You are probably wondering why we chose Cyprus as a retirement destination, I guess the reason is different for everyone, but in our case it started when we wanted to go and visit our two boys in Canada, they both live in different parts of the country and so we decided to set up a visit, suggesting to them both that we could all meet somewhere in the middle, after a few back and forths with emails it turned out that it wasn’t a good time for either of them, both the boys are married and both had different things going on in their lives.

After getting over the initial disappointment as it had been five years since seeing them both, we decided to pull our socks up and go on a much needed holiday, a holiday that we hadn’t had in quite a lot of years, after lots of discussions and a lot of pouring over brochures we eventually chose a cruise and so we set sail for two weeks at the end of January 2018 to visit nine islands in the Caribbean.

Well this blog isn’t about the holiday so I won’t say anything more, it was when we got back from all of those sun-drenched islands that we realized how cold England was, it didn’t help that we landed back from our holiday in February, to what they were calling ‘The Beast from the East’, which was rain, cold winds and a fair bit of snow, it was after being home for about a month that we both started talking about how nice it would be to live on one of the islands abroad that had more sunshine and milder winters than England, and that is what started it off and got the ball rolling so to speak, from there it was just a continual discussion that we had on and off, only the discussion didn’t end thankfully.

Throughout March we talked about moving somewhere warmer endlessly, I think the thought of another cold winter in the UK was something neither of wanted to endure again, and at the time I think it also gave us something to do, it was a bit like having a hobby, researching different places was interesting and talking about it was good fun, I also started watching a program called ‘A Place in the Sun’, I think I got slightly obsessed with the program to be honest lol, the more we researched different countries we realized that in some of those countries the English pension doesn’t ever increase, something neither of us realized, and I read different accounts of people living in other countries that had moved for example in the 1970’s, and their pension hadn’t increased by even a penny, so what was once worth an amount you could live on was now worth virtually nothing, so we realized the importance of finding somewhere that ticked all of our boxes, which was Pension Increases, Warmer Summers, Milder Winters, Less Rain, Cheaper Rents, Cheaper Electricity & Water Bills, Cheaper Property Taxes, and just to make it even more perfect did you know that Cyprus has on average 326 sunny days a year, so in the end we eventually whittled it all down to Cyprus.

I enjoyed all the researching I did on Cyprus, I think it was something interesting to do in the midst of a cold winter, but at the start I don’t think to be honest that either of us ever thought that we would actually make it happen, but we started with research into pensions and the weather, house rentals, prices of utilities, food etc. I spent a lot of time on Cyprus forums reading pages upon pages of people moving to Cyprus or from People who were living in Cyprus.

I struggled to find anything from people who had left Cyprus because they were unhappy, which was a good sign, the few people that I had read about that had gone back to the UK either had become grandparents of children living in the UK, or elderly parents back in the UK were getting sick or old and needed looking after, I guess all of that was also encouraging and kept us reading and researching.

So we had gotten back from our holiday in February, and we made the decision that we both wanted to move in March sometime and we were gone by September, so six months in all, I wonder sometimes how we got to be so brave, especially as we had never been to Cyprus before.

Nick was also going to be 65 that August and although he had already decided to keep on working, the more we discussed moving and living somewhere warmer the more it appealed to him to retire on his 65^th birthday and give up work entirely.

So we basically started off by writing a list of things to do, it ended up being page after page, and at one point I went and bought a notebook, we were lucky in one respect that we were renting our house so selling thankfully was not needed, I think that did make things easier as I read of a lot of people wanting to make the move but couldn’t sell their house in the UK.

The months leading up to our move I found frustrating as there was nothing that we could do from our list, it seemed all of the things on my list were things to do closer to the time, so April June and July were quite frustrating months really and I kept myself going by continually reading and researching about Cyprus.

So my blog starts roughly about six weeks before our actual move in August 2018 which you can follow along with from the home page on the right hand side.