Do you know the expression “the cobbler\u2019s children have no shoes”? The same is true of expat service providers \u2014 I\u2019ve been too cavalier about securing our own residency while I focused on other people\u2019s moves. Here\u2019s what it cost me, and why you should do as I say and not as I do!<\/p>\n
After visiting M\u00e9rida on two scouting trips in 2022, we decided to move here. We scheduled an appointment at the Mexican consulate in Atlanta in mid-November of that year. It wasn\u2019t an easy process, and I didn\u2019t have any professional partners yet who could give me pointers. We had a lot of trouble using the online portal and couldn\u2019t get a response to emails. Someone in a Mexico expat Facebook group reported success using a particular email address, so I DM\u2019ed them and asked for it. I wrote to the email, and someone responded with the info that new appointments were released on Thursdays. I spent the next Thursday refreshing the screen like I was trying to score Taylor Swift tickets \u2014 not easy when the site required multiple complex captchas at every refresh \u2014 but I scored an appointment!<\/p>\n
That next Wednesday, we drove to Atlanta and spent the night to get an early start the next day. Brett was qualifying by income, and I was qualifying by savings, so we printed six months of bank statements and pay stubs for him and 12 months of IRA statements for me (or so I thought). We snagged passport photos that morning in Atlanta and headed to the consulate.<\/p>\n
The process there was really easy. We sat with the immigration agents while they went over our statements. I\u2019d accidentally forgotten to print one month, so they let us run to a FedEx office and print it. We were so nervous trying to navigate directions, spotty WiFi, and a million passwords to get the documents, but we did and made it back to the consulate. They told us to come back one hour later and pay $45, and then we got our visas! (See our happy faces above!)<\/p>\n
If the visa story ended there, I\u2019d be several thousand dollars richer and lying by the pool instead of typing this post, but it absolutely does not.<\/p>\n
After you get your visa, you have six months to cross the border into Mexico, then 30 days to register at the local immigration office. We planned to move in April 2023, about five months into our window. That March, Brett\u2019s job changed their work abroad policy and wouldn\u2019t let him go. We decided that Brett would come work full-time with me at Expatsi. We’d postpone the move and spend the next few months trying to grow the business so it could support us in Mexico.<\/p>\n
Our visa would expire by then, of course, but it was so easy to get residency, and now we knew how to do it! What could happen?<\/p>\n
After a few months of hard work and investments into Expatsi, we could see that it would eventually be able to support us. We planned to make the move in Spring 2024. Our move date would be just a month after we got back from the first Expatsi scouting trip<\/a> to Spain & Portugal.<\/p>\n During that month, we sold most of our belongings through a yard sale and Facebook Marketplace. We donated everything else except what we were taking with us (our Instant Pot, hot weather clothes, and the pets) and a few items we put in a tiny storage unit. We did home repairs and repainted and staged the house. It hit the market the day that we crossed the U.S.-Mexico border.<\/p>\n We could have also gone back to Atlanta during that month to get new residency visas, but there were a few problems: Brett no longer had a salary because Expatsi wasn\u2019t paying him (sorry Brett!), and I had changed banks when our advisors said they couldn\u2019t handle our accounts anymore if we moved to Mexico. I was nervous about trying to explain the changeover halfway through the year.<\/p>\n We decided to pursue a path called Regularization, or RNE, to get our visas. This was a Covid-era program that allowed tourists stuck in Mexico to become residents. You didn\u2019t have to show any income info \u2014 just a visa stamp prior to 2023 and a recent, expired tourist stamp. We planned to move now and work it out later.<\/p>\n Now, I should point out here that \u201cmoving now and working it out later\u201d is a viable strategy, if you\u2019re prepared for what working it out later entails. I do think it can be worthwhile to get out of the country and then explore options if it solves other problems you\u2019re facing in the moment. You don\u2019t have to solve every problem all at once \u2014 just do what you can.<\/em><\/p>\n When you cross the border into Mexico, you get a tourist stamp that\u2019s usually valid for six months, but this timeline is up to the discretion of the border agent. In our case, we also brought our car, so we got a temporary import permit (TIP) and paid a $400 deposit. The permit is issued for the same length as the tourist visa. One problem that I hadn\u2019t been able to solve was this: I needed to overstay my tourist visa to get residency. However, if the car overstayed the TIP, it was considered illegal AND I\u2019d lose $400. BUT I could only renew the TIP if I renewed the tourist visa. And if I renewed the tourist visa, I couldn\u2019t convert it to residency\u2026<\/p>\n Anyway, all that turned out to be moot, because Brett and I needed to leave Mexico occasionally. Every time we came back, Immigration would give us ANOTHER six month tourist visa! It was nice to keep getting these little extensions at dealing with the problem, but it was also pushing the solution further out of reach.<\/p>\n I was really starting to sweat how to get a shorter tourist visa so it would expire already! Whenever we flew, we always got six months automatically, even when we asked for shorter periods (they\u2019re onto us). I\u2019d heard the possibility that we could get a shorter tourist visa by driving to Belize, but I wasn\u2019t sure how to drive there and hadn\u2019t researched it.<\/p>\n I had the idea to take a ferry from Mexico to one of the islands in Belize. That way, the car could stay in Mexico, but we could cross the border. We made a plan to do that in October 2024, right after we renewed the TIP at the border, but a tropical storm came and shut down the ferry! Instead, we stayed on the Mexican mainland and just renewed the TIP.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s a little timeline:<\/p>\n The week after we renewed the TIP in October was the U.S. election. After that, we were so swamped that we could barely breathe. I learned that you could get the regularization process expedited for $3,000 per person and confirmed the info with our legal partner at MexLaw<\/a>, but balked at the price. I decided to try my Belize plan again.<\/p>\n\n