This all started because of an argument I had with a client of my neighbours last week. I should say my neighbour runs a child care all day care centre out of her house and my wife asked me to find out if it was possible way for her to make some extra money so I went over there when I saw my neighbour outside and just asked her. While she was telling me about the ridiculous amounts of paperwork that the government agencies require before they will hand over the subsidies that all parents get paid for them to pay for her service when one of her clients arrived to collect her kids.
This client heard what we were discussing and decided to tell us her opinion, which was the government, really the taxpayers, were not paying enough money for her kids to attend daycare while she did a full-time job, I also asked her and her husband also has a full-time job. The two of them combined earning in excess of $140,000 per annum but even after she told me that she still complained they were not getting enough subsidy money, and when I called it welfare she got really angry. This was the point at which I went home, not going to argue with my neighbours client especially when I know arguing with ‘entitled’ people is useless. A couple of days later I made the mistake of commenting to some friends about this conversation, not a single one of them was surprised. All of this group of friends are approaching 60 years of age including myself and we gather a regular basis to discuss what we are going to be doing in five years time, when we retire. Most of us are going to go and live overseas as we all pretty much believe that our personal income plus the government pension which we have all contributed to will probably not make a comfortable retirement. However, we also all know from taking regular trips overseas for the last 10 years that we can live very comfortably with or without the government pension in other countries. And most of these have a lifestyle that we all enjoy. They also have a whole bunch of other benefits, like the climate and the general cost of living. One of my friends in this group is always trying to convince us all that we have to invest in property, now we all know property investment is a good idea, but we also all believe that is good idea if you are under 40, not within a year of your 60th birthday. If you haven’t got a property investment portfolio by now you probably starting to late. We all have our own houses we live in but for all bar this one friend, and maybe a couple of others have holiday unit, the rest of us only own the houses we live in and are not likely to own another house in Australia now. My friends continued agitation in this area of investment for our futures however did get most of this looking at property investments in the countries where were planning to settle down after we retire. According to my friends but, I am the only one who will probably never retire, mainly because they don’t think I actually work for a living, I am a writer in these days nearly all my work is done online, that means of course I can do it anywhere at any time. My wife however all hearing these discussions has now decided that maybe we should look at property investment in Australia, the house we have at the moment is a small house in a small country town, that means compared to Sydney or any of the other cities it is virtually worth nothing. To be totally ruthless a parking space in Sydney cost more than our property and we have a double block of land. I’m old enough and wise enough now that when my wife started going off on this tangent instead of trying to stop her or telling her that it was a waste of time I encouraged her. For some unknown reason after a couple of months of her looking around she has decided that we could maybe afford to buy a property on the south coast of New South Wales. I personally think she is as mad as they come. The first property she was looking at was valued at two and half times what our house is valued at so I asked her how she was going to afford to buy the house on the south coast, her off-the-cuff response was “borrow it”, and I almost rose to the bait. My wife knows I hate debt of any kind which is why currently we have zero debt and have had for the last 16 years. For the first couple of weeks after she suggested this house on the south coast I was a little put out by how I was going to deter her but then I had the brilliant idea. We are going away, overseas, for another holiday in early October and will be back just before Christmas. And I know my comment to her, “maybe we should look for a property in Cebu to buy” threw her a curve ball that she was not expecting, and this one she never got any wood on at all. Little known to my darling wife I had already been looking at properties in Cebu, only online, but I already knew we could get a very nice house for the money we had in the bank currently, this idea had been running around in the back of my mind from maybe the last two years and I wasn’t even planning on seriously looking at any properties are leased another two years but I would rather spend a couple hundred thousand dollars buying a really nice property in Cebu than spending three quarters of a million buying a dump in Australia. But for now we are going down the South Coast next week before we leave for overseas to have a look at a couple of properties she has lined up for us. I know she is expecting me to block her attempts to buy a property but I will not, well not openly, when the time comes we will not have the money, I will make sure of that. If my information is correct and we can buy house outright up there without having to borrow anything then there is no way in the world I am going to borrow half a million dollars to buy what would be a substandard house in Australia. I had a second part to my plan which I’ve not spoken to my wife about it all, and that is, after we got used to living in Cebu I want to sell a house in Australia, so effectively at about age 63 or 64 we will emigrate to the Philippines. She is quite worried about how we are going to live in retirement, and six years ago when we took our first trip overseas she really had no idea what the trip was about. She thought it was just some kind of holiday, to me it was a fact-finding mission, and to be honest most of the facts I found I didn’t like. I would not live in Indonesia under any circumstances, Singapore is very nice but very expensive, probably more expensive even than Australia, Malaysia is going down the same road that Indonesia is taking so it is out of the question too. When I first arrived in Thailand I thought that this was the country and the capital and a bigger tourist traps are just what any Westerner wants but I am prepared to go native when I’m exploring so quickly found out that Thailand has an undercurrent that can be quite intimidating, I think it has a lot to do with the military dictatorship that runs the country. I would have liked to have checked our Burma but at the time they told us it was can take up to 6 months to get a Visa because they don’t like Westerners, thinking that no matter what you say you are doing you are actually a reporter trying to sneak into the country to deliver a bad report on the country. We almost didn’t go to the Philippines but I guess fate as a way of intervening, we are actually heading back to Australia and were in Changi airport in Singapore at 10 PM at night and looking at trying to find a hotel room for the night. Remember I said I like to go native, another thing I like to do is not pre-book flights and I’m standing there virtually arguing with the ticket clerk for Qantas about whether or not we can get on a Qantas flight that night back to Sydney and how much it was going to cost us. So while this person went to talk to a supervisor about whether or not they should let two Australian citizens, who don’t need visas to enter Australia, should be allowed on their plane I looked at the next counter up the line. The woman at the counter was watching me and I must admit I had never heard of an airline called Cebu Pacific, but I was smart enough to realize that like the idiot on the Qantas counter, if the counter was manned that meant they had a flight going out pretty soon. After about 2 min I figured that Qantas agent really wasn’t interested so I walked about half the distance to the Cebu Pacific counter and asked the woman there if she had any tickets available, she did, did we need visas, “no you can go and stay for 21 days without a visa”, last question, how much is a ticket and I got a really pleasant surprise, about $60 each for business class. This was about the time my wife asked me what the hell I was doing. After explaining some of it to my wife I also realized I’d forgotten one very important question, where was the flight going to, so I asked her, she said Cebu, and now I had to throw myself on her mercy as I had no idea where that was, she gave me a very pretty Asian smile and told me it was in the Philippines. And I had read something about the Philippines and I knew that we could not go to Mindanao, there were terrorists there who loved kidnapping Westerners. By this time both me and my wife were at the counter talking to the woman and she showed us on the map were Cebu was, okay that’s fine by me, my wife said I was crazy as usual but we just bought the tickets and went. The flight left Singapore one hour and 20 min after we bought the tickets and landed in Cebu at 5 AM local time. It was an interesting first day to say the least, we were both tired and needed at least one days good rest, so we splashed out, resort hotel room actually for three days because it was so cheap even just walking in off the street. It only took us two days to start exploring Cebu City, was on the third day that I found what they call a pensionne house, what we would call a bed-and-breakfast, the one I found was in Talisay City which is just south of Cebu City, about a 20 min cab ride, which will cost you about seven dollars. A bed-and-breakfast is nothing to write home about but it is ideal if you’re prepared to go out and explore, well you have to go out and explore unless you’re prepared to go hungry except for breakfast, which in this pensionne house was a cup of coffee, a boiled egg, and a bread roll. After about a week we both loved the place and the people and have returned there twice a year since. This is the place we will move to when we retire.
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