Tuscan Sun or Fool’s Gold? Navigating Global Moves and Market Hype

Introduction

Dr. Chris Mullis, PhD, CFP®: Picture this, it’s 10:00 AM on a Tuesday instead of a fluorescent lit office or a frantic commute. You’re sitting at a sun drenched cafe in a Tuscan piazza.

The only thing on your to-do list is deciding between a second espresso or a walk through the olive groves. For many, retiring to Italy is the ultimate dream. The wine, the history, the pace of life. But how do you actually turn that postcard fantasy into a permanent reality? We’re breaking down the logistics of trading your nine to five for the sweet life. Are you ready?

Dr. Chris Mullis, PhD, CFP®: Welcome back to Retirement Isn’t Rocket Science. I’m your host, Dr. Chris Mullis, a certified financial planner with 21 years of experience helping people enjoy great retirements. And in my past life as an observational astrophysicist, I’m mapped the structure of the universe using NASA’s great space observatories.

But back here on Planet Earth, our core mission is to show you how to lower your taxes, strengthen your portfolio, and spend more with confidence so you can make your retirement even better. And if that wasn’t enough, we’re going to have some fun and learn cool stuff by exploring the most unique places in the cosmos.

I invite you to join our crew by subscribing to our weekly retirement newsletter called the Launch. This is where we share all the valuable resources, links, and smart launches steps you can take today to convert knowledge into action. You can sign up for the launch by visiting Retirement isn’t rocket science.com.

 Dr. Chris Mullis, PhD, CFP®: In today’s show, is your retirement ready for the big move to the Mediterranean?

And it seems like every time you turn on the news lately, gold is hitting another all time high. But when a Shawnee assets price skyrockets, is it a signal to jump on board or a warning that you’re about to buy into a bubble right before the engine cuts out?

And we pay a very special tribute to Gayle Rigsbee. An incredibly talented charlatan who mentored generations of Carolina Sky watchers and is honored with his name on both an observatory and an asteroid.

Retirement Briefing Room

Dr. Chris Mullis, PhD, CFP®: Welcome to the Retirement Briefing Room. This is where we huddle up to take a close look at important aspects of your financial life, spotlight pathways of success, and think about how to integrate both financial and non-financial attributes into your retirement mission plan. I just returned from an extended stay in Florence, Italy.

Our oldest child is a third year at UNC Chapel Hill and studying abroad this semester. It was a special experience to explore the cradle of the Renaissance with my 20-year-old, reconnect with old Italian astronomy collaborators and, and of course enjoy the amazing cuisine and culture of Italy.

That time in Florence got me thinking about how popular it is for folks from America to think about retiring abroad and specifically retiring to Italy. Retiring to Italy is a popular dream for many Americans, and while the romance of the Tuscan sun is a major draw, the move is often driven by very practical financial and lifestyle advantages.

Here’s a breakdown of why Italy is a top choice for us retirees seeking to retire abroad. It comes into four major categories, lower cost of living, world-class, healthcare, the quality of life, and some of the financial and tax and syn. Let’s break them down one at a time.

First. Drastically lower costs of living. If you’re smart about geography, for many, the move is a mathematical win outside of the fashion hubs like Milan or the tourist centers of Rome and Florence Daily life in Italy is significantly cheaper than in most US metro areas.

Take housing, for instance, you can find comfortable apartments in smaller cities or in the south of Italy for around 475 to $830 a month. In some rural regions, entire homes can be purchased for less than the cost of a luxury car in the United States and considered daily expenses. Groceries. Local wine and dining out are often 30 to 50% cheaper than in the United States because of the abundance of local agriculture and a culture itself that prioritizes affordable, high quality food. Next, let’s look at the healthcare system. It’s a world class healthcare system, often at a fraction of the cost. Healthcare is often considered the biggest motivator for older Americans.

The National Healthcare System in Italy with the acronym SSN, like Social Security number, is consistently ranked by the World Health Organization as one of the best in the world. Now while US retirees must initially have private insurance to get a visa, once they become legal residents, they can buy into the Italian public system for a relatively low annual fee.

And we’re gonna dive into some of those numbers a little bit later. And then from a savings perspective, retirees often save thousands of dollars annually on premiums and out-of-pocket costs compared to the US private insurance or Medicare supplement market. The third key advantage is that quality of life La Doche Vita,

 The Italian lifestyle offers a stark contrast to the high stress hustle culture of the United States. First, the pace of life. Everything moves slower, meals are meant to be long and social interaction is the cornerstone of the day.

Walkability is a very high factor. Most Italian towns are designed for walking. This built-in exercise leads to higher activity levels and better health outcomes for retirees and the climate. From the temperate Mediterranean coast to the crisp, alpine, north Italy offers a climate for most any preference.

And the fourth aspect are the financial incentives. Italy has introduced specific policies to attract foreign retirees, particularly to its southern regions. For example, there is a 7% flat tax in southern regions like Sicily, Puglia, and calabria. New residents who draw a foreign pension can qualify for that 7% flat tax rate on all foreign income for up to 10 years.

And the other key aspect is the elective residency visa. This specific visa path is designed for people who can prove they have sufficient passive income. Pensions, social security or investment income. So they have sufficient passive income to live without working in Italy.

Again, we’ll dive a little bit deeper into those numbers in just a few minutes.

Now I know what you’re thinking. Dr. Chris, I’m a super saver. I’ve got a healthy retirement nest egg, but I’m no billionaire. Is Italy really in the cards? If , it’s part of my dream retirement, and I think the answer is very likely, yes, it might actually be more affordable than staying in the United States.

Again, if that’s your lifestyle and living preference, you need to lead with the things that are key to your fulfillment. Let the money be a second. So choose to live overseas or in Italy because that fits your ideal retirement. But of course, we want to do the math and make sure it makes sense and it’s a sustainable thing to choose.

So in that spirit, let’s go just a little deeper into some of the, , features , and nuances that , we referenced just shortly ago. . Let’s talk about the trajectory of lifestyle and logistics. Let’s look at the why. We talk a lot on this show about mission control for your health, right? Italy offers the Mediterranean diet, world-class healthcare, and a culture that values walking and community.

But how do you get there if that’s your destination? Now, Italy doesn’t have a specific retirement visa. It does have something again called the elective residency visa. To qualify, you need to demonstrate passive income. Again, that could be from your pension, from social security, or from your investment portfolio, and that minimum qualifier for that visa is $35,000 a year.

Now, for many of our listeners who have worked very hard and saved diligently, invest wisely. That’s a very achievable launch requirement. Now, let’s look at the fuel consumption, right? That’s your cost of living and living day to day there. That’s where the math, again gets interesting. There are many regions where Italy is incredibly affordable.

That sweet life can be afforded at 1500 to $1,800 a month. Compare that to the US average for retirees, which hovers around $4,300 a month. In Italy, your Social Security check isn’t just a supplement in many regions. It’s your entire operating budget. We are talking three course lunches with wine for $16.

From an investment standpoint, this geographic arbitrage allows your nest egg to last significantly longer. If you’re withdrawing 4% or 5% from your portfolio in the United States, you might be feeling a little bit of the burn rate. In Italy, you might only need 2% or a 3% withdrawal to live better than you do now, depending on your geography and circumstances.

Now let’s consider some technical hurdles around taxes and insurance as your mission briefing officer, I have to talk about that. Friction, right taxes. Italy wants you to be a resident, but they also want you to , pay your share in taxes.

Tax residents are subject to income tax on their worldwide income. Now, national rates in Italy can be high. The 23 to 43% range. However, there’s a silver lining. Italy and the US have a tax treaty to prevent double taxation, and here’s a pro tip for building that financial orbit over Italy. Italy has been offering incentive programs.

Including again, some regions where there’s a 7% flat tax for retirees moving to specific small towns, this is where a tax focused retirement planner becomes your best navigator, ? You need to model these tax implications before you pack your bags.

And a quick but very important note in regards to healthcare. While Italy’s system is ranked among the best and it’s very affordable for resident. Remember that Medicare does not travel. While you might keep Part A since it’s essentially free or part B, to avoid penalties.

If you ever return to the us, neither will pay for your Italian doctor visits or your Italian hospital stays in Italy. You generally have two paths. The public healthcare system. Again, that’s SSN or Private Global Insurance. Now let’s look at some broad costs for reference for US residents in the elective residency visa.

You can join the Italian version of Medicare via voluntary registration. The base contribution for 2026 is $2,360 per person, and it scales up with your global income. It’s capped at approximately 3,290. Once you’re enrolled, you have the same rights as an Italian citizen, including a dedicated primary care doctor and subsidized prescriptions the other option is private insurance, which is often required for your initial Visa application, and is used by many expats to bypass public waiting lists for non-emergency procedures. Now, the average costs there are a little bit, maybe significantly higher than the public health system. For an individual in 2026, the average cost is about $4,600 a year, and you have options for a basic local plan.

That’s the Italy only private plans. Those can be found for 950 to $2,300 per year, and they’re often sufficient for Visa requirements, but maybe have limited networks. And then at the high end there’s comprehensive global plans. Where there’s a premium international plan that generally ranges between $3,500 to $8,000 per year, depending heavily on your age and whether you include US coverage or not.

 That’s some of what the costs look like from a healthcare perspective, but again, very attractive compared to what we’re paying for our retirement healthcare system here in the United States. The last thing to think about. Mission risks. It’s not all sunshine and gelatos. There are some things to consider.

First the concept of currency risk. Your income is generated in dollars, but your living expenses are in euros. If the dollar weakens, your fuel doesn’t go as far. Number two is estate planning. Italy is a civil law country. Their inheritance laws are different than our common law system.

You’ll need to have a mission briefing with an international estate attorney to ensure your assets go to your loved ones exactly as you’ve intended. And finally, there’s the human element. You’ll need to learn the language. You know, being a nice person goes a long ways in Italy, but. There’s paperwork and there’s bureaucracy and

it can feel like literal rocket science if you don’t speak Italian

Retiring to Italy isn’t just about the art and the pasta. It’s a strategic life choice that can extend the life of your retirement savings while dramatically increasing the quality of your life. But remember, a successful mission requires a solid flight plan. Italy is beautiful, but it’s the planning that makes it the sweet life rather than a financial black hole

Now let’s head over to mission Control to answer your financial questions and get you retirement ready.

Ask Mission Control

Welcome to Ask Mission Control. If you’ve got a question that you’d like us to answer on the show, head over to retirement isn’t Rocket Science.com and click Ask a Question. Or even better, you can skip to the front of the line by calling Mission Control at 7 0 4 2 3 4 6 5 5 0 and record your audio question.

This week’s question comes from listener, Caitlin. She asks, gold is grabbing a lot of headlines and my friends are talking about it constantly. What is the role of gold, if any, in a high quality investment portfolio

First off, I totally get why gold is the talk of the town. It’s shiny, it’s heavy, and for thousands of years, humans have treated it like the ultimate panic room.

When the world feels turbulent, like over some of the past years, our fight or flight response kicks in. We want to hold something physical, but as a former scientist, I look at the data, the actual data and the evidence shows a very different story than the commercials on cable news.

In the world of fiduciary financial planning, we make a big distinction between an investment and a speculation. Think of a great investment like a fruit tree. You plant it. That’s your capital. You nurture it and over time it grows. But most importantly, it produces something. It drops apples or it drops oranges into your basket every year in the form of dividends or interests.

That’s what stocks and bonds do. They are productive assets. Gold. Well, gold is more like a pet rock. You put it in a vault. You come back in 10 years and it’s still just a rock. It hasn’t grown. It hasn’t produced a single cent of income, and it hasn’t innovated. It just sits there. The only way for you to make money on gold is if you find someone else down the road who’s willing to pay more for your rock than you did.

That’s not a strategy, that’s a hope. And many people buy gold because they think it’s a hedge against inflation. But here’s the reality. Gold is actually a really terrible inflation hedge over the long haul. Let’s look at the numbers. If we look long-term, the long-term returns. After subtracting inflation, stocks have historically returned about 6.9% per year.

Gold. It limped along at 0.6%. that’s a massive gap. And talk about a waiting game in 2025, gold finally hit a new inflation adjusted high. Do you know how long it took to get there? 45 years. So imagine being a 55-year-old today. Buying gold as quote protection and having to wait until you’re 100 just to break even in terms of purchasing power and investing in speculative metals like gold and silver. It’s a rollercoaster. We saw this play out in real time recently. 20 25 was a banner year for gold and everyone was high fiving each other. But then January 20, 26 hit and just one day gold slumped more than 12% falling below $5,000 an ounce.

 Silver was even worse . Plunging 36% in a single intraday decline. Now that’s what I call a golden yo-yo. Stocks tend to grow steadily over time with temporary pullbacks. Gold, however, goes through these sudden emotional surges, followed by long fades that last decades. Now, here’s why Gold’s not in our mission briefing. Specifically in my day job as a retirement planner. , My job is to make sure that families that we serve have sustainable, fulfilling financial and life trajectories, and that stay on track for decades. And depending on when they retire, that could be a 30 or 40 year period.

We do not include gold in our portfolios for three big reasons. Number one, no cash flow. When you’re retired, you need a paycheck. Gold doesn’t pay you to own it. In fact, it usually costs you money to store and insure it.

Number two, because of the wild fluctuations. In a commodity price like gold, you have to be right twice. It’s the be right twice problem. To make money in gold, you have to be right twice. You have to time the bottom when you buy it, and you have to time the top when you sell it. professional traders who have spent their entire adult lives have not been able to achieve this in a repeatable fashion.

And number three, emotional volatility. Retirement should be about peace of mind and confidence. Gold is sold on fear and headlines. We’d rather see you invest in a prudent. Globally diversified portfolio paired with a smart war chest of bonds and cash.

So you don’t need to worry about gyrations in the market or gyrations in the economy. These are proven productive tools. This is a solve problem, so we don’t need gold. That panic room mentality is part of the equation. Caitlin, thank you so much for this thoughtful, and again, very timely question. I love hearing from our listeners. Things that are the current event or things that have just been lingering for a long time. Either one are great questions to ask, , on the show and let us help us all journey safer down this path towards and through retirement.

Now let’s broaden our perspective and head over to a very special edition of the Retirement Big Picture.

Retirement Big Picture

Dr. Chris Mullis, PhD, CFP®: Welcome to the Retirement Big Picture part of our show. This is where we usually look up and look out to expand our appreciation and understanding of our amazing universe. Today we’re doing something a little bit different and very special. We are taking this time to look up from our spreadsheets and towards the stars to honor a man who proved that a life well lived.

Is measured by what you leave behind in the hearts and minds of others. You know, they say you should never meet your heroes. But in 1984, I was a seventh grader at Providence Day School on a field trip, and I met mine. We were at the old Charlotte Amateur Astronomers Observatory in Weddington, North Carolina.

Back then, it was a beautiful, dark sky paradise. Hosting. That star party was Mr. Gayle Riggsbee, and I was a nuisance. I hit Gayle with a constellation of questions, nonstop rapid fire, raw curiosity. Eventually, Gayle looked at me probably half exhausted and half impressed, and said, look, kid, why don’t you just come to the club meetings?

That moment changed my life. It changed the trajectory of who I would eventually become. , Gayle Rigsbee passed away very recently. At the age of 93 to the world, he was a legendary machine design engineer and a titan of the amateur astronomy community. To me. He was the man who propelled me to win the International Science fair and enter my first career as an astrophysicist.

I remember those milestone calls to him that I made over the years. I called him from the control room the first time I ever observed with the 10 meter Keck telescope in Hawaii. That to me, felt like summiting Mount Everest in the astronomy world. That being the world’s largest telescope, even to this day, years later, I remember placing a bittersweet phone call to him from Las Compus Observatory in Chile’s AA Desert during my final professional observing run.

Before I transitioned into financial planning, I dedicated my PhD dissertation to Gayle. And, and he kept that thick leather bound book right on the center of his sitting room. , I think he was quietly proud of that and wanted others to see that. Now, Gayle wasn’t just, a rank amateur since 1960.

He was the heart of the Charlotte Amateur Astronomers Club. He founded the Southern Star Astronomical Convention in the Blue Ridge Mountains. He was a master craftsman who built telescopes up to very large sizes and won national recognition for his achievements. In 1997, he helped rescue a historic Alvin Clark telescope from Columbia University, literally hauling it off a 14 story building in New York City to bring it to the South Carolina State Museum ’cause of Gayle.

Kids today can look through that historic lens and see the rings of Saturn. Gayle and I recently had lunch together. 93. Gayle was the gold standard of retirement. He was still out there doing all the things that he was doing. When I first met him in 1984, he was cutting his grass of his tractor. He was down in his basement machine shop, turning out telescope parts.

He was fit. He was sharp and still fueled by the same passion when we met back in the eighties. After lunch, we visited the site of the old observatory in Weddington . It’s just a relic now. Overgrown weeds with only the foundation visible. All the action for the club long ago shifted to a beautiful dark sky location in South Carolina. With a very advanced amateur observatory complex named in Gale’s Honor, that’s the Gale h Riggsbee Observatory. And if you think a complex like that isn’t a big enough legacy, the universe itself now carries his name in February, 2025 and asteroid 17 6 10 Riggsbee was officially named in his honor.

Gayle Riggsbee’s Life is a masterclass in what we talk about in this show. Retirement shouldn’t be a fading light. It should be a period of maximum impact. He generously shared his passion. He mentored generations of Carolina Sky Watchers and he volunteered his genius and his energy for the field of astronomy.

GA Riggsbee leaves behind a community of people who know how to look up. Ga, thank you for the stars. You changed my life and you’ve changed the sky for all of us.

Conclusion

Dr. Chris Mullis, PhD, CFP®: We spent some time today orbiting the complexities of retirement, analyzing the data, looking at the hurdles, thinking about the opportunities. It’s now time to open the hatch. This is your space walk. You are stepping out of the daily routine of your day-to-day life for a high impact work session to accomplish a specific objective.

This isn’t just a stroll. It’s the moment you convert today’s knowledge into a successful mission to move from insights to results. Here are your action items. Number one, if you find yourself tempted to buy gold, simply because the price has been going up and you’re afraid of missing out, it’s time to pull out your investment policy statement.

And if you don’t have an investment policy statement, it’s time to get one. Think of the IPS, that investment policy statement as your mission flight plan. Before we ever leave the launchpad, we decide exactly what fuel we’ll be using, what our coordinates are, and what we won’t do when things get bumpy.

If your IPS doesn’t include speculative commodities and for my retirement planning clients, it does not. Then buying gold just because it’s hot, is the equivalent of a pilot changing course mid-flight because she saw a shawny reflection in the clouds. Number two, if you’re thinking about retiring overseas, it’s vital to execute a lifestyle test flight by booking a long-term rental for at least three to four weeks.

Focus on staying in a quiet nont tourist region where you can trade the luxury hotel or a local apartment and a pair of walking shoes. Spend your time navigating the neighborhood markets, visiting the local pharmacy, and experiencing the unglamorous side of life just as you would if you lived there permanently.

This immersive mission will reveal if the actual daily rhythm of the country fits your personal vibe. Before you decide to launch into a full scale relocation, I challenge you to take one idea from today’s show. Put it into practice this week to make your retirement even better. Thank you so much for joining me.

Remember, you’ve done the hard work of savings. Now let’s do the smart work of planning. Until next time, keep your eyes on the horizon. Enjoy the adventure you are go for retirement.

 Credits

Dr. Chris Mullis, PhD, CFP®: We thank the National Aeronautics and Space Administration for providing the radio communications between the spat shuttle astronauts and the flight controllers.

Disclaimer

This show is for informational and entertainment purposes only. It is not specific tax, legal or investment advice. Before considering acting on anything you hear in this show, first consult your own tax, legal or financial advisor.