What About Moving To Malaysia?

With our view that inflation will remain high for years to come, it got us thinking more diligently about retiring abroad. We brought this topic up in December under, “What About Retiring Abroad?” and we’ve been doing our research.

While the United States can be a great place to live, the reality is that it is extremely expensive to live in the U.S. As boomers continue to age and all hit age 65 over older in 2030, there will be extreme pressure on health care services throughout the United States. There simply won’t be enough labor to go around to provide the same level of goods and services that people in America have become accustomed to in decades past.

We posted recently that many Californians are moving to Mexico for the lower cost of living but there are many people moving to Malaysia. So what does it take to move to Malaysia?

There are consulting firms that specialize in helping people relocate to other countries and we came across Malaysia My Second Home to gather some information. The basic requirements, according to the site, are to be over the age of 35, have 40,000 RM ($9000 USD) in monthly income, and a fixed deposit of 1,000,000 RM ($224,000 USD) which can be withdrawn after a year.

If this Malaysian program seems too expensive, there are other options in other parts of Malaysia. According to Sarawak Tourism, it claims only 600,000 RM ($135,000) is needed but participants must be over the age of 50.

If a multi-cultural and multi-lingual country located in the Pacific with access to countless beaches and a lower cost of living sounds appealing then perhaps it is worth of a deeper look. We plan on taking a trip to Malaysia soon to see what some of the options might be for our future.

In the meantime, note that money doesn’t buy happiness, it buys options so stay tuned and stay solvent…