When Jonathan Montgomery, a British transplantation that lives in Alaska, retired 15 years ago, was completely fed up with the notoriously brutal winters of his state of adoptive origin. So he decided to become a snow bird and go to warmer coasts.
“I see my purpose of life as where the bad weather is not,” he tells Realtor.com in a recent email exchange while one of his winter adventures abroad.
This is how Montgomery works: six months a year, covering the spring and summer seasons, lives in Anchorage, AK, enjoying the many outdoor activities that the area has to offer. The other six months, the retiree is divided between a guest house in Bali and one in New Zealand, while renting his home in the United States.
“I spend exactly six months every year in Alaska, and not one more moment,” Montgomery emphasizes.
Thanks to this agreement, Montgomery has bones capable of retaining its residence in Alaska and collecting what it described as “free money” of the state government through the permanent background of Alaska, which pays annual dividends to all the Romingan from from.
Montgomery says that last year, its participation reached $ 1,700. It is known that it rises as high as almost $ 3,300.
The life of a snow bird in a tropical paradise
In Ubud, Bali, Montgomery has been staying in the same guest house during the last decade for the low price of $ 25 per day. That amount includes breakfast.
Meanwhile, the rental income of your home in Anchorage leaves $ 110 per day.
The British-American Day of Expatores in Bali begins at 7 AM a Hatha Yoga session, followed by a training in a gym with air conditioning. At night, when the weather becomes cooler, Montgomery enjoys a one -hour ball massage for only $ 20, including a generous tip.
“Duration in my work career in Alaska, I never really enjoy my winters. I just overcome them,” Montgomery admits. “Now, I totally love my winters.”
At the beginning of his snow experience, Montgomery would move away to explore remote places. But more recently, he says he has returned to his favorite places, including Bali and the South Island of New Zealand, where he keeps an old man in the courtyard of a friend.
“Usually, I go to New Zealand for two or three months per year,” he explains. “It is very similar to Alaska, but when it is winter in Alaska, it is summer in New Zealand. It also has the advantage that I can walk in peace through the forest, sure that I am the best of my food chain. The sausage that will bite me is a sandfly.”
A great concern for the desert enthusiast in Alaska is to become an alpha predatory meal.
“It is a complete fallacy that Alaska’s bears kill you and eat you. No. They overlook and go directly to food,” Brina Montgomery. “The last sound you can hear is the crunch of your own bones! There are no such concerns in New Zealand.”
He thought he loves New Zealand, Montgomery says he sees Bali as his true home away from the home, as well as a convenient winter travel center from where he can swim to Thailand or Singapore for only $ 100.
This spring, Montgomery’s trips took him to Nepal, where he was preparing to make a three -day white water rafting trip, before flying back to Anchorage at the end of April.
“This will be my fifteenth year of snow, and I love it,” sprouts.
From the United Kingdom to the final border
Montgomery is originally from England, but moved to Alaska to attend the postgraduate school in Fairbanks in the late 1980s. After winning his MBA in 1991, he moved to Anchorage, married and embarked on a career in mortgage loans.
An avid man outdoors, Montgomery fell in love with Alaska’s wild and open spaces, but not so much with his hard winter climate, with average temperatures that loom in adolescents and 20 years.
“I love Alaska in summer. It is the size of Western Europe with the population once in the tenth of London,” he says. “Desert adventure opportunities are simply unbeatable.”
Montgomery has lived in Alaska for 38 years, but having to tremble during the frigid winter months never agreed with him. Then, when he had the opportunity to withdraw from the mortgage origin industry at age 46, he took the opportunity to renew his lifestyle.
Montgomery, now a widower, points out that he could “stop pursuing the dollar” before most of his chief of ballsgata, unlike them, he had no children to take care of, and always strives to live below their means.
“I could recognize that I had enough and my time was more valuable to be,” he says.
Instead of sprouting for an elegant car, Montgomery continued to drive his old Jeep while invested in an apartment building of five units. Ten years later, the building’s mortgage has been paid, and rental revenues now constitute the lion’s participation in Montgomery retirement income. He also finances his Jet Setting lifestyle.
While enjoying a massage in Bali or exploring Thailand temples, Montgomery also gets another income of renting his private home in Anchorage, which he had built in 2007. Between the furnished unit of the upper floor and the grandmother’s floor he obtained in his property, the retiree says he attracts about $ 3,300 dead in the six months he has gone.
Montgomery says he intends to keep his balloon’s trot during the time that his health allows.
“Like any flock of migratory birds you can tell you: it doesn’t think about it too much,” he says.