Now that I am an age where I can actually envision retirement, I have started thinking seriously about where I wish to divide up those years. I’m not talking about the partial, part-time retirement I’ve been enjoying for that last ten years. I mean sometime after 2014 when I hit 55. Spending six months a year here and the remaining six in Canada is beginning to sound like a possible proposition.
We could easily scrape up the funds to buy something. Housing is fairly expensive here. Oh, I’d venture it is only one third to a half of Canadian prices, but by local standards that’s very expensive. The problem would lie not in the price though, but in the selection. I absolutely love the geographic variety that Sri Lanka offers. Most probably, to every place I’ve ever travelled, I’ve briefly considered owning property. Yet, here I’d be hard pressed to choose.
Owning a house such as this one would be restful. I can remember trying to draw coconut trees before I learned my alphabet. A yearly escape to a big yard and garden would be refreshing. It’d be hard to argue with tropical fruit juices freshly squeezed from one’s own trees. As well, the poor infrastructure of most Sri Lankan big towns makes them really rather ugly. Still, I would find it hard after a while to live without the amenities of urban life. Some of the most jaw dropping scenery is hours and hours away from a DSL connection or the airport. I think that a $70,000 apartment on the eighth floor of one of those new, urban Colombo residential buildings might be more practical.
An additional hindrance is the distance involved. This is quite literally half the world away and therefore one of the most expensive air tickets one can buy. Brochure type information for large projects is available on the Internet. Yet, I would be hard pressed to actually purchase anything sight unseen. Trying to arrange all the details for the purchase of property on a short vacation would be a stressful experience too.
I believe there’s a 100% tax on foreign ownership in Sri Lanka. That may change.