By Tamara Hardingham-Gill, CNN – After dealing with the death of her mother, losing her job of 10 years and finalizing her divorce, Barbara Barto was at a crossroads in her life.
The 62-year-old, from Fort Worth, Texas, who had been working as an office manager, struggled to find another role and felt as though she had passed her “expiration date.”
Barto decided that now was probably the right time to retire, but was concerned that she wouldn’t be able to live comfortably afterwards due to the rising cost of living in the US.
An avid viewer of the Home & Garden Television (HGTV) channel for years, she’d often dreamed of packing up and moving to another country, but hadn’t ever had the courage. However, she realized that it was likely now or never.
New chapter
“I’ve never been one of those people who just pick up and move and do adventurous things like that,” Barto tells CNN Travel, before explaining that Italy, where she’d briefly visited in the 1980s, was high on the list of countries she’d like to live in.
“So I thought I’m getting to that age, might as well try it out and see how it will work out for me.”
In 2020, Barto began attending regular webinars hosted by A Home In Italy, a company that assists foreigners with buying property in the European country, to figure out whether such a move would even be feasible.
“I put pencil to paper and saw that I could afford it, and it was going to be more affordable than living in the United States,” she says.
“Because everything’s more expensive there. When I put the numbers together, I saw I could live there more comfortably with my retirement and the inheritance that I have. And I thought, ‘Well, why not?’”
