Talking to Your Financial Advisors About Mexico
But what will your financial advisor say?
Moving to Mexico for many people forms part of a financial strategy, a way to stretch dollars in a less expensive country. Given its financial implications, it’s natural to want to share your plans with your CPA or financial planner, especially if you want to start a business in Mexico.
In the spring of 2014, after several years of not being able to secure a full time job in my field, I set a meeting with my CPA to discuss my newly hatched plan. I’d been looking for a career position for two years following the Great Recession. It was time to do something bold.
Marina El Cid
As she looked at me gravely across the conference table in complete silence, I felt like a raving lunatic. Then, on completion of presenting my case for the move, to my total shock, she said "Give {the job search six more months}. If you don't secure anything steady by then, leave.”
Accountants generally aren’t travel adventurers. My numbers indeed may have made my case better than I did. Several other clients were also planning expat exits, she confided, although unlike me they moving as a couple, not parachuting in as a single woman.
Adversely, I received a long moment of silence when I ran it by my financial planner in Richmond. I had never realized before that you can actually hear a person shaking his head over the phone. He has many older, single female clients who had suffered financial hits similar to mine in the Great Recession. Certainly none of those staid southern women had taken this step.
A year later…
Returning a year later for my annual come-to-Jesus tax meeting, I found myself shaking with relief rather than apprehension this tie. As I looked up from the summary page of my tax return, I tried to stay as expressionless as possible. “It’s working?” I ventured. My stoic accountant leveled her gaze at me without blinking, then smiled, “Yes…...it is.”
Beginning with the first year, by staying five months in Mexico in the big house on the beach in Los Cerritos, Mazatlán and every year since, always in places with ocean or marina views, I’ve cut my living expenses in half every month I lived in Mexico, even after deducting airfare. At the same time I significantly reduced my tax bill. Leaving more in my accounts means by investments could continue to grow and a time others were dipping into theirs.
What is your job outlook in the U.S?
Are you underemployed and miserable? According to AARP reports if you're unemployed over 50 you are likely to be unemployed longer and make less than you did previously when (and if) you find another job. If you are younger and have a liberal arts education, your prospects are even bleaker. Only 2% of employers look for liberal arts majors according to Business Insider.
An orthodox financial solution to un- and underemployment: Mexico
What you have to prepare for is people, intelligent people whom you respect, telling you you’re crazy when you mention Mexico.
My view the first year in Mexico
Nobody else around me in similar circumstance had drawn the same conclusion I had, that my best bet for saving my nest egg was moving to Mexico. It was the fact no one else was doing it that scared me.
What did they know I didn’t? I was still asking that question even as I spent the next six months gazing out at the warming Pacific with its sailboats cutting across the sunset.
In the years since I arrived to Mexico however, I have found many Americans and Canadians whose thinking mirrored mine at pickleball courts, golf courses, bars and cultural events.
Looking back on taking the leap to living in Mexico, the logistics were not the problem, a checklist really. The fear was harder. Fear of what? Change? The Unknown? Bad water? Fortunately, the fear about what might happen to my bank account if I didn't take drastic action won out.
The fear drove me fast and hard down a pitch black highway of nightmares many a night. I saw hundreds of Denver sunrises as I worried about the dizzying cost of healthcare in the US, rising costs of housing in any neighborhood worth living in the cities that interested me, and the wage stagnation I'd already gotten a taste of in my job hunt. When I weighed these financial fears against what I suspected were unfounded fears about Mexico, they were far stronger than any fear of narco traficantes or language barriers.
If I hadn't for confronted irrational fears about Mexico with personal experience rather than hysterical second-hand accounts by people who'd never even lived there, I would be living that more fearful life today. So maybe you ask yourself, as I did, which are you most afraid of?
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About the author, Kerry Baker
'Kerry Baker has written four books, If Only I Had a Place" on renting luxuriously for less in Mexico, also geared toward the aspiring part-time expat as is The Mexico Solution: Saving your money, sanity, and quality of life through part-time life in Mexico” that gives you a game plan and time line along with cultural insights to life in a foreign culture.
Her most recent book is “The Lazy Expat: Healthy Recipes That Translate in Mexico” a cookbook for travelers, snowbirds and expats who wish to maintain a healthy diet in Mexico.