I'm FI, but not RE now, although I was. The short version--I retired from the military with a pretty generous pension and benefits. After about 4-5 months of FIRE, I took my first post military job in the civil service in the Washington DC area at which point I came across MMM, Nords and some other from the FIRE community. I basically worked for about a year, didn't like the commute, grind and where I was heading in life, so we sold our house and moved in with my parents in Northern Michigan where I'm from while I spent the next 2.5 years building my own house while working part time for a small non-profit. My wife freelanced to help fund our house building and we were happy and enjoying ourselves, but, we had lived overseas once and had always talked about going back. I thought about doing a school program using GI Bill or just taking a year and renewing tourist visas, but last October, my wife found a job in southwest France that she thought I would like and would be a good fit for. I applied for it, got the offer in December and started about 2 months ago. We're all American and I speak French, but my wife and kids don't so its a little challenging, but my kids went to the last couple weeks of French school and really loved it. We live in the Charente and so far, quality of life has been terrific. Cost of living is very reasonable, schools are good and people are friendly. School tuitions depends on income taxes and my kids go to private Catholic school for about 450 euro/year. I think the highest is 750 euro/year. Tutoring for French is about 10 euro/hour. School doesn't require proof of immigration status or anything like that, so if you were working or studying here, you would have a long term visa otherwise, you would be doing visa runs every 3 months to keep them current.
the experience has been very positive overall. We grab a baguette, cheese, and a bottle of wine and head to the park for the afternoon and no one cares about open container or anything like that. We live right on the Charente with a long running/walking/biking trail, several restaurants, shops and Cognac houses next to where we live. We sold our SUV back in the US and bought a VW Touran van which gets about 60 mpg in diesel, but my wife can walk the kids to school and I can bike to work so we don't have to drive that much. As of now, we're planning on staying 2-3 years so my son can doing his 6th grade year and my daughter her 3rd grade year back in the US. If the kids want to stay longer, I can stay up to five years but I want to keep them current on their US studies so we'll revaluate later. My job is super easy and I'm just stashing away my retirement pay, maxing out my 401K and IRAs while we enjoy Europe