Why I Like Living Abroad in Mexico

Since I first started traveling a few decades ago, I’ve had the great experience of living abroad in three different countries. I enjoyed the first two experiences, but they weren’t made to last. I really enjoy living abroad in Mexico though, even though a whole lot of people don’t get it. 

When I lived in these different places, the people, the food, the sounds, and the smells changed a lot. The questions I got from the people I knew back home did not. Especially the most common one:

So…why did you decide to move there?

It has become so predictable that I could just make a recording on my phone to play back when people ask. The question is always the same, though the motivation for asking often isn’t. Some struggle to ask this simple question as a substitute for what’s really on their mind.

Occasionally these days it’s just a well-traveled person just asking what made Guanajuato speak to me—why that particular place out of so many to choose from? They’re not curious about the move away from my own country of birth, but just wondering how I picked the new resting place. If they’re nomadic types, they’re always looking for new places that come recommended. 

More often, however, it’s a baffled person from the country of my birth trying to express the shouting going on in their head without seeming rude. Why would you leave the USA (or Canada) and move to a less developed country on purpose? Why would you take your kid with you? Why would you downgrade to a less “civilized” place? Is there some problem you’re running away from?

I patiently go through the script about how inexpensively we live, the lower stress levels, the ability to spend more time with friends and family, the ability to just go out and enjoy life more, the fact that we don’t need a car here in a city where most streets are pedestrian-only.

My daughter became bilingual, giving her a huge step up in life. I can now at least cope in a second language. We live in a city where some of the buildings are older than Jamestown or Boston. 

Those are just the easy answers. I could get more descriptive or poetic if they really cared.

But they don’t.

It’s a fruitless exercise that’s really just a form of polite small talk and I know won’t sway their opinion or stop the voices shouting in their head. Their eyes have already glazed over by sentence two, like they are saying, “Does…not…compute.”

Moving somewhere in another country when you’re not even retired, without any job or family reason requiring you to go there, is just, well, insane! Even if the weather is close to perfect all year and this is the view when I look out my window sometimes after an occasional rain:

In Mexico I live healthier, wealthier, and happier, in a less stressful place where life is not so competitive. In a place where people work to live, not the other way around. But I don’t expect everyone to believe me. They’ve been brainwashed too hard to see a different reality than what they know. 

Someone told them that they’re in the greatest country in the world and they believed it, without even needing to go anywhere else to see. Some even believe that they’re living under a normal health care system. Like the North Koreans who are told by state media that everyone is as poor as they are, many Americans believe that the horrible medical bureaucracy and for-profit system they struggle with is common around the world, not an outlier. 

Living Abroad is Not for Everyone

It’s okay if the people in the land of my birth think I’m crazy though. I understand. They don’t really know any better. 

There may be a few million of us Americans and Canadians living abroad, more if you count all the digital nomads, but that’s a tiny fraction of the total population. When we settle down somewhere that most people can’t even find on a map, we run into dozens, hundreds, maybe thousands of others just like us. We see expat families raising children that turn out just fine. People like me have the same job they had in the USA, just plugging the laptop into a different outlet.

So it starts to feel normal to us. But reality is that we’re a small minority. We may add up to the population of Connecticut, but the population of that state is smaller than the number of yee-haws just in Houston. For now anyway, we’re still a fringe movement. 

I’m quite okay with being on the fringe though. I work for myself and take time off whenever I want. Unless my family is calling, I never have an urgent need to consult my smartphone. I’ve got no boss to answer to and no time clock to punch. I’m Antifragile.

Let those who are playing by someone else’s rules stress out over their bad boss, infrequent vacations, commutes in traffic, and office politics. I don’t have to deal with any of those things, so I get more sleep and am healthier than I was in the states—mentally and physically.

Plus I just like living abroad in a place that surprises me, where I can see something like this every year at the beginning of November.

Moving Abroad is Not All or Nothing

The thing about moving to a different place is, it’s not permanent. This is not a big ugly tattoo that you’re stuck with for life.

I lived in Turkey for six months. I lived in South Korea for 14 months. I’ve lived in Mexico multiple times now and it’s my permanent base, but this is the third time I’ve moved here. Sometimes we’ll spend a month in Asia or two months in Europe. 

I had a daughter in school for some of the bouncing back and forth years, which complicated things, so we we were alternating countries. It’s always been great for our finances when we were out of the USA and quite painful when we returned. I always regretted returning to the land of consumerism and 24-hour noise dressed up as news. I hated paying several dollars each for tacos that weren’t all that good. 

But it made sense for our daughter’s education, especially the last three years of high school, so we sucked it up and moved back to Tampa twice. On the plus side, I was near some beaches and at least I got to drink a lot of great Tampa Bay craft beer.

Now my daughter is a good bit older than she was in this photo and she’s off on her own. My wife and I said, “See ya!” as soon as she left for college and moved back to Guanajuato in late 2018. We’ve traveled a lot, but this is where most of our belongings are now.

There are a lot of expatriates in Mexico, somewhere between one and two million. It’s hard to count though since many are not here all year. You get close to six months on a tourist visa, so a lot of Americans and Canadians who live in cold places are following the birds and monarch butterflies. They come here when it’s freezing where they’re from, then go back after the thaw.

Maybe some day they’ll come here permanently and start living abroad in Mexico. Maybe they never will. There’s no law saying you have to stay in one place all the time (though the Canadian health care laws put a limit on your time abroad there.)

Really though, even if you move some place for a year and then decide it’s not for you, so what? Just pack up and go somewhere else. Or even home if you really miss it.

This is why you rent instead of buying, by the way. Keep your options open until you know the market well and you’re 100% sure you want to stay.

Living Abroad is Actually Easier Now Than Ever

I have a few gripes about my adopted country, just as anyone probably will, and there are always going to be pros and cons of moving abroad. I have fewer gripes as the years go by though it seems. Sometimes big problems just go away as a country gets richer, like poor internet speed. When we first moved to Guanajuato I was limited to the Telmex monopoly that outright sucked, without the ability to upgrade in my neighborhood no matter how much I paid.

Thankfully Megacable strung up fat lines past my house years ago and I’ve now got 70+mbps internet, cable TV, and a land line for around $33 a month. Those days of yelling at my daughter to get off of YouTube so I could make a Skype call are long gone. By the time the pandemic Zoom meetings started in earnest, our online speed was fast enough to do two of them at once.

We also had water pressure issues in the past since everything is gravity fed, from a tank on the roof. It got on our nerves. Then we paid a handyman a trifling amount to install a small electric pump outside that water tank and wham! We’ve got water pressure out the wazoo. Who knows why we waited so long considering how easy it was.

Living abroad in Mexico has gotten easier, but we’ve also gotten better at adapting. There are some things you can’t fight here, like the love of noise and the fluid sense of time, so it’s best to just find a way to deal with them. 

Things are getting easier all over the world though, actually. Broadband internet and faster phone speeds are the norm now more often than not. Plane connections keep getting better. Unlike in the USA, new tunnels and train lines keep getting built. For better or worse, Mexico built the whole Maya Train across multiple states faster than most cities add a single metro stop.

Making business calls and staying connected to relatives is cheaper than it has ever been in history—close to free much of the time. It’s commonplace now to work remotely from another country and not miss a beat with projects and meetings. 

While it’s still going to take time and money to get residency in a lot of countries, more of them are slowly but surely marching toward a stance of welcoming digital nomads and retirees. There’s no shortage of nations that will be happy to have you if you’ve got steady deposits going into your bank account.

Back in Guanajuato, we’ve got our weekly housekeeper, our $3 taxis across town, our 45-cent bus tickets, our $3 lunches, our $6 symphony tickets, our $2 beers in a bar, and our $8 monthly electric bill. On top of sunshine, great weather, beautiful pedestrian-only streets, and a population that’s smiling more than they’re arguing. We’re  living the good life for less.

With all that in the plus column, I don’t really care whether my countrymen and women who don’t travel much think I’m crazy. Their opinion is way down my list of things I value. After all, just look at who some of them voted for last time…

If you’d like to learn more about how to cut your expenses in half while having a less stressful life as a byproduct, check out the expat stories from A Better Life for Half the Price.

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