PhilFAQS

I started a little tradition here and then fell down badly, I think in trying to uphold it.  Best way to fix it is to get back on track I think.  Every Thursday I will try to answer questions sent in by readers.  If you have a question you haven’t found the answer for, just click on the Contac page here or up on the top menu bar and I’ll do my best to find an answer.  I appreciate all questions that you send, and if I don’t get to yours in a reasonable time, give me a little ‘pulse’, sometimes things get lost in my in basket, for sure.

Today I will look at several questions I received recently, on somewhat different subjects, but all directly related to living here in the Philippines:

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Deferring Federal Retirement and Moving to the Philippines Now

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Well as a retired federal employee (CSRS) and also retired military I have some thoughts on this for sure.  remember I have no expertise in retirement planning, investment advice or legal issues, this is just one federal retiree’s opinion, so please take it with a grain of salt.

If I have seen one consistent mistake federal employees make over the years it is to wait too long.  The US has become such a nation of worriers and seniors paralyzed by the thought that they might live longer than their money that it gets depressing at times.  We are all dead.  We just don’t know the date.  I am saddened almost every day by friends I had in previous jobs who clung to work as if it was life.  Some never even got to retire.  others retired and had an all to brief experience.  I would say, go the minute it makes sense to you and your situation.

In the particular case this reader is talking about, Federal retirement systems have a provision that allows employees to leave earlier than their normal first date of full retirement benefits and defer their retirement annuity until the reach the magic age and years of service numbers.  The down side is, you won’t benefit from raises and gains in your retirement funding that may happen between your deferment date and your ‘real’ retirement date.  The plus side is, you actually get to live the years you have left doing something which pleases you.

I waited at least three years longer than I needed to myself, and while I of course got paid well for those years (they were not my high three by the way, so I didn’t really increase my annuity as much as I might have), I also will never get those three years of time essentially wasted back, no matter how long I live.

For our US military retirees 9and there are quite a few here in the Philippines), an advantage of living here is, unlike trying to continue living in the US and having to find another job at 40 or so,. you can almost certainly live here in comfort on your military pension … something to think about when you are weighing choices.

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Do you know Americans of color living there, if so your take on the Phil’s treatment of them?

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I have no American friends of color here in the Philippines at the moment.  I have a Turkish buddy on my street who is married to a Filipina who works in Taiwan … he lives here with their children, partially because he feels the Filipinos are more accepting of different races/color.   He could also live with here in Taiwan, but he doesn’t like it there.  How much of that might be racial and how much is just personal preference, I can’t say.

You likely know that ‘white’ is a dominant ‘good thing’ in many countries.  Here in the Phils you can’t watch TV for 15 minutes without seeing a commercial for ‘whitening’ this or that.  Yet when I lived in Japan, even high school girls with almost transparent perfect pale skin would line up to ruin their skin with expensive tanning treatments.  (and most came out a kind of sickly yellow, not at all like a Caucasian with a tan).  So all over the world people seem to try to be what they aren’t.

But the Filipinos (who vary greatly from very pale ‘mestizos’ to very dark ‘Negritos’ are hard to figure for a white guy.  You might like the two-parter my wife wrote on this: http://www.mitams.com/honey-youre-white-part-1/

Many Filipinos from the president on down are fanatical Barak Obama worshipers.  But how much of that is because he’s partially of African heritage and how much is because he spent part of his life in Asia and how much is because he is not a Muslim-hater or how much is because after 63 years of injustice he finally signed a bill that gave non-US military allied soldiers and guerilla fighters from WWII a cash bonus,  is impossible, for a white guy to tell. 

In general, again only a personal observation, the Filipinos are much less politically correct, but much less openly discriminatory. Example, close to home.  My sister-in-law married a Sudanese man when she was working in Doha.   A very dark Sudanese.  They had two beautiful little boys who now live with their mom here in the Philippines.  They are both way darker in skin tone than anyone in the family and have definite African features.  Momma and daddy are far from overjoyed that she married a black man.  But he has visited here and they treated him with respect, if not real warmth.  And no one could love those little boys more.  In the US, in today’s world, many (whites, especially) would act like they didn’t even know these boys had African ancestry.  In the Philippines people will come right out as soon as they see them and say, Oh, their father is Negro"?  One of my other sisters-in-law visited a local store and the lady who runs the store said, "Oh, don’t I know you?  You are the sister of the one with the African husband, aren’t you."?   Bit those same people who openly mention the boy’s mixed race in a way you might never hear in the US appear to love the little fellows to death.

So is this blatant discrimination, is this an innocent difference in cultural norms, or is this a sign of hidden discrimination that will affect these boys negatively as they grow up?  As a white guy, I can’t be certain.

I can say this for certain.  If you come to live here, you will always be the "negro" or the "Black guy" on your street, just as my Turk buddy will forever be "the Turk" and I will always be the "kano".  But when I lived in Thailand it was always like this also.  I have an African-American buddy, USAF retired NCO, who has lived in England nearly 30 years now.  he has always been ‘"the black chap" to people in his town and likely will be until the day he dies.  I can’t judge.

There are many people in Thailand and in the Philippines who have a bit of a hard on for foreigners in general, their skin tone doesn’t matter.  I don’t find it a problem, some Americans get really upset about it.  In general, a foreigner is a ‘prized acquaintance’ in the Philippines … no matter the skin color, so the anti-foreigner aspect doesn’t trouble me a lot.  It’s mostly jealousy because we Americans are ’so rich’, etc.  In Japan, anti-foreigner feelings often run deeper, but I still loved it there.  My deputy in that job was a black American who had lived in Japan 27 years.  He told me that being a black man in Japan had certain advantages in business and social settings, in his words, "As long as you realize they are only hanging out with you so they can show you off like a lawn jockey".

I had a good friend in the AF a few years back who was black and he had done several tours in the KSA.  He told me he felt Arab anti-black discrimination was much more pervasive than in the US, which made him laugh because he commented on how many Saudis were much darker than he was.  Go figure.

That’s about the depth of my knowledge.  So much as a white man can envision being a black man, I would much rather be here in the Philippines than in the USA, but there is no way to test the validity of my feelings.  Again, come give it  a try, there’s no need to make any irrevocable decisions.

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So, what’s your question?  Leave me a message here, call me on 719-966-4295 or text me on 0919-231-5625. More Q&A next week

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