Moving to Panama with a Family: What We Learned Leaving Everything Behind

Simon Napoli, August 4, 2026

We ran a mechanical contracting business with eight employees working across mining sites in Western Australia. On paper, we'd made it. We were about to double in size and take on a new contract in Queensland when we stopped and asked each other a question neither of us expected to be asking: is this the life we want to raise our three kids in?

In July 2025, we left. Not in a straight line, either. The Philippines, Dubai, Italy, Croatia, Cyprus, Turkey, and finally Panama, where we settled in one of Panama’s highland towns. Twelve months later, we can say plainly: the country taught us less than the people did. Here's what changed for our family, the good parts and the harder parts, in equal measure.

Settling In: What Was Surprisingly Easy

Coming from Australia, where every basic administrative task seems designed to take a week and three phone calls, a few things in Panama caught us off guard in the best way:

• Buying a car. Straightforward, fast, none of the drawn-out back-and-forth we were used to.

•  Registering a car. Done in a fraction of the time it takes at home.

• Getting insurance. Simple, clear pricing, no endless underwriting questions.

• Opening a bank account. We expected red tape. We had a conversation, some paperwork and an account live all in two hours.

• Renting a home.  The absence of rental red tape compared to Australia was incredible. Basic rental contracts, friendly terms and agents/brokers willing to bend over backwards to help you out.

• Finding everything we need. From the basics to stock a pantry to entertainment on a weekend, Panama has it all.None of this is a small thing when you're relocating a family. The stuff we assumed would take up our first three months, barely took any time at all.

Two Systems That Surprised Us

Tax. Living here as a foreigner is remarkably tax efficient. The system feels like it was designed to support people building a life here, not to hinder them at every turn the way we'd become used to at home. We're not tax advisors, and every family's situation is different, so speak to a qualified professional about your specific circumstances before making decisions. But directionally, this was one of the biggest and most welcome surprises of the move.

Healthcare. We've had to lean on the medical system here more than we ever expected, through some genuinely unlikely situations. What we found, both public and private, was fast, professional, and caring in a way that's hard to describe until you've needed it. It was both a worrying and a humbling experience: worrying because of what brought us there in the first place, humbling because of how well we were looked after by people who owed us nothing.

What Takes Longer and Why We Stopped Minding

The flip side is real, and we'd rather families hear it from us honestly than discover it themselves and feel blindsided:

• Road conditions

• Traffic management

• Footpaths

• Waste disposal systems

• Reliable power

This isn't a complaint; Panama's infrastructure is still developing in a lot of areas, and that's simply the trade-off. What surprised us most wasn't that these things exist; it was realizing how much we'd taken the opposite for granted back in Australia. Smooth roads, footpaths that just work, power that never blinks: we didn't notice any of it until it wasn't guaranteed anymore. In some areas where we lived, we experienced power and water outages lasting several hours and, in a few cases, a couple of days. It is also worth noting the off-grid power solution used by Veritas Villages. After experiencing extended outages in other areas, we have a new appreciation for the reliability and independence that a well-designed off-grid system can provide.

Families considering the move should expect this, plan around it, and understand it's not personal. It's a country still building itself.

The Real Discovery Was the Community We Found

Here's the part we didn't see coming, and honestly, the part that matters most.

Relocating to the Panama highlands placed us inside an expat community we didn't know we needed until we found it. Like-minded people. Like-minded families. Families with kids the same and similar ages to our own three. We found people navigating the exact same transition we were, and somehow, that made every hard day easier.

We didn't have a support network like this even back in Australia. That's worth sitting with for a second: we had to leave the country to find the kind of community most people spend a lifetime looking for at home.

We believe every expat experiences some version of this same story, just in slightly different ways. Relocating strips away the assumption that support must come from people who've known you for years. Here, when something comes up, people show up. Perfect strangers, for the most part, who become the reason the whole experience works. There's something we can't fully explain about trusting that the right people keep appearing exactly when you need them, especially on the days you didn't think you needed anyone at all.

What to Consider When Moving to Panama with a Family

If you're weighing a move to Panama with your own family, our honest advice is this: don't choose a location for the scenery alone, and don't assume the administrative stuff will be the hard part. It might genuinely be the easy part.

What will make or break the experience is whether you land somewhere with a real community already built, especially one with other families and kids in a similar stage of life to yours. That single factor did more for our transition than any visa process, bank account, or car registration combined.

We left Australia because we were running toward something: more time, more presence, more life as a family. Twelve months on, we'd make the same call again, infrastructure quirks and all. 

Tammi and Simon Napoli are an Australian family of five who left a mechanical contracting business in Western Australia to build a location-independent life across the Philippines, Dubai, Italy, Croatia, Cyprus, and Turkey before settling in the highlands of Panama. They write about income, family, adventure, and freedom at Pathway Unlocked.