About Fifty Abroad

Retiring abroad, honestly.

Fifty Abroad exists because the retire-abroad media has a hype problem — and a $7.5-billion-a-year flow of Social Security benefits abroad (Greenback, updated Oct 2026) deserves better than "paradise" listicles.

The honesty manifesto

What we promise, in plain English

Cons chapters on everything. No country is perfect. Every guide names the downsides — bureaucracy, housing squeezes, healthcare gaps, the language reality — sourced from real expat forums and published alongside the pretty pictures.
All-in cost tables, not fantasy budgets. Rent + healthcare + visa fees + tax drag, with methodology shown and a safety buffer built in. If the headline budget doesn't hold up, we show exactly where it breaks.
Disclosure first. Every affiliate or referral relationship is disclosed at the top of the page it appears on. We never take real-estate steering fees disguised as editorial — that's the trust failure we're built to correct.
Every figure dated and sourced. Social Security rules to ssa.gov, Medicare to medicare.gov, taxes to the IRS, visas to official immigration portals. No number ships without a source and a date.
A corrections log. When we're wrong, we correct publicly and date the correction instead of quietly editing. Rules change — our pages say when they were last verified.
General information, not professional advice. We're researchers and editors, not your CPA, attorney, or immigration lawyer. Where a decision needs professional judgment, we say so and point you to a licensed pro.

How we make money

Full monetization disclosure

We believe you should know exactly how a publisher gets paid before you trust a word it says. So you know where we stand:

Referrals. If we recommend an insurance or service provider and you sign up through our link, we may earn a commission. Every placement is labeled, every time.
The $39 Honest Country Guide Pack. A one-time purchase, not a membership.
Possibly a paid newsletter down the road.

What this means for you: our guides don't change based on who pays us. If a country is a bad fit, we say so — that's the whole brand.

The line we won't cross We never take real-estate steering fees disguised as editorial. The retire-abroad industry's ugliest habit is steering readers into property deals while pretending the coverage is independent. If we ever have a real-estate referral relationship, it will be disclosed loudly — but it will never shape what we write about a country.

How we work

E-E-A-T is the brand, not a checklist

Finance and health content has a high bar, and this site lives entirely inside it. So we turned compliance into the product:

Every figure is dated and sourced to ssa.gov, medicare.gov, the IRS, or official immigration portals.
Every article carries a last-verified date, and we publish a corrections log when we get something wrong.
Money claims come from official sources or named publications with dates — never from memory, never from vibes.
And for your situation specifically: consult licensed professionals. We're the honest starting point, not the final word.

Questions, corrections, or a figure you think is stale? contact@fiftyabroad.com — corrections from readers go straight to the top of the queue.