Can I afford to live in Mexico on Social Security?

hey everybody kuru paul here from two expats mexico and in today's video i'm gonna be answering a really common question that i get from readers of my blog and that is can i afford to live in mexico on just my social security now i'm actually gonna be answering this in two different ways i'm going to be looking at it first from the financials economic standpoint right is that going to be enough money what type of housing can you expect what type of lifestyle can you expect and two we're going to be looking at it from an immigration standpoint right because is that going to be enough money to qualify for either temporary or permanent residency and if it's not is that it is that your dream of living in mexico is over is there some other option for you well that's what this video is about in return for me giving up a little bit of my time as a busy retiree in mexico all i ask is you take the time to hit the like button really means a lot to me it really does and if you're not already a subscriber why not subscribe i talk about a lot of things about moving to mexico you might find something else interesting all right let's get started okay the first thing we need to do is set some type of a baseline how much money are we actually talking about well according to the aarp the average social security payment in january of 2021 is 1543. now i realize people make more than that and some people make less than that but that's the baseline we're going to be using for this video next thing we want to do is take our 1543 us dollars and turn them into mexican pesos to do that we got to look at the exchange rate which is constantly in flux like this all the time that's why it's important to time your payments very carefully when you send your money to mexico so you can get the most paces on this end again we need to set a baseline so we're setting 20 to 1. so we've turned that into 30 860 mexican pesos we're going to keep this in mind you'll see why i'm doing all this math early on now let's talk cost of living now i know that some of the people watching the video may have actually been researching the cost of living in multiple countries because they're thinking about retiring abroad so here's a quick tip instead of looking at the micro level like how much is an average meal out how much is a tank of gas how much is an average electric bill instead of doing that look at the salary studies for that country it's going to give you a quick snapshot of whether or not the income you have coming in is going to be enough to live there if the salaries are very high the cost of living is going to be very high and if they're lower you can expect the cost of living to be lower what we're going to be doing today is doing just that for mexico now i've only chosen four occupations and we're going to look at the average salary for someone who's been in that position for 10 years these are going to be gross salaries now the website i'm using to do my salary studies is super useful i like it highly recommended it's called me salario.org you can research various positions in mexico and even adjust some of the parameters like how many years the person's been doing the job etc okay the first salary we're looking at is municipal police officer this is somebody with 10 years on the job and this is the gross monthly salary 9563 pesos or about the equivalent of 478 u.s dollars so you're going to make a lot more of the municipal police officer of course i don't think it's a comes a surprise to anybody know that the police do not get paid well in mexico our next job is hospital nurse with 10 years of experience 15 513 pesos so about half of what your social security payment is our next occupation as we move up more white collar accountant now the accountant with 10 years of experience average monthly gross salary 24 858 pesos still below your threshold but getting closer and the last one we're going to look at is a radiologist a doctor with 10 years of experience average gross monthly salary is 43 873 pesos which is about 2 193 so that person's making more than you well now you can see you can live on social security in mexico but it doesn't tell you what kind of lifestyle you're going to have like where are you going to live and that's the key where are you going to live that's the next thing you should look at because actually when you start to look at housing costs that's going to help you look at cost of living more on a micro level you're immediately going to see that you're going to get a lot less and say more touristy areas like where we are in the riviera maya than you would if you went to some of the inland towns or even cities in different parts of mexico but before i teach you how to research your own properties let's figure out how much money we're going to be spending on rent well we know you're making over 30 000 pesos a month but you can't spend it all on rent right you'll be house poor so a general rule of thumb is never to spend more than 30 percent of your income on housing so we're going to use that rule of thumb and that's going to mean that we're going to have to keep it within about 9200 pesos a month that's what we're working with maybe we can go a little higher don't eat out as much and if we go lower that means we can do more things but that's our line all right let's go to the computer before i show you how to research different properties around mexico i just want to point out this particular article which i found relevant to the video it comes from forbes mexico came out in february of 2020 less than one percent of mexicans earn more than 38 000 pesos a month now that certainly puts salaries in perspective doesn't it all right let's move on to researching properties we're going to start by just going to google and just type in trovit mexico should be the first one that comes up yep here it is we're going to go into this site the site is in spanish that should not surprise people because well mexico is a spanish-speaking country and if you really want to live here you should probably learn some spanish okay so we're going to go to casas and our first thing is sales if we're only living on our social security income chances are we're just going to rent so we're going to go to the second one rental and in this one this is search by colony zone or city okay i'm going to start with playa del carmen plato carmen is located in the state of quintana roo near where we are and it's considered a more expensive area generally all along the coast which shouldn't surprise anybody because of tourism and it's right on the caribbean so let's see what you could expect to get in a place like that we're going to come to this and if you don't speak spanish i know you're like ah it's already becoming overwhelming first thing i want to do is come over here to the left and we want to narrow down our options we have our price we want to set a maximum to kind of narrow our search to 10 000 pesos because remember we don't want to be house poor and our budget is really nine thousand two hundred fifty eight pesos if you wanna limit it here you have three cameras which are bedrooms banos which are bathrooms you can limit it also superficial is how many like say square meters you would like again i find the most useful thing is to just set the price and see what you come up with so if we choose one our first one up here is this is casa which is house dos recamaras recommends of bedrooms remember so we're going to look at this one now the real reason i like this site is because of all the pictures it'll allow you to really do some research you can go through them like this place has 24 photos see what the outside looks like and as you go through the photos you have to ask yourself hey could i live here was this some place i can see myself living either part-time or full-time this is only 7 000 pesos which is well below our budget so let's try to look at something a little closer to our budget all right this one looks promising here it's a little over our budget at 10 000 pesos a month but i think it's worth taking a look at we have a two bedroom two bath one garage that can be important for some people you can see where it is located in playa del carmen and you can come down here and get a little bit more information about it this one actually includes quite a bit of furnishing including a king size bed televisions etc so you don't have to bring all that stuff with you let's look at some photos wow kitchen's nice it's a nice simple living room that's a cute place nice bathroom but you get an idea and again playa del carmen and riviera maya is going to be more expensive than many other areas so let's look at one of those before we move on to the next part of the video for the next one we're going to look at the city of puebla which is definitely my favorite city for the size in mexico i'm more of a small town kind of guy but i really really love pueblo and hope to get back there as soon as so pandemic thing is behind us so i've already plugged in all our numbers we're trying to limit our search to apartments under 10 000 pesos a month and as you can see there are lots and lots and lots of options here and you can go through and do your own homework but let's take a look at one of them what we can expect now here's one that's under our budget it's eight thousand five hundred pesos and it is furnished departamento is an apartment in renta for rent abuelado if you're looking for furnish look for that word amuebulado and this is located in the downtown area so this one is two bedrooms one bath which is useful if you want to have people visit you right they can stay with you and you can come down here and see where it's located in the city let's take a look at the photos you've got your dining room here living room it's small but again that's a big benefit to have something furnished is because you don't have to lug all of your garbage down from the country just came from and it has a washer and dryer that's a nice perk as well and a little patio area no matter what your budget is that's a really useful site to see what type of housing you're going to be able to afford and what it's going to look like it's going to give you an idea of what type of quality of life you're going to have here in mexico and if you stick to that rule of thumb of only spending about 30 percent of your income on housing you can rest assured you'll be able to live fine on the other 70 to pay your other bills all right now that we have the financials out of the way let's look at the immigration aspect of moving to mexico on just your social security payment chances are you have visited mexico at some point that's why you want to make it your permanent home and if you haven't visited you might want to visit it first before you think about living there permanently don't you think i'm just saying anyway if you have visited mexico you visited as a tourist and a tourist can enter mexico for 180 days and do what tourists do and that's spend money what taurus can't do is do some of the things you may want to do as a resident those things include opening a bank account registering a car here getting a driver's license and participating in different government programs including health programs now if you spend some time in mexico and you meet some of the expats or you've chatted with a few on a facebook group you have undoubtedly found people that were able to do all of these things without getting any type of residency they are the exception and not the rule ideally you want to get residency to make your life in mexico much easier in this video i'm not going to go into great detail about how to get residency in mexico the different types pros and cons i'm going to dedicate other videos to that that's why if you're not a subscriber and those things interest you you may want to subscribe right now i'm just going to give you just a quick brief overview of what to expect so your process to get residency will actually start outside of mexico at a mexican consulate normally in your home country so you're going to make an appointment at the mexican consulate and you're going to show up there for an interview the first thing they're going to ask you is why do you want to live in mexico and you're going to say something like because it's awesome i love it there i vacation all the time i love the food the culture the people i want to make it my permanent home and they're going to be like oh okay well we need to see some documentation first and part of that documentation are financials yes mexico wants to make sure that you can prove that you're economically solvent so what does that mean exactly well basically they just want to make sure that you make enough money to support yourself and not be a drain on their society so you're probably thinking after watching this video can't i just say hey you know my social security is higher than say what a nurse makes etc so i should be able to support myself you think so but it's not really that easy actually they use a mathematical formula to figure out what the thresholds are to prove economic solvency to move to mexico there's two different types of residency there's going to be temporary residency and permanent you'd love to have permanent but that has a very high economic threshold so let's look at temporary first how much money are they going to want you to have as of the filming of this particular video they're going to be looking for you to have a monthly income of around nineteen hundred dollars now i say around nineteen hundred dollars because actually different mexican consulate locations within the same country will have slightly different requirements the reason for that is because even though it's a mathematical formula there's some other variables at play including some base numbers they use and exchange rates i'll explain that in the other video so here's an example this is the website from the mexican consulate in san diego and as you can see they want you to have a monthly income of one thousand nine hundred and ninety eight dollars and you don't have it well at least in this hypothetical situation you don't have it so what does that mean does that mean that your dream of living in mexico is dead no there is another option and it is the perpetual tourist option so what is that well there are a lot of retirees from the us and canada that live in mexico without residency as perpetual tourists they do what tourists do they spend money they're just contributing the economy but they're not working remember what i said before a tourist can come to mexico for 180 days and then they have to leave before that period of time what i didn't say is that they can immediately re-enter and the 180-day clock begins again we know a lot of expats that do this some of them met in mexico as long as five or six years they just comply with the law leave and immediately re-enter so whether or not you're already aware of this the topic of the perpetual tourist is quite controversial you're going to see it mentioned in different facebook groups about expats and someone will say oh they're going to start cracking down on that and start throwing out all these retirees who are illegally living in mexico so i just want to address that illegally living in mexico again if you comply with the law and you leave every 180 days of re-enter you're not illegally in mexico in fact if you got a tourist card again when you came in mexico knows you're doing this still there are some dangers of being the perpetual tourist you will hear people say hey i heard about an individual who was doing that living here and left and when they tried to come back in we're blocked by immigration and were actually denied entry into mexico for like a year yes those things do occasionally happen that someone is blocked for up to a year from re-entry but it is rare in fact over the five years that i've been blogging anytime i've heard about one of those cases i've tried to look into it as much as i can including contacting people through facebook to figure out what made this particular person be singled out from all the rest of the expats and each one of these cases that i looked into had one thing in common not only were the people living in mexico as tourists and spending money which helps the economy they were also doing some type of work illegally in mexico so if you're just going to be a retiree who comes to mexico complies with immigration laws leaves every 180 days and comes back and just spends money and doesn't work you're not likely to have any types of problems well that's it for our video i hope you enjoyed it before i go i just want to talk briefly about people that are leaving me some additional questions on unrelated videos here on youtube as i mentioned i've been blogging for about five years so we're getting questions here we're getting questions on the blog we get questions on our facebook page and we get about a thousand emails a month although we would like to answer everybody's questions it's just not possible if you don't see the answer to your particular question on our youtube channel which is pretty new you may want to check out our blog at kuru.us and type what you're looking for in the search engine it might be there for you folks who want some extra attention you may want to think of joining our patreon page for a small fee you can be a member and members get access to a private facebook group to ask us questions directly and interact with other members as well as be able to attend our live q a sessions every single month that we do through facebook and thanks again for supporting my new year's resolution to start making youtube videos until next time

Channel: Two Expats Mexico

Views: 503,902

Rating: 4.963892 out of 5

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Id: 5pI3N6T6ht4

Length: 16min 45sec (1005 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 10 2021