The Retirement Arbitrageurs

These are your most sympathetic expats. They did everything right — worked for decades, saved diligently, then did the math and realized their $2,000-a-month retirement income would barely cover life in a depressing studio apartment in their home country.

You'll recognize them by their enthusiastic comparison shopping ("Do you know what dinner out costs here compared to Florida?!"), their ecstatic posts about their latest visit to the local public hospital ("My total bill was only $20!!!"), and their genuine, infectious joy at having cracked the system.

They are, by and large, lovely people — and the backbone of most of the expat Facebook groups. They hang out at the local expat bars and host gatherings with their fellow escapees.

But, they can usually benefit from studying Spanish more, are known to complain when Panama and Panamanians don't function like they're used to back home, and are by-and-large old.

The Adventure Seekers

They arrived with a backpack, a loose five-year plan, and the unshakeable belief that life is meant to be lived. Maybe they are young and idealistic, or a jaded divorcé, or a recovering workaholic, or a victim of a particularly bad winter in their home country. Or, maybe they just woke up one day and thought: What exactly am I waiting for???

These are genuinely inspiring people — curious, adaptable, and fun at parties. They'll surf or hike with you on a Tuesday. They'll find the best hidden treasures.

The caveat is that "adventure" may have a half-life, and at some point the adventure either becomes unaffordable or more challenging than they could sustain. Some figure it out and thrive…some move on to look for the elusive concept of Paradise in the next country…some go home with their tail between their legs or a newfound appreciation for what they left behind.

The Digital Nomads

Technically not expats in the traditional sense, but they're everywhere with their laptops open. They work remotely, often in the tech or creative fields, and have optimized their lives down to a backpack and MacBook Pro.

They are brilliant at finding co-working spaces and not always good at committing to anything. You will have excellent conversations with them for a few months, then they'll vanish because their visa expired. It's a lifestyle!

The Political Refugees

Every political cycle, a fresh wave of people arrive absolutely convinced that their home country has become uninhabitable and Panamá will be different.

Depending on the election, they might be arriving from the left or the right — which leads to the delightful situation of ideological arch-enemies ending up at the same expat happy hour, united only by their shared decision to leave and their willingness to loudly explain why.

The honest truth is that many of them haven't actually left their politics behind — they've just relocated them. They still spend three hours a day doom-scrolling news from back home. They're not really living abroad; they're living in opposition from abroad.

The Idealistic Parents

This category is underappreciated and underrepresented in the expat conversation. These are the couples with kids who looked at school systems, screen culture, school shootings, cost of living, and the general ambient anxiety of modern Western life and said: Not for my kids!

They tend to be idealistic, thoughtful and research-driven. They're not running from something so much as running toward something — a slower pace, more time outdoors, a more idyllic childhood for their babies.

But like parents everywhere, their world revolves around their kids — and with the added complexity of navigating homeschooling or a foreign school system, and a unique activity landscape, "a bit harried" tends to be their default setting.

The Square Pegs

Here's a category nobody puts in the brochure but everyone quietly recognizes. Some people — through some combination of personality, temperament, or neurology — just don't fit very well in their home culture. The particular flavor of social conformity expected back home doesn't suit them. The pace is wrong. The values feel alien. The small talk is excruciating.

Abroad, something loosens. The rules are different, or at least confusing so being a foreigner gives you a kind of social permission to be a little odd. Nobody expects you to know the local norms perfectly, which takes enormous pressure off people who never quite mastered the norms back home either.

This can be genuinely beautiful — people coming alive in a context that finally fits them. It can also shade into something more complicated, because occasionally the thing that made someone a poor fit at home isn't cultural mismatch. It's something they've brought with them. And that, as they say, is still in the bag when you land.

The Richard Werstines

Believe it or not, there are some who come here to hide. I mean officially hide.

Werstine, it turned out, had been using multiple fake identities over the years without anyone catching on. He eventually entered Panama illegally in 2005 and never bothered to obtain legal status. He was — and this detail is almost poetic — arrested at a dog park.

Thirty-one years. A fake identity. A Panama City dog park. There's almost a Guy Ritchie film in there.

The uncomfortable reality is that "no extradition treaty" and "cash economy" are, for a small subset of people, not incidental features of a destination — they are the point. Most expat communities don't harbour actual fugitives, but they do occasionally attract people whose relationship with their past is…well, complicated.

The good news, as the U.S. Marshal for the Eastern District of Michigan put it, is that there's no place you can hide that the Marshals Service won't eventually find you. Just perhaps not before you've had 30 years of Caribbean sunsets.

The Bonus Categories

The Career Transplants. A multinational posted them or they hunted down an opportunity that simply didn't exist back home — including a salary that goes much further when rent is a fraction of what it was in London or New York. They arrive with a contract and a relocation allowance, and tend to cluster in their own comfortable orbit: company housing, international schools, colleagues who rotate in and out on similar cycles.

The Romantic Refugees. Followed a partner abroad, the relationship ended, and now they're still here three years later because they realised they actually like it better than wherever they came from. Some of the happiest expats I know belong to this accidental category.

The Tax Optimisers. They'll tell you it's about "lifestyle" and "culture." It is not entirely about lifestyle and culture. To their credit, they've usually done the research, understand the financial and legal landscape better than anyone in the room, and — once you get a drink into them — will happily explain exactly how many dollars they're keeping out of the government's hands each year.

I launched my Panamá expat experience completely unprepared for how much the social landscape would shape my overall experience — not just as a nice-to-have, but as something foundational and very necessary.

You might want to know…the drinking culture was real and pervasive. Not for everyone, and not everywhere, but enough that if you're not someone who finds their best self at a bar, the options narrow quickly. (Drugs too, more than I expected.) This is not a moral judgment — people find their people however they find them — but when the default social infrastructure runs on alcohol, it's a lonely place to be if that's not your thing.

What caught me off guard more than anything, though, was the never-ending small talk. Where are you from, how long have you been here, what do you do, have you tried that new restaurant? On a loop, indefinitely.