There are nice things about living in Buenos Aires. Particularly if you have a decent amount of money (i.e., I mean things aren't tight for you). Many people are nice (I wouldn't say most, personally - hasn't been my experience) and there are some good friends to be made. I love the fact that not too many people really care about what I'm doing on a regular basis, as long as I'm not doing stupid or disruptive things in their face - but that's not me, and there are plenty of people who do stupid and disruptive things with no consequence anyway. There are a lot of cultural things to do, and it is easy to find a decent place to sit and watch the world roll by while you drink a cup of coffee.
But sometimes the bad parts of living here can be a bit depressing. Adventurism is one thing (I'm a fairly adventurous individual), but sometimes the little things can grind you down over time.
You might want to talk in depth with other retirees here (if you haven't already). A good friend of mine is a retired cop from Florida. He bought an apartment here about ten years ago. He's got good retirement circumstances but he is finding the last year or two to be almost overwhelming in terms of how much life here is costing him. He married an Argentina (no kids now that her daughter has moved out) and she's the primary reason they haven't sold the apartment and moved the States - she doesn't want to live there because she would be separated from her family.
I would live here at least a year (maybe two) before you make any kind of
permanent (or semi-permanent) decision. Took me a year before the rose-colored glasses started to give way to reality. There are various things you haven't seen yet, I guarantee, that you only see once you immerse yourself for a decently long period of time.
Living in a temporary apartment where everything is taken care of (if you are reasonably lucky enough to get a good owner, not too hard, but the bad ones really are...) is one thing. Getting a long-term lease and dealing with the things you need to deal with on a sometimes daily basis can be taxing once you are in control. The floor of our kitchen is still in rubble after almost two months after the plumber fixed a simple leaking pipe that had to have a large hole in the floor smashed open to get to it. Just one example among many, for me.
Given the way construction is done here (everything embedded in concrete) you will find yourself at some point awakened (if you are a late sleeper like me) by never-ending "chunk...chunk...chunk" noises as someone in the building has to have some pipe repaired (quite common here) by breaking into the concrete with a slow, steady rhythmic hand-wielded hammer...sometimes for days on end. There will be no apartment in the building that doesn't get the noise. There is very little in the way of modern tools like a power hammer to get the job done quickly and efficiently.
To rent with a long-term lease is not so easy. You are aware of the need to backup long term leases with a property "garantia" in most cases? Renting long term is under a completely different law than renting short term and it affects things significantly. It's nowhere near as easy as going out and finding the place you want, putting down a deposit and then occupying it. Many laws here always favor poor people against business, and both labor and rental laws are pretty big examples. All of which end up giving the population "unintended consequences". In this case, the law allows people who occupy a space to stay there for years before they can be removed and a garantia is basically the way to "stop" that. If someone decides to stay in a place and not pay, without a garantia the owner has little he or she can do quickly to get the freeloader out.. With a garantia, at the very least they can start proceedings against the owner of the property that was put up as a garantia.
I'm in my fourth long-term lease and I find myself dreading the end of the contract usually (though I may have found a place I'm reasonably happy with this time) because it's either stay in something I don't like as much as I should or go through the lengthy (and somewhat embarrassing and/or expensive) effort to find someone who owns an apartment and is willing to co-sign the lease with me as a guarantor. You might find a place without a garantia being required, but it ain't easy and usually the owner that will accept such a situation will require a regular deposit, on top of a minimum of 6 moths rent in advance, if not the entire balance of the rent up front (yeah, two years' worth).
Life here does get easier the more contacts you make - and contacts can almost be a necessity for happiness here (no one is going to give you a garantia, for example, sight-unseen, unless you go the illegal route and buy one, and that is not always a guarantee of success when the title of the property used for garantia is examined). Make sure you speak the language reasonably well!
If you intend to buy property, things aren't so easy either. Don't plan on being able to sell the property if you need to, quickly. Worry about getting your money back out of the country intact.
And since I moved here in 2006, I've seen inflation go from a real 4-6% annual (I'm guessing the rate back in 2006) to somewhere around 40% now. If you have a lot of money maybe inflation doesn't hurt that much. If you don't, well, it could be a little bit of an issue. At one time the amount of money I made more than covered everything with plenty to spare and I've watched that shrink and shrink and shrink over the last few years and I'm surely better off than most Argentine here, but everything's relative. However, I do have a wife and three of her teenage sisters who live with us (who are like my daughters) and I feel inflation way more keenly than most do because of the variety of expenses I incur as a result of my family.
Getting money here is another thing many of us worry about on a continual basis - getting it from our home countries. It's great to have US Dollars and change the money at the blue rate (although the blue rate should probably be upwards of at least 14, if not higher), but after your Dollars run out, you need to be able to bring more in. That ain't easy, and at the very least is time-consuming if not expensive to boot. With the currency controls in place, getting Dollars here is often an exercise in black-market maneuvering. Maybe the currency controls will be lifted at some point after the election coming up in October (or rather, after the new president takes office), but one thing I've learned here over the last nearly 9 years is don't count on anything here.
Things may not be so difficult for a retiree - once you get your residency, get a bank account set up and get it enabled to bring in money. Maybe not the easiest process and right now you would pay through the nose as your money is brought into the country, converted to pesos at the official rate (which is horrible) and then put into your account. When I first moved here, I could get pesos out of the ATM with no problem and I got a good enough rate and paid low fees with my bank that it made sense to do so. With the inflation and spread between official rate and blue rate, anyone that pulls money out of the ATM or pays be credit card most likely has too much money
It would be similar to you if you brought in money via retirement - you'd lose some 35% or so of its value straightaway.
And since you are conservative (I'm assuming a real conservative), you'll probably be irritated by an awful lot that happens here because a good portion of the mentality here is "
feed me!" (like a Big shop of horrors, heh). If you have any humanity and spend time in any "real" parts of Buenos Aires (i.e., outside of "rich" areas like Recoleta, where admittedly I live, or outside of middle class or tourist areas) and its outwardly environs, you'll feel a sense of sadness watching all of the poor ignorant people waiting for the economic Messiah to come free them all, instead of realizing the politicians are playing to their weakness (mostly ignorance and the way they've been raised to think about the rich - and often with good reason, just no alternatives being taught) to keep themselves in power. One stupid decision after another.
But then again, I'm a full-bore AnCap Libertarian and there is no country in the world that doesn't irritate me to one extent or the other
If you find the economic policies of the US to be annoying, you will be annoyed ten-fold here. I'm in complete agreement with you that neo-Liberals are a bane of existence (but I doubt you would agree with me that conservatives are as well
though you being conservative we probably have more points in common). But here, most people in power stem from Peronism/populism, either the "left" side or the "right" side of the same Peronist coin. In my opinion, looking at Argentina is seeing the US in another 20-30 years (at least some of the aspects). Too many people in the US are constantly of the opinion that government will take care of everything and make it all "fair" - and like the use of force to make it "fair". Well, you have that here in spades. No one wants to work hard to get what they want - the magic fairy should come down and pass out money and services without the need to work your butt off for what you get. The idea of living a simple, unassuming life is a wonderful idea, but too many people seem to miss the point that we are not endowed with magical machines that do everything for us and that someone has to work to provide what others consume. Too many people here discount consumerism without letting go of the results of consumerism, even though the majority deny they have that outlook. Kind of a vicious cycle because if you don't work for what you get, someone else has to and what a burden it puts on productive people! Too many people here (and, just about everywhere I'd say) don't understand economy at all and don't understand why the government can't just print all the money everyone "needs".
Don't take what I'm saying the wrong way. I'm just writing about the reality of living here. And yet, I've been here for nearly 9 years. I must find something I like here, and you probably will too. Just make sure before you commit yourself to a permanent course that you understand what you're getting yourself into.
Truth be told, I sometimes wish we had moved to Asuncion or Encarnacion in Paraguay shortly after I married my wife about 8 years ago. When I first moved here, the Guarani was something like 2800 to 1 in relation to the peso. My wife just returned from a trip to Paraguay yesterday and she got 340 Guaranies to 1 peso to return. We could live better in Paraguay with what I make (damned near live in a palace for what I spend on rent here) and spend around half of what we spend per month.
She's Paraguayan and she comes from probably the poorest place in Paraguay, her family themselves literally dirt poor. She refused to even think about moving there 8 years ago because of the way the poor are treated there and she didn't understand at the time what it would mean to live with money there - and given the relative economy when we first moved here compared to Paraguay, that was another reason I never pushed it.
She has12 brothers and sisters and all but the three youngest are here in Buenos Aires. I told them about 4 years ago when they came looking for work, thinking of Buenos Aires as a place with streets paved in gold and silver, that they would regret their decision. It's difficult to make someone understand when they have few opportunities where they came from, that things will be nearly as bad where they are moving to, in the future. They all have jobs, but they can't keep up with inflation. Most of them are thinking about returning to Paraguay because they work their asses off 6 1/2 days a week, sometimes 12 hours a day, and can't get ahead no matter what as inflation robs them of their earnings and begins to force them to move lower and lower on the economic rung, to neighborhoods that are less than desirable.
It hasn't been until the last year or so that my wife started seeing the downside of living here and has started considering the idea of moving to Paraguay after our current lease is up in about 10 months. Two of her sisters are in high school here, but the big problem now is the older one, who is in her second year of university at UADE. She's on a career path that isn't really offered in Paraguay, certainly not at the same level as she can get here. On top of that, we've all made so many friends (amongst expats and Argentinos) that it would be difficult to think of starting over again anywhere.
I doubt most of the family issues I have will be a problem for a retiree, unless you put yourself into some economic responsibilities that probably go beyond the norm. However, my point being that ties you build here (be they personal or property, or what-have-you) can conspire to keep you here past what you would normally think of as comfortable.
Just make sure you do so with eyes wide open. And in fact, I doubt there is anywhere in the world one can go to retire that would be ideal, unless you were so flush with cash that economy wasn't a big factor.
