Welcome back Tangerineys, from Mexico.
Today we're going to be telling you the big, sometimes unexpected reasons
why expats who come to Mexico with the intention of living here forever
end up leaving for good, within just a few years.
The first reason is, people getting screwed over and having problems with property rights.
We've heard several stories like this and here's one to give you an example:
Mid 90s, I purchased a lot, 10 miles west of Cabo San Lucas. Contracted and built my home. Moved in September of 1996.
After 22 years, people assumed the surrounding property, not sure legally or not
and decided they would not recognize my ownership.
I was legally employed by the local golf course for approximately 3 years, paid taxes,
had my property in a bank trust, all in a timely fashion. Without notification,
they've had the local police remove everything from my house while I was in the States,
supposedly place it all in storage, and have refused entrance to my ranch. This was around Christmas, 2019.
Trying to deal with all this through the court
which is just now in August reopen for business.
In the meantime, having to deal with all the expenses of maintaining another residence.
So, there's that story straight from the person and another one was this lady, bought beachfront property in Tulum,
spent her life savings to build a hotel there, and then had it stolen from her.
We heard another story of someone buying a bunch of property about around Mahahaul and Bacalar,
only to have it stolen from them.
Property rights can be a serious issue and it seems especially bad in places where property values are super high and
it's a popular tourist place. And you know, not all of these reasons that we're going to mention
necessarily have to be negative. For instance,
some people may come to mexico and realize this is awesome!
"I love traveling, I want to see more of the world,
this has been great." And they move on. The next reason people move away from Mexico might be pretty obvious
but the language barrier. It is actually very hard to live in a country that you're not familiar
with the culture and customs
and the language as well. So, having these communication issues on a very daily basis.
We have struggled with this ourselves, but I'm so thankful,
so thankful that we were doing lessons before we came, so that by the time we got here we were like kind of
conversational. It made our lives a whole lot easier and I think that's one big reason
why we felt comfortable pushing our boundaries, going to new places. Yeah. I think this is really an
underestimated reason. People underestimate how difficult
the things in their everyday life are going to be if they don't know the language. If you want to get a head start,
we think a great program to do that is Rocket languages. It's the program we've been using for quite a while now.
It's very extensive and reasonably priced for what you get.
You get a lot of value out of this course. I mean, you can use apps and stuff for vocabulary building
but I think if you really truly want to get conversational and get past those...
Get past that hump of like not even being sure whether you can say something out loud in Spanish,
which was a big thing. I didn't even want to say things in Spanish in front of Jordan, at first.
Yeah, you wouldn't do the lessons in front of me at first until you got a little bit into them,
but anyway, they're actually having a their labor day sale right now.
So, it's even better value than it normally is. So, if you want to go check that out, it's at
TangerineSpanish.com we are an affiliate and that will take you straight to our affiliate link.
Next reason is politics.
We've had a lot of people tell us that they moved here because they didn't like some politician
in the U.S and they plan
to move back as soon as that politician is out of office.
The next big reason people move away is that they're homesick, they miss family, t they miss grandkids.
And also, I think they underestimated how much that would be the case. I know for me,
the first year that we were gone,
it was literally the first year I had ever been away from my family. I was born and raised in Arizona
for 26 years, then we started traveling. The first Christmas was difficult.
I'd never been away from family and I was so
depressed. And it was at that point that we were like, "we need to make a few more regular trips back home."
and many other people feel the same way and some even decide;
"I don't like being away from my friends and family and I just have to get back."
The next reason and I think this is actually one of the most common, is cost.
Basically, people having an unrealistic expectation for what the cost of living will be like in Mexico
for the lifestyle that they want.
Yeah, for example, I know I could live in Mexico for $300 USD a month
but I wouldn't want to. It wouldn't be the amenities I wanted. I would be living in a place without AC, without
services like hot water, and things like that.
but I think a lot of people
are going to one of the most popular vacation destinations in the country
and thinking it's going to be way cheaper there
than wherever they came from and
if you're going to one of those super popular places, I think that often isn't going to be the case.
Why are people picking these places though? I think it's a few reasons:
They have big expat communities and people want that community
feel. They want to not be like such a fish out of water at first, and I totally get that. And the other reason is
English. There's a lot of English spoken and you can get by without knowing any Spanish at all, basically
but the trade-off you're making is that if you want something
super cheap, like the Mexico prices people generally think of, you're going to
have to know Spanish if you want to...
Or at least be able to adapt in a place where most people only speak Spanish.
The next big reason people move away is related to cost and that is money problems.
For example, someone might come here thinking:
"Oh, yeah, I'll be able to find a job,
no problem."
And then, they get here and then it turns out it's way harder for them to find a job
or at least one that pays something near what they were expecting to receive. Oh yeah, I was just going to say
the pay. Like that's taking the pay cut and getting paid in pesos is pretty a huge deal
Or people come here,
they run out of money, or they have something happen to them and they have unexpected medical expenses
that they didn't have savings or insurance to cover,
things like that. All kinds of reasons but basically running out of money.
I think one of the biggest problems with this is,
someone comes here and they're getting, I don't know, social security or
a pension of something like $1,200 USD every single month
and then, they end up spending that $1,200 USD every single month.
but there are going to be unexpected expenses that come up, so literally that's just life. Yeah, that's life.
I don't want to tell you how to spend your money. If that was me though,
if I had $1,200 USD a month,
I would make my budget $1,000 USD a month and have $200 USD going into savings every month to
be able to meet those unexpected expenses. A rainy day fund or
maybe an "I want to live in Mexico for the rest of my life and I don't want something to mess it up" fund. [Laughs]
We do our best to make videos that are both informative and entertaining
about our life and traveling around Mexico to really help others out
like you are watching right now, that maybe you're considering visiting a place in Mexico or
moving here, retiring here, or something.
So, if you want to see more videos just like this one,
please subscribe to our channel. Another reason people decide to pack their
bags and get the heck out of Mexico is an increase in
violence or maybe cartel activity happening in their area. For instance,
just around the time that we were leaving Ajijic,
this wasn't our personal reason but a little bit after we left, there were some...
some incidents that happened that were likely tied to the cartels.
Many expats got spooked and left
because they did not want to be around that. It kind of seemed
like violence was trending in an upward direction
and they just got the heck out of town. So, that's a very real reason why some people leave.
How I feel about this, personally, is that there's danger and
violent things that happen everywhere. For instance,
there was a shooting in Guadalajara while we were there. I think some politician got his pinky shot off
uh and
that same day, we looked at the headlines in Phoenix,
and there were like 3 shootings that happened in the Phoenix area;
that's where I lived my whole life. 3 murders, not just shootings. Oh! 3 murders. Okay.
So more serious than that. [Laughs]
So, I think this type of stuff happens everywhere and it obviously is a very personal
decision if you don't feel comfortable, then you're going to leave.
And this also goes hand in hand with a scary experience - a scary personal experience
that happens to people. For instance,
their house gets broken into and they're robbed or
they are involved in some type of like cartel, or gang, or just dangerous violent activity
and that
makes them feel unsafe in the country as a whole and they leave. Another example of a scary
experience that we heard about fairly recently that caused someone to leave Mexico.
It was these 2 guys that came down from the U.S and
they
were into bird watching. So they were out on these jungle roads in the middle of nowhere,
looking for exotic birds
and then suddenly, this car comes - this truck comes racing up behind them. You see this... I'm getting tingles
just thinking about this right now, but you see this
white truck just cruising
behind them and then, it pulls in front of them and stops and 5 guys jump out with guns pointed at them.
The car behind us is kind of scaring me, how fast they are going...
I know, they're going...(inaudible)
I mean, it's not scaring me it's scaring me but... It's scaring me because what if they're speeding up on us to rob us or something...
Mmm...I doubt that.
They've probably just drove this road lots of times.
Oh God, they have guns. They have guns.
Go! Go! Go! Go! Go! No! No! No! No! No! Please! Please! Please!
Please, please, please! What?
Please, please, please!
(The men) Gringos, gringos. Are you lost or WTF?
Please, what?
No, Spanish. They ended up letting them go because they realized hey, this isn't another cartel trying to come on my turf
but that was pretty clearly cartel activity and they were somewhere they probably shouldn't have been.
You know, we're not giving this example, by the way, to like freak people out or to
sensationalize, or anything like that,
this is just a real example of something that happened to 2 normal people, doing something as innocent as bird watching.
So, these are
just to solidify the fact that, that's a very real reason why people leave and I think that's the case with any city, too.
I mean if there was - if I was involved in something like that in my hometown, Phoenix,
I might decide to move somewhere too,
if I felt like it was getting to be no longer safe there. I'd go to a different city
or maybe I'd leave. Shortly before coming to Mexico, someone tried to rob me in Phoenix.
Yeah, actually, 2 people tried to rob me at the same time.
Yeah. Another very common reason why expats leave Mexico is because of health problems.
They have something happen to them. They get sick
and they need to see doctors,
so they're covered by medicare in the U.S or they're covered by
their health insurance in Canada, so they know they can go back to their home country and get care
with no expenses out of pocket or very little versus they would have to pay for it out of pocket in Mexico.
It's a very common reason we hear about people leaving the country. In the same vein of health care,
there's also people who feel like they're getting inadequate healthcare
or they're getting ripped off. We've heard of stories,
a lot actually, in this region: in the Riviera Maya, from people who come here and because
I feel like it's typically because they don't speak Spanish, they get ripped off.
They go to the hospital and something that should have cost like $10 USD
ends up costing $300 USD or something. Or there's different
prices for residents versus non-residents. True, there's different pricing.
So, there's that and even at a bigger extent where there's ongoing health
issues and like needing to go to the doctor a lot.
We've heard personal stories from people who feel like that health care was just not up to their standards.
Just not what they needed.
They felt like they weren't getting everything they needed out of the visits to the hospital, to doctors, etc
So, thankfully on our end, of all the times that we've gone to the hospital, of
all the times, I think it's been like 3 total. Um, like I said, thankfully, it's been that few,
we haven't felt like it's been inadequate, but we don't have any ongoing
health issues like where we need prescriptions all the time or how we're having to go for regular checkups.
So, I don't think we're at the point yet where we would be experiencing anything like that.
So, that's not a reason why I think we'll be leaving anytime soon.
But it definitely is a reason why lots of expats and especially retirees
get out of here. We'll link a playlist of all the videos we've made about our medical experiences right up here.
Another big reason why people leave for good is that they have unmet expectations. This is probably pretty
self-explanatory, but I think a lot of people have this idea of Mexico in their head and
then they get here and it's not exactly
like that and they find out that they just don't like it as much and they kind of
can't wrap their head around what it's actually like. Yeah. I mean, I experience this a lot in my personal life,
so like someone talks up a restaurant or someone really talks up a dish
and then you're expecting the world and then it just
doesn't deliver and it's a disappointment. And when something's a disappointment,
you know...
you thought the grass was greener and it isn't.
The next reason people leave is that they can't adapt to the culture.
They have trouble adapting to the way of life here and
I think people often say this as if it's like a character defect
or a personality flaw, like "Oh! You couldn't hack it" and
"Me and my infinite perfection, I
have adapted to the culture perfectly and that just means that you hate Mexico and the Mexican way of life."
I don't think it's that at all because, for instance, I don't think I could make it, like "make it" in New York City.
I think the hustle and bustle lifestyle with all the people walking around and everything and the big city life,
I know myself and I know that's not for me. Does that mean I can't adapt?
No, because here we are in mexico 2 and a half years later.
We've traveled all across the country and I think we do a pretty darn good job of adapting and
learning like new phrases in certain places and new dishes and various things like that.
So, I just wanted to get that out of the way, but some of the big reasons why people can't adapt in Mexico.
There's some stuff that are kind of deal breakers for people,
like dogs barking all the time from their neighbors, people partying late at night,
all the lovely random sounds of Mexico, like shooting off rockets, and cultural celebrations, and even like
cars driving around that are selling things and they've got these loud speakers, playing recordings of stuff like
(singing) El panadero con el pan. El panadero con el pan!
I love that one. [Laughter]
You know, we've mentioned this in a video before and I thought it was funny when someone commented on a video saying
"you know, I grew up in Mexico and then I moved to the U.S and I couldn't sleep at night because it was too quiet."
[Laughter] "I was used to the noise." So, uh, yeah noise is a big one for people
and then... One moment. [Loud truck driving by]
Another one is the whole concept of "manaña" like people will get to it tomorrow
or like eventually, and things...
Like people show up to maintenance appointments late or they never show up.
Like this has happened to us at number of times.
Yeah, like they say, "Okay I'll be there today at noon" and then
noon comes by, no one has showed up. By the end of the day,
no one has showed up. You haven't received a phone call.
Tomorrow, no one shows up and then they show up 2 days later and then they expect you to be there.
[Laughter]
Basically, what we're trying to get at here is the culture is really a big thing.
Like going to a new country, I didn't
even fathom how
big of a difference it would be in so many different aspects.
I probably should have, honestly. I mean, it's totally different.
It is totally different!
So, there's a lot to adapt to
and that's why I say I don't think it's necessarily bad when some people can't
because it's okay if you go somewhere
and you give it a shot. At least you tried! Yeah, good on you for trying.
Yeah, I mean and of course, there are the people who don't try, they don't try to learn Spanish,
they don't want to adapt, they want it to be exactly like where they're coming from. Just cheaper - just cheaper.
There are those people but I just would like to encourage people to not have such, like a
high and mighty attitude about like "Oh, you
couldn't make it here."
Yeah, I just despise that so thoroughly because I think it's good that at least they gave it a shot.
They put themselves out there and it's okay if it doesn't work out. Every single time,
that was kind of our attitude when moving to Mexico, was like "Hey,
we'll give it a shot and what's the worst that happens? We don't like it and we move back."
We move back.
I think that's actually probably the best attitude to have because then, you're like "We'll just give it a go
and if not, if it doesn't work out, well, that was a fun experience, like we learned something probably."
Yeah. Another reason why people might decide to move back is because they miss the comforts of home,
whatever that might be - whether it's foods, or restaurants, or
speaking your own language; the language that you're familiar with. Yeah.
I hear people talk about the food scene where they were at and they really missed that
but this might not be a deal breaker on its own but you have a few of these that add up and then like
a combination of things cause you end up leaving.
Yeah, because it can be something little, like you really love licorice and it's hard to find licorice here in Mexico.
I'm not going to move away because I can't get Licorice here
but if it was that, and a scary experience, and the healthcare
not living up to your quality standards or whatever,
many of these, I think it's actually like, it becomes a big grand old storm that causes people to say like
"This is it. I just can't do it anymore." And then, maybe the straw that breaks
the camel's back, is like "And for goodness sakes, I cannot find mayo without limón."
[Laughter] If you're thinking about moving to Mexico,
I think one of the best things you can do is watch our videos from the beginning because then you'll see
all of our struggles, all of our blunders,
all of our epic fails
and then, if you watch every single one of our videos, you become part of the Tangerine Elite.
Oh, yeah. It's an exclusive club. The VIT - Very Important Tangerineys! [Laughter]
On the end screen here in just a moment, we're going to link our binge watch everything playlist. We do
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