You may find, say, rural Wisconsin to be cheaper than Uruguay, by the time you factor everything in. Including the cost of people visiting you. I could visit my grandmother in rural Wisconsin pretty easily compared to Uruguay.

Note that with modern transportation, you can pretty much be in the middle of nowhere while simultaneously being less than 90 minutes from downtown Chicago via medium speed train (or probably 3 hours away by traffic jam car...)

Its not like you'll have to give up modern medicine and go back to faith healing and leaches. One of the benefits of the health care bubble is you'll occasionally see a giant hospital in the middle of nowhere. There's a major Mayo Clinic facility in a rural county that has more cows than people up north, in a city that has fewer residents than my high school had students, next to seemingly infinite acres of recreational areas.

> I were to be of retirement age today, I'm having trouble thinking of a reason NOT to do this.

Family? Helping your children with their kids instead of selfishly running away to some tropical destination?

After you get past a certain age, you may also want some help for yourself from your children.

    After you get past a certain age, you may also want 
    some help for yourself from your children.

The cost of a maid or other household help in many developing countries is low enough that you can get much much much better help there than you could possibly get from your adult kids with their own lives in the US. A really good live-in maid will run you $500 a month (a great salary for many people). They will cook all your meals three times a day, keep the house spotless, do all your laundry, run errands like buying groceries, etc. You can't find service like you can in Brazil without paying a pretty penny. The average cost of a retirement community in the US is $2750 a month, many times more expensive for probably far worse service, with one employee shared among many retired individuals.

I will always choose care from my children over professional care. Easy choice. Even a few hours of time with them will be much more enjoyable than days or weeks with a stranger, regardless of how wonderful the stranger happens to be.

Not everything can be reduced to dollars and cents.

Oh, it depends a lot on your family. For example, what if you had kids at twenty, and your kids had kids at twenty? By the time you retire, your grandchildren are in college. Maybe not a bad time to run off for a ten year Hawaiian vacation.

The connection between parent and mature children also varies a lot from family to family.

That's making a lot of assumptions about future lifestyle choices -- But point taken, I do suppose if my wife and I had kids now, that quickly changes the overall mindset of retirement.

Still though, I hardly consider it a selfish choice -- shit, I would have loved to have gone and visited the grandparents in some tropical destination as opposed to northern Idaho.

My in-laws did that, they moved to Brazil. (expatriating) Mostly it was the weather (they are in the northern part) and the lower cost of living.

I find these sorts of articles interesting in a morbid sort of way. I've been making out my 401k contribution for as long as I've been working, and was told back in the 80's that it would be worth millions by now. Uh, not so much :-). To its credit though it has come back from 2009 which was pretty horrible.

The scary thing about watching technologists age is when they stop learning. If they stop and figure "I'm there" and then start to coast. Never a good outcome on that as far as I can see.

Hans't the cost of living in Brazil been exploding in the past few years?

Well I don't know if they "planned" it exactly but they bought a couple of apartments in a vacation spot which provide a rental income in Reales before they moved. Between that and my father-in-laws Navy retirement benefit they seem to do ok.

Opening and running a bed and breakfast is also a great option since it provides a steady stream of travelers, which mitigates the isolation you might feel from being in a foreign land.

Yes. A lot, but it's still extremely cheap and there are literally hundreds of miles of amazing coastline to retire cheaply to, many of which are within 1-4 hours of a major metropolitan city. São Luis (Maranhão), Fortaleza (Ceara), Recife & Olinda (Pernambuco), Salvador (Bahia) and Aracaju (Sergipe) all have amazing and cheap places nearby.

The major cities in the northeast leave a lot to be desired because they are often very poorly run because socialist political parties are in power[0]

A lot of the growth in the Northeast has been due to the Bolsa Família[1] conditional cash transfer program that redistributed wealth to poor across the country, but especially the northeast because many of Brazil's poor live there. It works in a way that doesn't undermine local economics but instead infuses cash at the lowest levels of society, generating economic activity in local communities and providing opportunities for individuals to scale to small businesses and small businesses to scale into larger ones. One of the biggest takeaways for me was that except for major capital expenditures like power plants, ~12 million people spending ~$13 will better allocate ~$156 million dollars than one fund manager investing $156 million dollars. On top of that, a $10 million investment in Brazil is likely to be half of that after graft and palm greasing.

Read up on the Bolsa Familia. IMHO it's really a model of how you institute a social program in a capitalistic way and the northeast is proof.

[0] nothing wrong with many ideas of socialism per se, but if you want socialism within your city/state/country, then you need to ruthlessly pursue capitalism with respect to other cities/states/countries that aren't yours so you can fund your social programs.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolsa_Fam%C3%ADlia

Mostly in the big city centers, and primarily the cost of housing. Inflation has been concerning, but if you are living in a place where US$500/month can be plenty (like northern/northeastern Brazil), 6% annual inflation doesn't mean much.

Ex-pat life sounds good, but is very isolating. Do you want to live your retirement years far away from most everyone you care about and that cares about you?

How about just leading a more moderate lifestyle in the States? Live in a town, not downtown. Keep a single car, and bike a lot. Live in a small house or condo. Etc.

It's really only isolating in Latin American countries if you don't speak the language or are a curmudgeon. Culturally there is more than enough in common with US lifestyles with respect to social activities, cultural customs and food that you won't feel nearly as isolated there as you would in Southeast Asia.

And then not be able to see your family and grandkids often? Might as well move their now, lay down roots and work remotely.

Friends and family, home you enjoy, local culture, not learning a new language; there are tons of different factors when talking about someone putting down roots.