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.

In the Old Quarter of Hanoi

So much information spins past us every day that it’s hard to take a break and process it, much less record it for later. So here are a few travel articles I wrote or I’m in that have appeared recently. Lots more to come as the year goes on, but I’ll continue to try to keep the broadcasting to a minimum.

Some of my recent travel writing

The Viator Blog published a piece I wrote on the Buda side of Budapest.

Global Traveler magazine published an article on my time in Hanoi this past summer with my family – Hanoi: Up to Speed

I also had one in there on Mexico City at Night and did a short web piece on the new Microsoft Windows tablets.

Over at Practical Travel Gear, where I’m editor, we all rounded up our picks for the best travel gear of the year in 2012.

Some shout-outs from others on The World’s Cheapest Destinations

Kara from The Vacation Gals was the first to put up a review of the new edition.

EuroCheapo asked me 4 Cheapo Travel Questions

This time last month I did an interview with Gadling on cheap travel destinations.

I had fun participating in this Round-the-world chat with Adam and Sean from BootnAll via Google+ and Twitter.

You can always keep up with me via the RSS feed here or by following me on Twitter – @TimLeffel.

This Christmas and New Year’s Day I’m home with my immediate family, no traveling, just a normal holiday time. For us, “normal” this year is lighting a menorah one week and then putting up a Christmas tree the next. Then going to a restaurant overlooking Clearwater Beach for brunch on Christmas day. But compared to some past years…

The photo below was two Decembers ago, when we lived in Mexico. My daughter introduced her Mexican friends to our tradition of baking cookies. (We had an oven, which is kind of a novelty there.)

In Mexico the big holiday is Three Kings Day, the 12th day of Christmas. First we went to the local mall, where the kings paraded through on people in camel suits—that’s a photo from it at the top. Then that night we went to a real parade through downtown, with floats and bands and people throwing candy.

The Three Kings were the rock stars of the show. My favorites were the local beauty queens dressed up like Angels, though the ones dressed up like some Arabian Nights harem fantasy were fun too.

At night, our daughter was told to leave her shoes outside the door and the kings would put presents in them. She left some snacks in a bowl, with a note in Spanish to the kings. In the morning, score!

When my wife and I lived in South Korea teaching English, Christmas was a whirl of neon lights, electronic Santa gadgets, and cheesy music. All the commercialism, without much of that pesky religious part.

Mostly I remember hanging out with the other teachers we knew in Seoul and partying. In other words, it was just another typical day off, but with better food. One teacher was ex-military and had bought a turkey from the U.S. army base store. We drank wine instead of our usual crappy Korean beer.

I did get to dress up as Santa for the Wonderland school performance with my youngest class. (Yes, the school where we taught was called Wonderland.) I’m not exactly round, so that was the first and last time for that.

The place we taught English the first time was Istanbul, Turkey. Christmas there was…non-existent. I don’t have one photo from there that has anything to do with that holiday—only New Year’s Eve.

We went to a buffet brunch at the local Holiday Inn Crowne Plaza because it was the only place in our neighborhood with any hint of the holidays in place. We dined on food from home near what was probably the only Christmas tree in a 10-mile radius. Then we did what most expats seem to do over the holidays when living abroad: meet up with each other somewhere to drink. In our suburb of Istanbul, however, that meant beers with some Turkish friends in the mix too, at the Yesel Ev bar—-Green House.

If was a different story for their big holiday: Ramadan. That involved being woken up each morning by a guy beating a drum in the streets, eating meals hidden from the public view during daylight hours so we wouldn’t offend anyone, and eating lots of candy at the end.

What are your holiday memories in foreign places around the world?

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!