- My name is Jordan.
And in this video, I'm going to be telling you
why I moved to Mexico, but perhaps more importantly,
why I stayed, why I'm still living here after four years.
Because a lot of times the grass seems greener
on the other side, but then you get there,
you spend some time there and it turns out it's not
but in my case, I love it here and I'm still living here.
So let's get into it.
The first reason why I moved to Mexico
is the lower cost of living.
For example, before moving to Mexico
I was living in Phoenix, Arizona, and my apartment there,
after all utilities was about $1,500 dollars a month.
The first place I lived long term in Mexico, in Guadalajara,
I was paying about $350 dollars a month, everything included.
I also love that I could go out for a cheap dinner,
like get 50 cent tacos or something like that.
And you know, in about an hour, I have an appointment
with a physiotherapist because my knee has been hurting me
and I've been limping everywhere for the last few days.
And an hour with a physiotherapist
is gonna cost me about $24.
Now I don't know how much it would cost
for an hour with a physiotherapist in the US
but I can definitely tell you
it's a whole heck of a lot more than $24.
But you know, the longer I'm in Mexico,
I still appreciate like being able to go out
and get cheap tacos and things like that.
But what I really, really appreciate about the lower cost
of living here is I can go out and do things like
a fine dining experience for a small fraction
of the cost of a similar experience in the US.
And I really like getting those experiences
that I would never pay that much for in my home country.
Another reason why I moved to Mexico
was the proximity to the US.
I wanted to leave the country
and I thought it would be convenient to be
like a few hour flight away from most US cities.
And that has been nice for a lot of reasons
but to be perfectly honest, the longer I'm in Mexico,
the more I'd be okay with being further away from the US.
Another motivation for coming to Mexico
was the super friendly policy towards visitors.
At the time I moved here just about anyone could come
to Mexico and get 180 days visa-free.
So you don't have to go to any consulate
to try to get a visa before your trip.
You can just come here, you fill out a form
called an FMM, and they would give
pretty much everyone 180 days.
Unfortunately, that has changed
so if I was coming to Mexico today,
that would not be one of the reasons why.
Another motivation for moving to Mexico was that
I didn't like the path the US was headed down.
I saw a lot more fighting in between groups.
I saw a lot more bad stuff happening in the US,
like all kinds of school shootings,
all sorts of nasty stuff like that.
I also didn't like where I saw the culture going.
Like I saw a lot of people thinking they deserved something
or they were entitled to things that they didn't earn.
Things like that.
I didn't like the massive deficits
the government was running.
The huge debts, the huge money printing that I knew
would eventually lead to inflation.
So there were a lot of reasons why
the economy as a whole wasn't appealing to me
and I saw it heading in the wrong direction.
You know, I recently read a book that came out
I think in November of 2021.
And it's by someone I really look up to, Ray Dalio.
He's gotta be one of the smartest,
most well researched people in the world.
And he put out this book,
I think it was called "The Changing World Order.
Why nations succeed and fail."
And in that book, he really lays out all the reasons
why the US is a declining empire.
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Before coming to Mexico, the couple years leading up to it,
Matty and I had made a couple of trips to Europe
and on these trips to Europe, to Amsterdam, Portugal
and Spain, we met so many people
and all these people were really well traveled.
They all spoke several languages.
So we felt like we really needed to see more of the world
and also learn more languages.
And that was another reason why I wanted to move to Mexico.
After those Europe trips
I knew I wanted to start learning more languages
and I either wanted to learn Mandarin or Spanish
because those are the two that I thought were
going to be the most useful for me.
And I had been dabbling in Spanish a little bit.
I took Spanish in high school
but honestly I didn't pay attention at all
and I learned basically nothing
except for basic grammar rules.
That's basically all I remembered
from high school Spanish class.
So Mexico seemed like a good choice
to start learning another language.
And to this day, four years later,
it still is important to me to know more than English
and to have the knowledge of other languages
and I'm well on my way to being fluent in Spanish.
At this point, I probably know eight to 10,000 words.
So I can speak to most people in most situations
and like be able to get through the conversation.
However, like the average college graduate
knows something like 40,000 words.
So to get to that level, I still have a ways to go.
Another motivation for coming to Mexico
was that I just didn't like my job in the US.
I had an online business where I was basically selling stuff
on eBay and Amazon, and it was long hours,
it was really monotonous work,
it was a ton of work for not that great of pay
and I was ready to be done with it.
But thankfully now that we took this chance,
we quit our jobs, we came to Mexico
and started this YouTube channel from nothing
the day we moved here.
Now I feel like I have
one of the greatest jobs in the world.
So that's definitely a huge change
and a reason why I still live here.
However, sometimes we get comments saying something like,
"oh you just live in Mexico
because you can make money from your YouTube channel."
Well, no, because we've gone to other places
and we've been able to get good views
on our videos everywhere we've gone.
We've gone to Spain since having our channel
and got tons of views there.
We went to Peru and got tons of views there.
We went to Vegas and got tons of views there.
So I'm not saying that
we're getting tons of views everywhere to brag.
I'm saying it to say, we could live anywhere.
I could live anywhere now and continue the channel there.
But I live in Mexico because I want to.
I still like it here.
Another big reason why I moved to Mexico
was that I loved Mexico food.
But after coming to Mexico and traveling through the country
and going to all these different Mexican states,
yes there's states in Mexico, there's about 30 of them.
I'm just gonna say about 30 to sound smart
because I don't remember if it's 31 or 32
so about 30 states and every one of them
has a different cuisine pretty much
and they all have unique foods.
So what I've learned since coming to Mexico
and since traveling around is that
what I considered Mexican food in the US, that was Tex Mex.
And I do like Tex Mex food,
but I love Mexican food as a whole,
like, it's way more than Tex Mex.
There's way too many varieties to get
into all the things I love
but you can go to Oaxaca and get totally different food
than you're gonna find in Sonora.
You can go to Yucatan and find completely different food
than you're going to find in either of those places.
Like it's really diverse
and there is so much outstanding food
throughout the entire country.
Before moving to Mexico, I was living with my girlfriend
at the time in the US and it seemed like the food there
was just destroying her health.
She could hardly put anything in her mouth
without getting some type of reaction,
whether it was a skin reaction,
her stomach hurting or something else.
It was insane.
By the time we left, she was literally down
to like six foods that she could eat.
And I don't mean like a salad or a hamburger.
I mean like six individual foods
like cauliflower for example, was one of those.
And we came to Mexico and we saw changes almost immediately.
And then slowly she began reintroducing things
into her diet and now, years later,
she can eat pretty much a normal diet,
except for a few allergies she's had her whole life.
But yeah, that was really one big reason
why we left the US.
Before coming to Mexico, I had this vision of this life
that I was going to live and love.
And what that was, was living by the beach,
spending half of my day in a hammock drinking a margarita,
like in the morning I would go, I would walk
to the local market and get some fresh produce.
I would walk to the docks to the fishermen
and buy I my fish for the day from them.
But you know, four years later, that's not the case at all.
While that does still sound appealing in some ways,
I've lived by the ocean, I've lived in small towns,
I've lived in big cities in Mexico,
I've lived away from the beach
and I've come to learn that I don't want to live
at the beach full time, mostly because of the weather.
Like for the summers, it's just too hot and humid for me.
I love visiting the beach
and I would live there in the winter
but it's not a place where I'm going to live year round.
And right now I live in Queretaro
which is pretty much the geographical center of the country.
It's at about 6,000 feet of elevation
so the weather is nice all year round
and it's just really a pleasant place to live.
And from here, I can take a 45 minute flight
to Puerto Vallarta, a two and a half hour flight to Cancun.
I can visit all these beach destinations
with a reasonably cheap and easy flight.
Yet another reason I moved to Mexico
was that I wanted to internationalize myself
because I didn't like the way the US was headed.
I wanted to go abroad and have that experience
living abroad, learning a new language,
because I knew that if things got bad in the US
and like bad enough to the point
where it forced me to leave,
that would be a really difficult transition
if I hadn't already done that
and hadn't already had these experiences abroad.
So I think today, I'm much more well prepared
to live outside of the US than I was a few years ago.
And speaking of that
I continue to be happy with that decision.
I don't feel like the US has evolved into a point yet
where I would need to leave
but I do still think it's heading in the wrong direction.
Another reason for moving outside of the US
was that if you spend at least 330 days of the year
outside of the US,
you can qualify for the foreign earned income tax exemption.
And in 2022, that's $112,000.
That means that on the first $112,000, you earn
you don't have to pay federal income tax.
Like if you're self-employed
you still have to pay the self-employment tax
which is a 15.3% tax for social security and Medicare.
But to be honest, I wasn't able to take advantage
of this for the first few years.
And it wasn't until that I spoke to professional accountants
and professional tax attorneys that they were able to
figure out a way that I would be able to qualify for it.
Another reason why I came to Mexico was that
I liked how Mexico dealt with personal freedoms.
I didn't particularly like in the US that
I could go to a bar and drink a cocktail right here,
but I couldn't drink that same cocktail
two feet over this way.
And if I did, if I was outside of the confines
of that patio of the bar, I could literally get arrested
for drinking alcohol in public.
Or like I'm waiting at a stoplight,
there's no one for a mile in either direction
and I can easily cross the street
without any danger to anyone.
However, if you do you risk getting
a couple hundred dollar jaywalking ticket.
But in Mexico you come up to a street,
you see there's no one coming from either direction,
you can cross without any danger to yourself or anyone else
and you just do it and it's no big deal
and you're not going to get a fine or anything like that.
Now let's talk about some other reasons
why I'm still living in Mexico
that I didn't have a clue about when coming to Mexico.
The first is the diversity of the country
and I'm not talking about diversity
of skin color or anything like that.
I'm talking about diversity of nature,
the diversity of all the things you can see and do and eat.
Like before coming to Mexico
I thought Mexico was beaches and desert
because that's all you see portrayed in Hollywood.
And like the only times I've been to Mexico
I was going to the beach and living in Arizona
I was next to the Sonoran desert.
So yeah, that's kind of all I knew
but Mexico is so diverse.
Like yes, it has beaches and it has desert
but it also has mountains and rainforests and jungles
and hot springs on the side of cliffs
and all sorts of stuff.
Like the nature in Mexico is amazing.
And I really, really, truly appreciate it.
And I also appreciate
that I can visit all these amazing places
without ever having to cross a border.
International travel is kind of annoying sometimes
with the anxiety that comes with border crossings.
You never know what's going to happen
and things like that
and maybe you have to get a visa to travel somewhere.
Well in Mexico, I can travel visa free, domestically,
to all these amazing places
and that is really something that has kept me living here.
And then once I get to these awesome destinations
I can visit them and do cool experiences
and stuff like that for far less money than I could do
similar experiences in the United States.
Another motivation for staying in Mexico
that I didn't realize was gonna be the case
before coming here was the hospitality.
The hospitality here in Mexico has been on another level.
I've been so appreciative of that.
I've had so many amazing experiences
and met so many great Mexican people
and I've really felt at home here.
Unfortunately, I do have to say, I think this hospitality
is changing a little bit for the worse
because I'm noticing a higher and higher percentage
of the population who don't want foreigners here at all.
And it reminds me of one of my favorite authors
who has literally driven around the world,
the entire world, twice.
Once on a motorcycle and once in a car.
And he said that it's always the same.
Whenever a country has problems,
whenever people are facing financial difficulties,
they always blame it on the foreigners
because the foreigners look funny,
they talk funny, they smell funny, their food smells funny,
like all sorts of reasons.
They're not like you and I,
so it's easy to blame it on them
rather than blaming it on anything else.
So I don't like the direction that's headed in
but I do still feel
like the level of hospitality is fairly high.
But if I continue new to see more and more
and more people not wanting foreigners here at all
well then maybe my opinion on that will change eventually.
And the last reason why I still live in Mexico
is it just feels like home.
Like it feels like this is where I belong
and for all sorts of reasons
but that might be the biggest reason of all.
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