Fear Almost Stopped Me From Moving Abroad at 71… Here’s What Finally Got Me Started

Moving Abroad After 60: Your 6–12 Month Relocation Planner

Fear stops more people from moving abroad than money ever does. Here’s the month-by-month plan that quiets it.

I moved from the United States to Cali, Colombia at 71. I’m 73 now, and I’m writing this from a patio that looks out over the Cauca Valley, with birds I feed every morning and a life I built entirely on purpose.

People assume the hard part was the visa, or the Spanish, or the money. It wasn’t. In the years I’ve spent talking to women who dream about doing what I did, almost none of them are actually stopped by paperwork or budgets. They’re stopped by fear — and fear grows best in the empty space where a plan should be.

So this isn’t a pep talk. It’s a calendar. Below is the 6–12 month relocation planner I wish someone had handed me: what to do, when to do it, and what to start early because it takes longer than you think.

The Fear Isn’t the Problem. The Vagueness Is.

When something as big as move to another country lives in your head as one giant blur, your brain does exactly what it’s built to do — it hunts for everything that could go wrong, and it never runs out of material.

Almost every woman who writes to me is carrying one of these three fears:

• “I’m too old to start over.” I left at 71. The real question was never whether I was too old. It was whether I wanted the next years to look like the last ones.
• “What will my family think?” Usually less than you fear, and they come around faster than you expect. What actually helps them isn’t a speech — it’s a plan. A vague announcement invites worry. A timeline invites questions you can answer.
• “What if I get there and hate it?” Then you come home, with a story most people never get. This is a decision you can reverse. Almost nothing about it is permanent except the fact that you tried.

Notice what those three have in common: you cannot think your way out of any of them. They’re unanswerable in the abstract.

But you can schedule your way out. Fear is a fog; a date and a task list are a flashlight. The moment “someday” becomes “this month I open a bank account that works abroad,” the fog has nothing left to hold onto. That’s what the planner below is really for — not organization, relief.