After a lifetime of work is very pleasant to decide to live in a beautiful country with wonderful landscapes with rivers, lakes and hills, interesting and modern towns, excellent services and low cost of living.
Paraguay is a country where anything is possible and where you can safely and quietly spend your second life after your retirement.
Asuncion: a beautiful city to live
If you love city life and choose to live in Asuncion, the capital of Paraguay a lot of pleasant and interesting options are waiting for you. As a matter of fact Asuncion is one of the most beautiful towns of South America and you will soon learn to live and to appreciate it.
If you love shopping you may go to the Paseo La Galeria a Five Stars Shopping Centre where you can find everything you need and you like and spend pleasant days talking with your husband/wife and your friends and enjoy the tasty Paraguayan food and drinks. If you love plants and animals don’t miss a visit to the Botanical Garden and Zoo of Asuncion. The Botanical Garden is one of the main green lungs of Asuncion. You can walk in wonderful woods, find various animals and see typical plants of this area. Also in a town like Asuncion you can enjoy the beauty of the nature and of its inhabitants.
If you love cultural and artistic life, go to the outskirts of Asuncion and visit the famous Museum of the Barro: it contains an indigenous art museum, a contemporary art collection and a pottery museum: it is a very interesting place, typical of this country and of this culture. It was founded in 1979. At first it was a private collection and after seven years it obtained a permanent location.
If you appreciate and are interested in religious art spend your time in the Sacred Art Museum.
Here you can admire baroque Spanish-Guarani sculptures and learn much about the religious sense of Paraguayan people.
Another very interesting museum is the Memory Museum, where you can see pictures and objects that testify the history of the military dictatorship in Paraguay. An historic and precious look on Paraguayan past history, that many people find really interesting.
We should write a book about Asuncion, not a paper, because this town offers you really many things to discover and see, but if you move to Paraguay you will have a lot of time!
Why you should retire in Paraguay and not in Europe.
Once pensioners were considered the static element of the society, a ball and chain. In the modern economy made of flows and quick flights, even pensioners learnt to have mobile lives.
From Europe they move to other European countries searching for sun and for a more generous taxation. They revitalized also the cruise business, that once was only for old people.
Furthermore they began to deal with digital technology and more generally set in motion the so called “silver economy”.
The European pensioners are a good-sized group – in Italy, for example they are more than 16 millions. Italy has a population of 60 million and pensioners have an objective importance and even a subjective one, that is the ability to affect political parties and trade unions. Therefore, even for economists is almost a duty to care about the pensioners’ new mobile lives.
Different checks
Pensioners are a large and heterogeneous universe and there are different people between them. The main difference concerns the check size they receive. These checks are “on average better, as they are the effect of longer and continuous working lives and employment in fields with better professional categories.”
Based on data gathered from European Statistical Office and always taking Italy as an example, in any case the 22% of pensioners cashes monthly an annuity lower than 500 euros, about the 40% receives an amount between 500 and 1000 euros, the 23,5% receives an amount between 1000 and 2000 euros and only the 3,2% receives an annuity that does not exceed 3000 euros.
From this context was born a phenomenon, that we might call “ social security emigration”.
The countries, that are taking advantage of it with a certain skill, are especially some southern European countries, but Paraguay is at the top.
It is said that walking in the streets of Asuncion or Encarnacion in Paraguay you hear Italian fairly frequently. Tax advantage is about 25%, but it changes depending on the different rates (aliquots) and it contributes to attract Italian and European pensioners, because it adds up to a low standard of living. Rent costs 200 euros and you can eat in a restaurant spending only 7 euros.
After two or three years the export pensioners buy also a house and they spend only 20/25,000 euros for a cottage on the banks of the beautiful Paranà River. To move towards the Paraguay – where constant temperature is between 20 and 27 grades – are especially the over 65 people from the main European cities.
Tax free pension
In the first ten years of the new residence you have a pension almost tax free and obviously it attracts not only European people, but also American, Canadian and Australian people.
To obtain permanent residence you need to live in Paraguay for six months in the same year and you have to carry few documents with you ( your Birth Certificate, your Criminal Record etc…).
Who moves to Paraguay certainly cares about the cost of living and tax system, but also about the quality of hospital services, so he/she remains in the capital Asuncion or in the delightful city of Encarnacion on the Panama River, that shares a border with the beautiful city of Posadas in Argentine.
Currently we are bombarded with information requests. Once moved to Paraguay pensioners with 1000 euros per month, now there are also pensioners with 2.500 per month. There is a sort of word of mouth among neighbours. Some people live this particular type of emigration like an adventure and some others like an inevitable grief. But everyone suffers from being a victim of fiscal injustice.
There are also Italian pensioner flows towards other European or non European countries, but Paraguay is becoming a super appealing destination.
