By Robert Nelson - January 19, 2022
One of the great benefits of a much lower cost of living in Mexico is the opportunity to retire early. International globe trotters Wayne and Roxane Jared are still in their active fifties and loving early retirement in Puerto Vallarta.
We could have stayed in the U.S., but we would have worked longer just because of the cost of living,” Roxane told us, “but Mexico made it happen a lot sooner.”
The couple, both information technology professionals, first considered retirement in Colorado and New Mexico, but after spending time in Mexico on both its east and west coasts, decided to head south of the border to a new life of adventure made possible by a cost of living that is more than half of what early retirement in the U.S. would have been for them.
Wayne Jared, 58, was born and raised in Montreal and earned a degree in mechanical engineering at the University of Brunswick. His software development career led him to work in Montreal, Toronto and then to the U.S. where he worked in Buffalo, New York for 12 years. There, he started Inspired Design, a customer relationship management (CRM) firm that was named one of the fastest growing private companies in 2000. Jared sold it three years later to a company in Indianapolis. He moved there to manage the transition for three years before joining a security company.
A confirmed entrepreneur, Jared, exited the security firm to start an access control company, which he sold in 2012, but continued working for them for a few years. His last hurrah as a full-time employee was just last year. He said goodbye to his job as vice president of engineering for Qumulex, an Indiana-based video and access control company.
His wife Roxane, who just turned 55, grew up in Rennes, France, about 60 miles from the sea in Brittany. Attracted by the information technology opportunities in France and the U.S., she graduated from France’s National Institute of Applied Sciences (INSA) in Rennes with a master’s degree.
“I decided to go to INSA because it is a famous engineering school in France,” she said, “and I opted for computer science because I wanted to move to the U.S. and it was a good way to get a visa to work there.”
After school, she worked for Alcatel Business Systems and Thomson Electronics in France before landing a job in the Indianapolis northern suburb of Carmel in 1998. After resigning from her first job in the U.S., she signed on with Liberty Mutual as a computer system engineer. That led to a new job at her old company Thomson Electronic, which by then had changed its name to Technicolor. The end of the corporate road for her was back at Liberty Mutual last year until the lure of Mexico early retirement became too strong to ignore. Go HERE for the rest of the article.
Robert Nelson and Felice Arden Nelson are Founders and Publish The Expat Guide to Living in Mexico online magazine. Look for his Overseas Life Redesign podcast interview released in February.