There are a few clusters of cheap destinations around the world where you can travel overland from country to country on a low budget for weeks, months, or a year. For Americans, starting in Mexico and going down to Panama is a pretty reliable way to travel well without spending a fortune—especially since the initial flight won’t set you back too much.

There are major variations of course, which is why Nicaragua is a screaming bargain, Mexico is an “honorable mention” in my book, and Costa Rica isn’t in there at all. Even that last one and Belize will cost you less than home if you pick the where and how carefully, however, so all in all it’s a good block for long-term travel.

A month ago I updated my old article for Transitions Abroad on Budget Travel in Mexico and Central America. It’s an article, not a book, so it’s just going to give you a quick overview. It does give you a quick overview for the region though on sleeping, transportation, and eating/drinking. Plus there are ample links at the end to resources to find out more.

I like Mexico so much I have two houses there. (Though I’d like to bring that down to one. Beach house for sale – $68,500.) It’s no bargain if you go to Los Cabos or the Riviera Maya, but in the interior and many off-the-radar beaches, it’s a whole different story. In Nicaragua, Honduras, and Guatemala, it’s a bargain throughout.

So do a little planning, but follow the article to decide if it sounds like a region where the price is right.

Can you round up $68,500 in ready or borrowed cash? If so you can be the owner of a furnished beach house in Mexico and can cut your monthly living expenses in half. Or just have a cheap place to be a snowbird or go on vacation.

About a year and a half ago I announced on this blog that my Yucatan beach house in Mexico was for sale. Well, it still is.

We took it off the market a while during the rainy season and while it’s being rented a lot right now in high season, it’s still waiting for a buyer.

We own this place free and clear, so it’s not like there’s a mortgage gnawing at us, but we bought another house in Guanajuato, in the central highlands. We’re moving into that one come August for two years. We’d like to have the cash from house 1 to get debt free and flush so we’ve got plenty to put into beautifying house 2.

As you may have heard on the news, the housing market in the U.S. is in recovery mode now, to the point where there are bidding wars again in some cities because of a lack of inventory. While some savvy investors no doubt bought houses for $68,500 or even less the past few years because of bank foreclosures, they weren’t getting property one house back from a beach and those homes weren’t usually nice enough to be move-in ready. This one is both.

You can follow the link at the bottom for more details, but this is a well-maintained 2BR, 1 bath house with a nice covered outside terrace and plenty of room to build up or put in a pool. It’s a 30-second walk to the water and three blocks to the town square. There are already local caretakers in place we’ve worked with for years. It comes with beds that sleep four and all the other furniture there now, plus a fridge, dishes, and a bottle of 100% agave tequila we’ll supply upon closing.

This beach house is 40 minutes from the international airport in Merida, a city of a million, or less than four hours by rental car from Cancun.

If you’re wondering about home prices in Mexico in other non-tourist places, we paid a shade less than $90,000 for the Guanajuato house. It has four bedrooms, two baths, with a big sun room on the top floor that has terrific views. But right now it’s got a kitchen that we hate and no furniture…

So buy this bargain Yucatan beach house for $68,500 bringing just a toothbrush and a bathing suit. Then come stay with us later in the revamped city one. Full details here: cheap furnished Mexican beach house.

I’ve spent a lot of time in multiple states in Mexico, lived there for a year, and have a house in Guanajuato I’ll return to for two years as of next summer. Here are the two books I’d recommend the strongest for anyone interested in lowering their expenses and dialing back the stress level by moving south. Both are new editions released this year.

Living Abroad in Mexico

This is a great nuts-and-bolts guide to what you need to know about moving to Mexico. It’s heavy on the kind of practical information any future expat is clamoring for: visas, housing, health care, shipping, telecom, transportation, and language. It’s written by Julie Doherty Meade, an American who spent nearly a decade living in Mexico and traveling around the country (she’s now in NYC).

Even though I lived in Mexico and own real estate there, I learned some things from this book I didn’t know for the next time around. It’s a thorough guide that does what any good moving abroad book should: answer the questions you do have and then answer the ones you hadn’t even thought of yet.

There’s a good array of history and cultural information that will help you understand how the country works, which is essential with a neighbor that’s so close, yet so different. Some will probably complain that the section on where to live leaves out a lot of great areas for expats, but look at a map of Mexico and you’ll understand why. This is a big country with 30-some states, not a small dot like Costa Rica or Belize. So naturally the million or so expatriates have spread out far and wide. She highlights where the majority of them are concentrated. Go there for more people like you, go elsewhere for fewer of them.

After all the info presented, there’s a good resources section at the end for more. This book comes in at 488 pages, including some photos, and it’s a great reference for both dreamers and doers. I’ll be pulling it out a few times before I move back and will definitely bring it down across the border for my Mexican home. Follow these links to buy it from Amazon U.S., Amazon Canada, or Amazon UK.

People’s Guide to Mexico

The first book listed here is objective, efficient, and to the point. The People’s Guide to Mexico, however, is none of that—and is far more fun to read as a result. I’ve said before that this is my favorite guidebook of all time and this new edition has only reinforced that view. This is a book so filled with a love for Mexico in all its quirks and annoyances that every page sparkles with enjoyable prose. It’s the only guidebook I can think of where I’ve read 50 pages in a stretch because I was enjoying it so much, not because I had any questions I needed answering or had nothing else to read on a bus.

The authors, who have lived and traveled in Mexico since the 1970s, don’t just give you dry facts about the 2nd-class bus system. They give you nuggets like this:

The only time I’ve driven a fast car in Mexico, I was passed by a second-class bus traveling at over 80 miles per hour. This wasn’t unusual, nor were the three young men on the rear bumper. The one reading a comic book, however, without holding on, seemed abnormally blasé.

You get opinionated, experience-filled lines like that over and over on pulque bars, roadside cantinas, haggling in vegetable markets, and finding a house to rent.

Carl Franz and Lorena Hayens put the first one of these out 35 years ago and if they had stopped along the way, we’d say, “They don’t write them like that anymore.” Thankfully we don’t have to because they didn’t stop. This is the 14th edition, with 768 pages of hard-learned lessons and the kind of insight you only get from someone who can speak fluent Spanish in a way that includes all the idioms and street slang unique to Mexico.

If you have any interest at all in spending real time in Mexico, living there or just getting away from the sheltering resort areas, spend some quality time with this gem of a book. Read it through and you’ll know more about the country than half the people in Ajijic. Get it at Amazon, Amazon Canada, or Amazon UK.

The cover story in the current issue of Travelworld is from yours truly, a piece on the reasons to get away from the beaches and visit the middle of Mexico instead. This is the old part, the colonial part, the area with the most interesting architecture. And for most of the spots profiled, these are great value destinations as well.

In the article, which is accompanied by some nice photos I took while living there for a year, are the spots you should head to if you have some time to move around. These are the real gems of the region: Zacatecas, Morelia, Patzcuaro, San Miguel de Allende, and Guanajuato (where I lived for a year and will return to next year.)

Even in San Miguel, which has some 10,000 foreigners living there, you’ll see as many or more domestic tourists as foreign ones. That means prices that the locals can bear, not prices meant for celebs and dot-com millionaires like you find in Los Cabos.

Read the article for the rest of the story. It’s on the Issu platform, which means you can read it like a regular magazine, flipping the pages and seeing large photos. Or you can just check out the HTML version here.

Hasta pronto!

Time to check in with the travel news and blogosphere to bring home some timely news and tips for travelers on a budget.

I’m quoted in this article from Kiplinger Personal Finance: Your guide to bargain travel in 2012. (If you prefer, here’s just the airfare part of it at the Chicago Tribune instead.)

If you’re irked by resort fees tacked onto the room rate at hotels, here’s a piece on who has resort fees and who doesn’t in Las Vegas.

About.com’s Budget Travel site has a nice 10-part post on Travel Myths for Latin America.

And it’s always good for me to post another myth-busting article about crime in Mexico. As in you’re ten times more likely to be murdered in a drug-related crime in our nation’s capital than you are in Mexico City. The Yucatan is safer than Canada. And let’s not even bring up New Orleans…

Will Panama become a hot travel destination? The New York Times thinks so. I’m not so sure. I like Panama a lot, but their tourism promotion efforts are stuck in the past (“The interwhat?”) and they have a habit of spending their money on silly ad slogans. But the pieces are all there if they can get the word out.

How much does it cost to travel in Thailand? As Nomadic Matt found out when his vacationing friends joined up with him, that depends a whole lot on whether you’re a long-term traveler or you’re on vacation. When time is short, double your budget.

Want to take a trip to New York City on the cheap? How about free? No, it’s not a contest. Just pull up this Earthcam website and you can see the Statue of Liberty from its “torchcam” or see the lower Manhattan skyline from the island with the “harbor cam.”