I met a man in a village in northern Thailand once.
British, Australian, can't remember. Late sixties, maybe, though the life had been harder than the age suggested in ways that showed in how he sat rather than how he looked. He was outside a small guesthouse on a plastic chair with a drink that had gone warm and no particular intention to get another one or to be anywhere else. The village was small. The guesthouse was the kind that exists in places where foreigners occasionally arrive and occasionally stay longer than they planned.
We talked for about an hour.
He'd been in Thailand eleven years. Came for a year because a friend had been and the friend had said it was good and the job at home had ended and the timing was the timing. He'd stayed because the reasons to leave never quite outweighed the reasons to remain, and then the years accumulated in the way years do when you stop counting them deliberately.
He couldn't go back. He said this without drama, without self-pity, in the flat tone of someone describing a fact rather than a misfortune. Not wouldn't. Couldn't.
No rental history from the last decade. No credit history in his country worth anything. The driving licence had expired and the renewal process from abroad was more complicated than it should have been and he'd let it drift. The pension situation had complications that nobody had warned him about when he left, years abroad, contributions not made, entitlements not accumulated in the way he'd vaguely assumed they would be accumulating on his behalf somewhere.
The savings were what eleven years of living cheaply and building nothing had produced. Which was enough for here and not enough for there. The income that sustained the life in Thailand was not an income that would sustain any version of life at home.
The family had its own arrangements now. The friends had dispersed into the ordinary geography of people who stayed put, houses bought, children grown, the social infrastructure of a life lived in one place that he had no position in anymore because positions require presence and he had been absent for eleven years.
He wasn't unhappy exactly. He had the beer and the chair and the village and eleven years of stories that most people will never have. He was not without a life.
He was stuck. In a way that had been building for years without ever announcing itself clearly enough to act on, because stuck doesn't come as a moment. It comes as a series of small deferrals that each seem reasonable in isolation and accumulate into a situation.
I thought about him for a long time after that conversation.
I think about him still.
The entry has a plan.
Everyone who does this has a plan for the entry. The visa. The savings. The first city. The research on cost of living and coworking spaces and which neighbourhood to try first. The plan is detailed and considered and often revised several times before departure.
The exit has nothing.
Not because people are foolish. Because the exit is not the part that feels urgent when the entry is what's in front of you. Because planning the exit requires imagining the end of something you haven't started yet. Because exit planning is the unsexy work that produces no content and generates no excitement and sits at the bottom of the list indefinitely.
Until it isn't theoretical anymore.
The man in the village didn't fail to plan his exit because he was careless. He failed to plan it because he planned one year and stayed eleven and nobody made the future feel real until it was the present.
Here is what I've understood about the exit strategy since that afternoon in northern Thailand.
It is not one plan. It is several running simultaneously at different time horizons, because the thing that goes wrong in year one is different from the thing that goes wrong in year five, and both are different from the thing that becomes the situation in year eleven if nothing was built in the years before.
The short term version covers the practical things that expire quietly if you stop attending to them. The driving licence. The bank account that requires an active home address. The credit history that stops accumulating the moment you're no longer a customer of anything at home. The pension contributions that are either being made or aren't and the difference compounds over years in the direction of significant. These things require attention now, not when they become urgent, because by the time they're urgent the cost of addressing them is substantially higher than the cost of the ongoing maintenance they were asking for.
The medium term version covers the income question honestly. Not whether the current income sustains the current life. Whether it is growing. Whether it will sustain the life in two years and three years and whether there is a trajectory that leads somewhere or whether there is a stable platform that is stable until something destabilises it. A client leaving. A platform changing its terms. A category of work that gets automated. The income that works now is not automatically the income that works later and the medium term plan is the one that asks what changes between now and then and whether those changes have been prepared for.
The long term version is the one nobody wants to write because it requires imagining being old. Not the comfortable version of old that doesn't require planning because everything works out. The specific version of old that the man in the village was living, where the options had narrowed without him noticing until the narrowing was complete.
Retirement savings. Not a vague intention toward retirement savings. An actual number, an actual vehicle, an actual monthly amount going somewhere that will compound long enough to matter. The geo-arbitrage that makes Southeast Asia affordable also makes saving possible if the saving is chosen rather than left to whatever remains after the cost of the life. Most people choose the life. The plan requires choosing both.
The strategy is not the romantic part.
There is no content about exit strategies. There is no vision board category for pension contributions. Nobody gets on the first plane thinking about the plastic chair in the village and how many deferrals it took to arrive there.
But the strategy is what keeps the freedom from becoming the trap. The trap is patient. It builds from small things over long time. The expired licence, the gap in the credit history, the savings that are enough for here and not enough for there, the pension that was somewhere in the plan and somehow not in the reality.
The man in the village planned one year. He had eleven.
He didn't know he was building the trap while he was living the life. That's the thing about the trap. It doesn't feel like a trap while you're inside it. It feels like the year extending reasonably into the next year for reasons that make sense at the time.
Plan the entry. Everybody plans the entry.
Plan the exit. Know what the five year version looks like. Know what the ten year version looks like. Know what happens if something goes wrong in year two rather than year ten and whether the short term version of the plan covers that or whether it doesn't and what that costs.
The strategy is not optional. It is not a later problem. It is the work that makes everything else sustainable rather than just enjoyable for as long as the luck holds.
The drink was warm. The chair was plastic. The village was small.
He had eleven years of stories.
He had nowhere to go.
Andrew - No Refunds •••