What We Wish We'd Known
Before Retiring Abroad

We've written a lot of guides on this site. CPP withholding rates, RRIF minimum withdrawals, the principal residence exemption, NR5 forms. All useful. All important. None of it is what we actually think about when someone asks us "was it worth it?"

This post is different. This is what we'd tell our 2023 selves over a coffee at our local mamak stall in Mont Kiara — before the boxes were shipped, before we handed over our condo keys, before the flight. Not advice exactly. More like things we wish we'd known.

The First Three Months Are Genuinely Hard

We knew there would be an adjustment period. We didn't know it would be as specific, as disorienting, or as quietly exhausting as it was. In the first three months in KL, we felt the absence of everything familiar at once: our favourite coffee shop, our running route along the Humber, our friends' faces at Sunday dinner, our understanding of how things work. Simple things — finding a pharmacy, understanding which lane to be in, figuring out the water — took energy we didn't expect to spend.

This is normal. Almost every expat retiree we've spoken to describes the same first three months. The excitement of arrival gives way to a kind of low-grade disorientation that isn't quite homesickness and isn't quite unhappiness. It's the cognitive load of everything being slightly unfamiliar simultaneously.

What helped: finding one place near our apartment that became ours — a kopitiam where we became regulars within six weeks. Having a morning routine that was anchored and predictable. Not trying to solve everything at once. And genuinely accepting that three months of adjustment is not a sign that you made the wrong choice — it's a sign you made a big change.

Community Doesn't Happen to You — You Have to Build It

In Toronto, we had 25 years of accumulated community: neighbours who knew our names, a book club, colleagues who became close friends, our running group, Clara's yoga studio. We didn't build that deliberately — it accreted over decades of shared life. We assumed, without examining the assumption, that something similar would develop organically in KL.

It doesn't work that way. Abroad, in a place where you know no one, you have to go looking for community with a deliberateness that feels unusual for adults our age. Facebook expat groups. Volunteer opportunities. Language exchange meetups. Golf clubs. Book clubs you find through a notice at the gym. It feels effortful in a way that's slightly uncomfortable — like being new at school.

What we wish we'd known: start building community on day one, not after you feel settled. You feel settled faster when you have people around you. And the friendships that come from the deliberate effort abroad are often deeper and more honest than the ones that accreted over decades of proximity at home — because you chose them actively, and they chose you back.

The Family Distance Hits Differently Than You Expect

We thought about missing family before we left. We knew it would be hard. We were wrong about where the hardness comes from.

It's not the big events — flights home for Christmas, WhatsApp calls on birthdays — that carry the weight. It's the ordinary things. Fran's mother had a fall in October of our first year. Nothing serious, she recovered quickly. But we weren't there when it happened, weren't there the week after when she was still fragile and frightened, weren't there for the cups of tea on the Tuesday evenings that help. We were 14 hours and a 22-hour flight away. And we felt it not as a sharp pain but as a dull, persistent awareness that we'd chosen to be somewhere other than where our family was.

Clara's nephew was born in our first year away. We met him at four months old on our first trip home. He didn't know us yet.

What we wish we'd known: budget generously for flights home, both financially and emotionally. Plan them well in advance so they're not reactive (and expensive). Accept that some things will happen without you — and that this is the trade-off, not a failure. The distance is real. The relationships survive it when you tend them carefully. And being home in July feels differently special than it would if you were there all year.

Visiting a Place and Living There Are Completely Different Things

We'd been to KL twice as tourists before we decided to move here. We loved it both times — the food, the energy, the warmth of the people, the extraordinary value for money. We thought we knew what living here would feel like.

We knew almost nothing. What you experience as a tourist is the highlight reel of a place: the best restaurants, the interesting neighbourhoods, the novelty of everything. What you experience as a resident is the full picture — including the things that don't make it into travel guides. Traffic at 6pm on the LDP. The way humidity works on your body not for a week but for months. The week in March when the haze comes in from Sumatra and the air quality drops and you don't want to be outside. The bureaucracy of renewing a visa. The day when nothing works and you want to scream into a pillow and nobody around you would fully understand why.

This is not an argument against retiring abroad. It's an argument for doing a serious trial run before committing — 2–3 months, not 2–3 weeks. The tourist experience and the resident experience are different enough that they require separate evaluation.

Routines Are More Important Than You Think

We are not particularly routine-oriented people. In Toronto, our lives were scheduled by work, social commitments, and the rhythms of a city that imposes structure. Retirement abroad removed most of that scaffolding at once. Without work. Without a fixed social calendar. Without the seasonal rhythm of Canadian life. Without the alarm clock that exists because something is expected of you.

The freedom is extraordinary. It is also, unexpectedly, a little destabilising. Structure in retirement abroad doesn't arrive automatically — you build it deliberately, or you float. We spent the first three months floating and found it more unsettling than liberating. By month four we'd built a morning routine: coffee at the same kopitiam, a walk through the park, language practice, a plan for the day. The structure we built felt artificial at first. Three years later, it feels like home.

The Financial Surprises Were Mostly Our Own Fault

We underestimated flights home by about 40%. We forgot to budget for the cross-border CPA fees in year one (which were significant — departure return, deemed disposition calculation, local Malaysia tax registration). We didn't model the comfort-tax spending on imported goods. We set up a recurring bank wire transfer and paid RBC's terrible exchange rate for four months before discovering Wise.

None of these were catastrophic. All of them were avoidable. The lesson: do the full budget calculation — including the hidden costs — before you go, not after you arrive. The numbers in our Hidden Costs post are based on our real first-year experience. We wrote that post because we wish it had existed when we were planning.

Not All Your Canadian Friendships Will Survive the Distance

Some friendships are built on proximity — on the shared walk to the coffee machine, the regular Thursday dinner, the spontaneous Saturday afternoon. Remove the proximity and they thin out. This isn't anyone's failure. It's just that some friendships need to be fed by presence, and distance starves them.

The friendships that survive are the ones with deliberate effort on both sides — the WhatsApp conversations that stay active, the friends who come visit (and we make visiting easy and worth it), the ones who genuinely want to hear about the place we're living rather than politely asking. Three years in, we have fewer Canadian friends in active contact than we did before we left. The ones we have feel more essential, more chosen, more real.

What we wish we'd known: don't try to maintain everything equally. Invest in the friendships that have the capacity for distance. Let the others evolve into warm acquaintance without guilt. It's a natural consequence of choosing a different life.

It Takes Longer to Feel at Home Than Anyone Tells You

The expat community wisdom is that it takes 6–12 months to truly settle abroad. Our experience: it took closer to 18 months before KL felt like home rather than a place we were staying. The last phase of the adjustment is subtle — it's when you stop being aware that you're abroad. When the coffee shop feels like your coffee shop, not a foreign coffee shop you've been going to. When you give directions to someone who's lost. When you have a local repair person you trust and can call without looking up how to ask for what you need. When the haze comes in and you sigh rather than panic because you know it passes.

That phase arrives. Be patient with yourself until it does.

The Things We Were Wrong About Feeling Afraid of

Was It Worth It? — Honestly

If you're still in the planning phase — doing the spreadsheets, reading the guides, worrying about the things that might go wrong — we want to tell you this: the spreadsheets matter. The guides matter. And none of them will fully prepare you for the actual experience of building a new life in a place that doesn't know you yet. That part, you learn by doing. And it's worth it.

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