see a lot of different cities over a relatively short

period and jump from place to place. What we do is sort of the inverse,

which is take you to one place and just stay there for a longer period.

And we are not a tour company at all. It’s more of an independent

experience where you get to live abroad like a local, but you have the support of

local staff that we have on the ground to support you, and you have a community of

fellow travel lovers who all have their apartments sort of in the same neighborhood

as you. So, five minutes away, you know, there’s someone else living there and

someone else living that way and you can meet up and then we’re putting on events

and activities, cooking classes, happy hours, lunches, tours, different things

throughout the course of a month, but it’s not really a tour where you’re every day

getting together. You can jump in, be social, do a cooking class for a couple of

hours, and then bounce out and do your own thing. So, it’s more about independent

living abroad, but with the support of the local staff, your community, and of

course we provide medical insurance and have a network of English -speaking medical

professionals, because these are concerns that people have, especially as we get older

and we might need some sort of medical attention. Right. Yeah. Well, that sounds

really nice. I know when, when I go on trips here and there or you take the

cruise and oftentimes closer to the end of that trip, people are pretty much saying

I’m exhausted and I’m kind of ready to get back. And because it is really crammed

in all those tour guides, the buses, you know, getting on the boat, getting off the

boat, and it just feels like it’s going so fast that you don’t really get to take

the time to actually enjoy it or immerse yourself into, like you said. So that

seems pretty good for someone that’s got the time and the willingness to spend a

month or two or three in a certain area. So, what areas do you guys try to help

people put these really nice plans together for? What type of travel are we talking

about? Where to? – So, we primarily focus, well, we exclusively focus on Western

Europe right now. So, we have programs in different cities in Spain and we’re in

Paris, Portugal and Italy, we’re in Florence, Sardinia,

Sicily, we’re in Split, Croatia, Vienna, Austria, Amsterdam,

Prague. You name it, we try to focus on these iconic cities that have so much to

offer that allow people to go really deep and just you don’t you won’t get bored

there for a month, right? There’s so much to explore and its sort of like an

onion. I think of most of these places as onions. You may have been there before

for two days or three days on a tour and you saw like, you know, the checklist of

like the biggest things, you know, the Eiffel Tower and this and that. But Paris,

for example, you can keep peeling back the layers of Paris and it never gets old.

In fact, you’ll deeper and deeper and you discover more and more things. And that’s

sort of the joy that our people get from spending a whole month there. It’s a much

deeper appreciation and really feeling like they’ve immersed themselves into the local

rhythm of life. Yeah, that does sound very nice. So going back to a little bit

more of logistics, so we pick a destination, I guess, and we can talk more about

your process of how we land on, and you know what it takes to actually engage with

you, but a destination gets picked. Is that in like circuit certain?

I guess like launch time So imagine a cruise right you have to be at the boat at

that certain day because it sounds like there This is a bit of group travel or is

it’s kind of they pop in and pop out at different times? And then then the follow

-up to that is it sounds like you guys arrange for all of the Housing at the very

least, maybe not all the food and everything. So, what’s kind of included in this

program that you’re putting together for people? – Yeah, great, great question. So, we

think of this whole thing as a community experience, right? It’s independent, but

it’s a community of people. You’re not just on your own. And so therefore it is

cohort -based. So, let’s say you pick a city, a date, and then I’ll kind of walk

you briefly through the process. So, a month before you go, we’ll do a Zoom call.

Everyone on the program will get on, our local staff will get on, we’ll kind of

walk through the program, arrival details, et cetera. And then everyone arrives on

the same day. So again, a cohort and then we check into our apartments that we’re

going to get settled in. The next morning, we do an orientation where we teach you,

here’s your subway card, here’s how to ride public transit. Again, we want to empower

you to live like a local. And then here’s the grocery store, here’s like the

homeware store. And then we break and kind of set you free. That evening we have a

big welcome party, maybe at a rooftop bar or something. And then they go through

this month-long experience. Like you said, it’s not every day, we’re not like

holding your hand, but we come together for these fun activities, little touch points

for the community. So that’s sort of the cohort community nature of it.

And then what’s included is we provide kind of an upscale.

I wouldn’t say luxury, but it’s not budget accommodations either, some vetted

apartments, specifically vetted for people 55 and older. I don’t know if you’ve had

the experience in Europe in like a hotel room where you’re like, I can’t turn

around the shower, like the toilet is bumping into the sink. So no, that’s not for

1. So, we work with certain property management firms and have a list of amenities

and sort of standards that we need for our people. So, like a walk -in shower, for

example, a kitchen where you can actually cook with pots and pans. So, we provide

the apartment, the schedule of activities that we do throughout the month, and then

our local staff person. And the local staff person is sort of think of them as

your concierge. So, you’re there for a month in Florence. I want to go to Rome or

Venice for the weekend. They’ll kind of guide you through how to get your, either

bust it, get trained tickets, rent a car, or give you recommendations for a place

to eat, things to do, excuse me.

And of course, the medical insurance that I mentioned earlier. So that’s sort of

everything you need to live abroad safely, securely, and socially with friends around

you. – Right, yeah, that sounds fantastic. And so, it makes me think about wanting to

do this like very soon, myself, if I had the time. Yeah, so what is,

you know, the most common, I guess, age and are they retired?

Are they not retired? Like, what’s the most common client that your team works

really well with. – Right, so they’re all 55 and older and there’s sort of a couple

of subgroups within there. We have the 55 to 60,

the young retirees, maybe they’re still working on, serving on boards or they’re

still somewhat involved in the business.

And that’s a great, great community for us because they’re still very active and

they want to just do a lot. And they’ve sort of been working really hard in order

to get to this somewhat early retirement and they want their dreams to come true.

And so, we’ll get those. And what we found is many of those will just go from one

city for a month like Paris to Amsterdam to Vienna and sort of live out the dream.

And then we’ve got sort of the 69-year-old, sort of the average across the board.

So, you retire, maybe at 65, 66. You did some independent travel. We get a lot of

this. I went on a lot of travel when I retired, but it was sort of the tours and

the cruises, which were great. But one guy said it to me, Bas, he said it was

like a wine tasting. We just had a sample of a lot of places and now I want to

go back and drink the whole bottle. So, I want to go to that one place and so

those people who retired just went nuts on travel and now actually want to slow it

down a bit and a program like ours they think of sort of as a slow travel

alternative and then there’s sort of a subgroup as well which I would say is about

25 % of our people who are people who are seriously thinking about becoming expats,

like they’re like, I’m going to move abroad. – Right. – But it’s a really big decision.

And so, they use us as sort of a way to do a scouting trip, to live there, have

the support, security, all that, friends around them and then go for a month and

then check out a city in depth and decide, do I really want to do this? And if so,

what’s the right neighborhood? You know, what are the traffic patterns? What’s the

noise like, et cetera?

– Yeah, you mentioned the community or cohorts. So how many people on average are

typically, kind of in the same place at the same time? – Yeah, it varies month to

month, but on average is about 16 people. On the high end, it might go as high as

like 22. On the low end, it might go down to 10, but it’s on average, 15, 16

people. – Yeah, so small enough to where You can make some good relationships with

people in your community. It’s amazing how strong of friendships are formed in these

things. We hear this a lot. People say, “I didn’t think I really needed a

community. I’m a veteran traveler. I’ve been there, done that.” And they come out of

this going, “Wow.” And I think it’s because when you retire,

your identity kind of goes up in flux. your identity used to be about who you were

in the workplace. For example, your friends may have been people, other parents at

the kids’ school, but the kids are gone and you’re not working anymore. And so

like, what’s the thing that you form community around? And I think with the Good

Life Abroad, the thing that is the through line across all of our people is this

deep love of travel and cultural immersion. Those are really our folks. And so when

they come together, they suddenly found these like -minded people who are like, oh,

wow, you love this as well. We’re all well-traveled. That’s table stakes.

But now, this is like the deeper, more immersive kind of pushing the envelope type

of traveler. And suddenly, they have this whole tribe. And I’ve seen that they meet

up afterwards in different cities around America, or they might go do another trip

together with a good life abroad. So, it’s really pretty beautiful to see this, the

sense of community form. – Yeah, that sounds awesome. So, tell me from,

you know, you could have, and this happens a lot in our world too, where we have

people that say, I don’t want to plan this. I don’t have the ability to do this or

the focus or the detail to be able to do this. And then on the other side, I

have someone else that says, “I love managing investments. I love doing the research

on Social Security. I love doing all of this, so I don’t really need your help.”

So, help someone understand the difference between trying to plan all this yourself

versus a group like yours that you said something earlier to me,

which I think is very important, vetted places, right? So, help our listeners

understand the difference between trying to do this yourself versus partnering with

someone like you. Yeah. I’ll start by saying, first of all, I’m a big fan of

living abroad, however you want to do it. So, by no means am I here to encourage

people to go with a good life abroad. I think if you’re into this kind of thing,

you should do it however suits you best. But I would say a couple of things to

sort of be careful or to be mindful of if you’re going to live abroad. One is what

you mentioned around apartments. Sometimes you go on one of these short -term vacation

rental sites and the photos aren’t actually the reality, and you get there like, oh,

okay, there must have been a filter or a certain lens that made this thing look a

lot better. So, if you’re going to go abroad for an extended period of time, the level

of goes up, right? Because you’re going to be locked into something for a month or

two or three. So that’s one thing to be careful of. And that’s one thing that the

Good Life Abroad provides, is vetting these apartments to make sure that they’re a

standard that we can explain to you. We’ve actually been in these apartments and can

tell you exactly what to be aware of. Of course, they’re going to be different from

American apartments. They’re European. But at least, we can tell you clearly what the

differences are and what the pain points might be, right? Secondly, the other thing

to be mindful of, if you’re going to be abroad for a long period of time, it can

get lonely.

It sounds wonderful, but if you’re a foreigner and if you perhaps don’t speak the

local language, it could be harder to make friends after a month or two. You might

leave you feeling a little bit lonely and you might meet some people here and

there, and that’s great. So, I think the sense of community is actually really

important. It makes living abroad really enjoyable, knowing I’ve got some friends

around the corner and maybe we can meet up to go do a workout, a yoga, or we can

go out to dinner, et cetera. So, community, I think it’s something people should

think about. And you can form a community on your own as well. And I think you

doing things but in the same places and slowly developing relationships is really

important. The other thing to be mindful of is medical and healthcare.

You’re on your own and having a really clear plan, like a safety plan or a medical

plan, whenever you go somewhere like this, and much more if you’re traveling on your

own, right? So, we have a lot of solo travelers. I would say about 30 % of our

people are solo travelers and they and then the Andrew, I just love the idea that

there’s someone in this town who’s got my back and is like there for me, anything

were to happen. Plus, you have the medical insurance, and you’ve got the English

speaking medical care. So those are things I think, if you’re going to do it on your

own to be mindful of, but that’s sort of the difference when you go with us. You

have all these things taken care of, your community, your lodging, your support

system in your kind of safety plan in place. – Right, yeah, that makes a lot of

sense. And that’s kind of what we try to do here too is make sure from a

retirement planning perspective, everything is kind of done for you if that’s what

you want. And like you said, and I say, there’s plenty of people that are out

there that can do it all themselves, but not everyone wants to. So, I think this is

really cool and it sounds rather unique. I haven’t really come across, I’ve come

across travel agents that will help you books the things and then kind of disappear

on you. But this sounds very interesting if you really wanted to find a way to

immerse yourself in a particular area for a period of time. What would you say is

the easier one? Say you’ve never really traveled before, especially outside the U.S.,

what would be an easier one to say, “Yep, I could go live there for a month or

two and language wouldn’t be an issue and it’s somewhat similar to the way it is

here in the US, what would be one of the more common ones there? – Yeah, it’s a

great question. I think of it sort of as a continuum, right? And there’s some

places that are a little more challenging. So, on the easiest side would be London.

Obviously, they speak English, it’s a very cosmopolitan city, very easy to get around.

But then if you go a little bit more on the range, I think Lisbon,

Portugal is a great city for this because it is different, but it’s a city,

it’s a capital city, but it’s not a giant capital city. It’s very walkable, very

contained. You can really wrap your arms around Lisbon. And even though the language

is Portugal, English is very widely spoken so you can get by on English and so

I feel like for a lot of people this is a great like next place to go because

it’s a little bit out of your comfort zone but it’s actually very manageable and

after a month people feel like this is this is my city like I really know it and

then if you really push and you go on the far other extreme for the really

season traveler I’ll just throw this out I think Sardinia is a little-known jewel.

So, a lot of people have been to Italy. They’ve been to Venice and Rome and

Florence, and those are wonderful cities. But the island of Sardinia, which belongs

to Italy, and this main city on the island is Caliari.

It’s like an undiscovered gem, right? Not a lot of people speak English. It’s

Italian, it’s very Italian. It’s actually Sardinian. They actually speak Sardo. It’s a

local language, a derivation of Italian. But if you want to go to the Italy of,

you know, yesteryear or the kind of what you imagine before all the tourists figured

it out, Sardinia is such a great place. But it is a little more challenging and

there’s like old, you know, historical steps just to get around the city, these like

stone steps and hills, but very worthwhile. Okay.

Well, that sounds great. Definitely something to think about for our listeners. Last

question for you as we kind of wrap up. If someone wanted to explore what you guys

do at the Good Life Abroad a little bit further, what would be the best, what

would be your best recommendation on kind of what the next steps are and then

better ways for them to understand who you are? Sure. I would encourage you to go

to the website, www.thegoodlifeabroad.com and you can read about the different cities

and the programs and we have specific; we call them info sheets that go in detail

on each city. If you go to a city, there’s a little form, you fill it out. And

then once you start to understand what we do and first decide whether it’s right

for you, because this is not for everyone, I’ll tell you that. Many people do not

actually, want to live like a local, they are used to staying in a hotel or if

there’s something they can just call the front desk and send up more towels or

whatever, living like a local is not for everyone. So, first of all, I’d say, read

about it and think about whether it’s for you or not, because, again,

and then once you learn more about it and you want to get deeper, you can contact

our office. But we also have a private Facebook group for people who have gone on

the program or people who are seriously considering going and that’s a great way to

talk directly to other people who have done it and learn about, you know, the great

points about it and also things to be aware of. Because again, it is a very

different experience to live in a European apartment versus, you know, typical

Americans coming from a house that’s several thousand square feet large. It’s a very

different experience. Okay. Well, for everyone listening, we will make sure to have

the website listed in the show notes. It is www.goodlifeabroad.com.

And I went on there earlier. There’s a ton of information on there. So, if you have

any interest in it, check out the website. But really, that’s all we’ve got for you

today. Thanks for tuning in, Andrew. Thank you so much for your time and kind of

introducing us to something that not a lot of people are doing out there. So, thanks

a lot. Thanks, Mars. I appreciate it.