Shopping for an Island - Hint: Not at Target

Anthony Blair, March 2026

Photo by Maria Stewart on Unsplash

with the sorta background goal of owning an island, for 10 years we’d been planning a vacation every year or so, to a remote tropical country with islands. we’d make some effort on the vacation to assess the liveability, contact a realtor and look into prices and what was feasible. we checked out Fiji, the Federated States of Micronesia, Grenada, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, and a few others. Mostly, it was a good excuse to hang out on tropical beaches, drinking pina coladas.

beaches in fiji, indonesia & micronesia

then, we had a pretty challenging year in 2020. aside from covid (which, oddly, was mostly a boon for us), we faced down some pretty hard bits

sitting on a beach in Maui in 2021, recovering and getting our bodies & spirits back in order, we got to talking about next steps, where we saw ourselves living, next steps we wanted to take. i was waving my hands, well, we gotta hold out for an island.. ; and Allie, with a little hairy eye, “You know, it’s time to shit or get off the pot on the island thing. If you’re really serious, get off your ass and do something about it.”

recovering on Maui, July 2021, with my sisters & mom (from left, Jenn, Diane, me, Heather)

and what does any red-blooded Guilliom do in a crisis? build a spreadsheet!

at the time, it took a full-time week or so to put together a list of all the coastal countries within 20 degrees of the equator, figure out what our key dimensions were for evaluation, and then populate the list of countries with how they measured on each dimension. today, with ChatGPT or whatever, you could probably get it all together in a couple hours.

the key dimensions were the core thing to figure out. no country’s gonna be great in everything, especially if you don’t have an infinite budget.

these are the dimensions we included:

primary language

% english speaking

population density

Photo by Rob Curran on Unsplash

cost of living

average income

tourism density

annual rainfall (water catchment)

Photo by Alex Dukhanov on Unsplash

# of islands

stability of government

quality of healthcare

natural disasters: earthquakes, hurricanes/cyclones, tsunamis

flight hours to US east coast

time zone +\- US east coast

crime rates

coastal real estate value

island ownership laws

Photo by Tierra Mallorca on Unsplash

visa/residency accessibility

i gathered all this information, then we sorted each dimension by which was most important, then scored each country on the most important dimensions.

after we racked and stacked, our number one choice was a very clear lead – Belize.

Belize is weak on health care, and not great on crime (although safer than Detroit, where we lived previously). but in terms of affordability and availability of islands, it’s a very strong lead. it’s very feasible for a US citizen to get residency, land can actually be purchased (most south pacific countries allow only long-term leases), it’s close enough for easy & cheap flights to the US for our family & friends, and the time zone makes working remotely simple (as opposed to when we lived in Tokyo, which was very difficult). the primary language is English, which can’t be understated for a project of this magnitude, and we’ve confirmed living here that the cost of living is about half what it was in Detroit (and we appreciate that Detroit is already pretty low for the US). it’s the least densely populated central american country (400K in a country the size of Massachusetts), and while there is tourism, it’s pretty heavily concentrated in the north part of the country, around Caye Ambergris and Caulker. and there are no public large cruise ship accessible ports in the country.

our current plan for health care is to maintain an address in the US, and our health insurance, and return annually for checkups, or in the event of a crisis. to be clear, we haven’t yet had a significant health crisis. so far, the advice from expats here has been to make sure your US insurance has an evacuation policy, in the event of a significant crisis (they indicated most do, ours appears to).

INDEX (500) days of paradise