Central America / Mexico

voLdie

voLdie

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Any of you guys work around here? Looking to move down there for a bit.

Any of the countries as long as there cool, close to a beach and I can get reliable internet (at a cafe/co working space, or rental house/apt. Cartagena, Columbia is another option.

I would go the SEA route but have to be close to US timezones for various meetings.

I am just looking for advice or personal experiences.

Thanks!
 
I'm just outside Mexico City and we have offices in Medellin, Colombia too. Both tech-friendly places IME, and the exchange rate is excellent. No beaches though either place. If you like a beach town in Mexico you could look at Puerto Vallarta, gorgeous and less pricey than places like Cancun but safer than say Acapulco.

Really though, safety is pretty relative, expats acting like idiots can have problems anywhere but I've lived in some of the most dangerous places in Mexico and never had any issues personally. (Tamaulipas on the border for example like 7 years.) That holds true for Colombia as well IME though I have not been to Cartagena.

Monterrey is a great choice in Mexico too, but again no beaches :D
 
I also lived a little outside of Mexico City, @backinblack , in Valle de Bravo for a while. Mexico was pretty awesome in my opinion and I'd definitely consider moving back there for a little longer.

Mexico City itself is a great place to be, it's a REAL city; there's so much to do, a great party scene, tonnes of entrepreneurs and reasonable low living costs compared to the US.

If you're not going to consider SEA then Mexico City and Medellin are the obvious choices, but no beaches..
 
backinblack said:
I'm just outside Mexico City and we have offices in Medellin, Colombia too. Both tech-friendly places IME, and the exchange rate is excellent. No beaches though either place. If you like a beach town in Mexico you could look at Puerto Vallarta, gorgeous and less pricey than places like Cancun but safer than say Acapulco.

Really though, safety is pretty relative, expats acting like idiots can have problems anywhere but I've lived in some of the most dangerous places in Mexico and never had any issues personally. (Tamaulipas on the border for example like 7 years.) That holds true for Colombia as well IME though I have not been to Cartagena.

Monterrey is a great choice in Mexico too, but again no beaches :D
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I've been looking for a place to grind, and mexico has been on my radar. Can you clarify why you left Tamaulipas for Mexico City, the pros & cons of each from an online biz standpoint?
 
So I came down to Cuernavaca, Morelos 3 months ago. It's like 1 to 1.5 hours south of Mexico City proper. I was looking for a change, I was widowed a little while back and he was from Tamaulipas. Also, my company just happened to be opening an office in Mexico City. So the move was a mix of personal and professional reasons. But damn I wish I had done it sooner.

It's beautiful here and I get the perks of the city without living in the city. I take a very comfortable bus up to the city once or twice a week to go meet clients at the office or just get a change of scenery, the rest of the time I work from home. I pay $12 USD each way for the bus, I like it because it has little working areas in it with tables and comfortable seats so I have my coffee and get work done on my commute. It drops me at the Mexico City airport where I can grab a verified cab or an uber to anywhere I want. There is a cheaper bus that costs half that for the same trip, just less frills. I don't like to drive in the city itself, it makes LA traffic look tame.

I moved down here to Cuernavaca sight unseen on the advice of a coworker. My original plan was to move to Mexico City itself. For me it would not have been a good fit. The traffic and the noise and the lack of a yard etc would have gotten to me. I love day trips and weekends in the the city, I'm just not a city dwelling type. It's the fifth largest city in the world. If you like city life you will not want for anything there. Excellent public transportation, lots of English speaking folks, plenty to do and see. Like any city, rent is higher in the city itself.

Cost of Living:

I pay $600 USD / mo for a very nice, fully furnished 4 bedroom American style home with a pool in a gated community here in Cuernavaca. You can get cheap, decent apartments for less than $100 USD/ Month. You can get a pretty nice apartment for less than $200 USD/month. I calculate my food cost to be about $50 a week per person but then again we buy a lot of imported stuff, fancier stuff, convenient stuff (hey I work a shit ton of hours lol.) You could easily cut that down to half, eat like the locals and still eat well. I have a full-time housekeeper and I pay her $85 / week for 40 hours which is more than full-time factory workers make here. My neighbors scold me for paying her too much. Worth noting that that means my housekeeper (she's single and lives on her own) pays rent food and all of her expenses for $340 USD a month. So definitely do-able.

Tamaulipas was cheaper than here. In Tamaulipas, you can rent a beautiful 3 bedroom house with a pool for less than 300/mo in lots of places but Tamaulipas is not scenic, it's flat and brown. It's much like southern Texas (surprise!) and the climate is extreme, the winters are surprisingly cold and the summers are miserably hot. There is not much in between.

More importantly, living in Tamaulipas is like living in Afghanistan. The war between the cartels and the government is intense there and so I would hear gunfights from my house a couple times a week. If I wanted to go out I would listen to the scanner so I would know to avoid the shootout on such and such street, and the helicopters were constantly buzzing above you. Blockades were a common occurrence and a pain in the ass when trying to get from point A to point B in the city. The fight really doesn't concern you but you still have to deal with the fallout.

Cuernavaca, in turn, is green, beautiful. They call it the city of eternal spring (just like they call Medellin too!) It's 70s and 80s year round. Outside my door is like the garden of Eden, all flowering plants and on the horizon are the mountains. Really beautiful. It's also very peaceful, which is a night and day difference from Tamaulipas.

I know you asked about advantages as far as online biz, the quality and reliability of the internet here is great. As long as you stay fairly near a major city you'll find quality internet. I have to say I feel like Mexico is ahead of Colombia in that regard though if you are in Medellin, Bogota etc obviously there is no issue there either.

Mexico has a lot of advantages at least for what I am doing because Mexico is still early in their internet marketing revolution (sorry, so cringe lol but it is true.) That means they are less jaded, more engaged and hungry for information in my experience. It's a good time to market to the Mexican markets and if you are local then that helps with trust and you can always meet them for coffee too :smile:
 
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The way BackinBlack described Mexico is almost similar to the way I would describe Jamaica. I've never been to Mexico but hope to go one day.
 
Side note, I lived in Cuernavaca for bit as a child. My mother woke up screaming. She was awakened by a scorpion in the bed, hah.

One day my dad was carving a flute from a piece of wood. Heard a "shkt", then "Argh!". Looked over and my dad had nearly sliced his thumb off. Blood everywhere. Had to rush to the nearest hospital.

Another day I was out in the backyard. I saw a hornets nest attached to the house. Instead of leaving it alone I threw some rocks at it. Mistake. I ran in the house screaming and my family was like, "Wtf, why are there hornets coming in?!" haha

Anyway, haha, good times. I've always thought about going back there some day.
 
Thanks for all the advice guys!

Any views on Playa Del Carmen or Costa Rica?
 
Only been to Playa on vacation. Loved it. Don't know anything about digital marketing community/infrastructure out there though.
 
voLdie said:
Thanks for all the advice guys!

Any views on Playa Del Carmen or Costa Rica?
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I spent nearly 6 months in Playa del Carmen living as a local from February 2016 till July 2016, that is 2500 pesos a month house which was around 125 dollars at that time.

I'm originally a Mexican-American,but lived I 10 years as a kid on Juarez(another hot contested area for cartels by the border) and so I learned to speak and write in Spanish.Then, I moved to California and attended elementary, junior high, high school and some college. So, funny enough English is my stronger language now and lost a lot of my Spanish for 16 years of straight speaking English and so little Spanish.

When I arrived at Mexico last year and was at Playa del Carmen, I was only intended on staying 2 weeks. Eventually, I didn't return back and had the help of my dad who set me up with a local house with a cheap rent. I stayed there for 6 months living a life in two worlds. The tourist and local life at the same time. I lived on a neighborhood that was full of laborers coming from the poorer places of Mexico working at restaurants, hotels, stores, touristic jobs. These people literally were earning between 3k-12k pesos a month, with above 10k pesos being not common. But during the day I was socializing with tourists and nomads that lived on the expensive beach side. The nomads living here and working on this co workingspace were paying 6-8 times more my monthly rent. I first started going to the only coworking space that is called Nest, but I stopped going there because I decided to work from a Starbucks at quinta avenida.

I seriously loved it there, but for me it was a huge roller coaster. I was used to smoking a lot weed back in California and continued my habit on Mexico, but the weed quality there was horrendous but extremely cheap. So my daily routine was something like this:

- Get up smoke a joint or two
- Catch the mini bus or van that charged me 5 pesos from my corner house
- Eat a cheap meal, think about like 45-50 pesos comida corrida(a dish, a drink, tortillas)
- Pay 37 pesos at starbucks and stay there 8 hours. The workers didn't mind in fact I became very friendly with them and they were all cool with me.
- Get home, unwind and smoke a few more joints. At that time I was also hanging out with the local teens, young 20's fellows and were pretty much just drinking and smoking. It was fun at the beginning but it quickly got old. I like to hang out a lot by myself.

Now, I was doing light freelancing through Upwork, the first 2 months and a half I did 1k a month, really not reaching my potential. Then the last 3 months I basically spent it freaking out because my money was running low and couldn't find a new gig. Eventually, I got help from my parents, and then the last month I spent it all the time with my current girlfriend and mother of my new baby(we met there).


Here are the highlights of my trip there:

- Met my gf there and now living with her on Italy with her family with a new baby, which we are going through the whole visa process to get them to the states.

- Met a bunch of tourists from all over the world and I was extremely sociable.

- I got to finally experience, after a long time, the outside world coming from a rich liberal city in California. I lived really poor but had the most fun.

- Lost a lot of weight from all the walking and the FUCKING SWEATING. The weather there sucks during the summer, is hot as fuck.

- I met a few guys selling weed by the cartels and got a peek at how the underworld is ran. When you live on the poor neighboor hoods you really get to see and hear about stuff that the tourist don't even see or .

- Met a few python, php, machine learning, crypto guys at the co working space. Outside there , basically 0. It has a small community of nomads, but practically Mexico is really behind the technology scene. Like the previous poster mentioned, Mexico is really not up to par on the technology side. Most people that were hiring or were looking for programmers were really looking for wordpress, magento kind of guys.


The BAD SIDE:
Have a secure income, something you can rely, if you don't then you will have a really horrible time. I met a few Europeans that got stuck at Mexico working a really bad job under the table because they ran out of funds. You really want to have that income secure, because there are practically 0 safety nets there.

The internet is horrible when I was there: 1.5-5 Mb/s UP/DOWN. Really bad, but I hear they are laying new infrastructure.


The GOOD SIDE:
The beaches, the girls, the people , the FOOD, I mean everything is exactly like they tell you. However, if you have Internet money then you will have a hell of a time there. Things there are relatively cheap compare to a western country.

If you want to live like a regular local with $600-800 dollars you can live extremely well for one person with a lot of eating out. Heck, at the last 3 months I was living with $375 a month(heck why I was freaking out), and it wasn't that bad after words. Keep in mind I was spending like $50-80 a month on weed.

To live by the beach with a nice apartment and all the nice amenities, expect like $1800-3000 dollars.

The main reason why I said I was living between 2 worlds is because Playa del Carmen truly has a cast system. There are really poor people and rich foreigners living there, is like a mini Mexico City. There is a house for every budget. You can live on a local $125-225 a month house all for yourself or you can live in playacar for $1500-3000 a month in a nice house by the beach.
 
Curious what how much Spanish the Americans have living there.

Reason I ask is, maybe I might take a mini vacation to Mexico, but I know like 6th grade into to Spanish 101 that I learned like 20 years ago.

My wife and kids know 0 Spanish.

I don't want to have a bad time there bc of the lang issue if possible.
 
eliquid said:
Curious what how much Spanish the Americans have living there.

Reason I ask is, maybe I might take a mini vacation to Mexico, but I know like 6th grade into to Spanish 101 that I learned like 20 years ago.

My wife and kids know 0 Spanish.

I don't want to have a bad time there bc of the lang issue if possible.
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I was there with 0 Spanish, literally nothing. In small towns it was unbelievably hard, most locals also had 0 English. But in Mexico City and more common tourist areas there was a big split, some had perfect English and others still had very little.

In general, if you stick to large cities and tourist towns you will be completely fine until you can start to pick up the language.

I never did learn it, bar a few phrases, and I got by surprisingly well.
 
Mexico City, Puerto Escondido, Cancun, Acapulco, Playa del Carmen, to name a few: those places are full of people who can speak English. If you go to more remote places, you're gonna have some trouble for sure.

In general, Mexicans will try to help you as much as they can: signs, sounds, gestures, whatever it takes haha.
 
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