Living Abroad Is Not All Sunshine And Rainbows, Shocker I Know

What do you do when things do not go your way? I write.

Sara Burdick
4 min readApr 26, 2022
Photo by Alexander Dummer on Unsplash

Living abroad is not all roses and rainbows. If you are like me, you are not a permanent resident of the country where I live, Colombia.

I am here on a student visa, which means the US is still my permanent residence. With that said, all of my dealings with financials and phone numbers are all in the US. I am still heavily in the system, no matter how hard I work to get out of it.

A month ago, I had a virus on my chrome browser, so I had to reinstall chrome; well, this led to none of my banks recognizing my computer.
A few I could just reset with an email. I needed a phone number for a few others, but I do not have a US number here in Colombia.

My phone broke back in September, and I never got a new one, and they don’t ship to Colombia anyway. I paused my account. No big deal, right?

When I restarted my chrome, a few banks wanted to send me a text! It was frustrating, so I sent a google phone to my sister so she could help. I hate asking her to do it, but I was desperate.

My accounts are all locked, and luckily my sister is excellent (no, she does not read this); she is. They both are. So I only…

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Sara Burdick

I quit the rat race after working as a nurse for 16 years. Travel and Storyteller. I live in Colombia. https://linktr.ee/saraaliceburdick