cookj5
May 10, 2009, 8:20 PM
Post #3 of 16
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Re: [roni_smith] Holy Cow - Just two years away!!
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We came down with the idea of renting rather than buying, given how overpriced the market is in the Lake Chapala area. Thus, our decisions might or might not track with what you are planning. We decided to bring down as little as possible in the way of household goods for two reasons:
1) We already knew that most places we might want to rent were likely to be furnished and therefore a big load of stuff would limit our choices and force us to deal with storage issues and costs.
2) We made an educated guess that if we did need household goods, it would be cheaper to buy them down here than to pay to ship them from a far corner of the US to where we would be living at Lake Chapala. After two years in Mexico, I believe we were right.
3) Staying light on our possessions, even after moving to Lake Chapala, would enable us to much more easily move around the area as we found better accommodations and/or better rental costs. It would also make it easier to move to another area in Mexico if we so decided. A big load of household goods would be a huge and costly anchor to drag around behind us.
The first thing we did to prepare was to come down and spend a little time in the Ajijic area where we intended to initially land. This gave us "boots on the ground" experience to help our decision-making regarding rental availability, neighborhoods, facilities and services available here, etc.
Next we made a list of everything we thought we might have to do from initially listing our US house for sale all the way down to where to stay while we looked for a rental apartment in Ajijic after we'd moved down. We made the list as detailed as possible, breaking it down into categories and subcategories.
I then calendared out the whole list according to when I thought each item might have to be done, or what period of time it might take to do. This gave us a very realistic "to-do" list and helped us put things in the order in which they would have to be done, and to generally prioritize.
As time went by, it felt really good to check stuff off the list and see how things were developing. That was important so that we didn't get overwhelmed and discouraged by the huge number of things we had to do. It also meant that we had very few occasions where we said "if only we'd done this before that..."
All of this was based on thorough readings of books like Head for Mexico, The People' Guide to Mexico, and Judy King's Mexico Insights website. We kept these as quick references and they were invaluable in their detailed suggestions.
All these steps paid off and our transition went far smoother than I expected, largely because we had studied up on, anticipated, and planned for virtually every eventuality. While there have been occasional difficulties, there have been few surprises.
Eventually, we crossed the border with our small car packed full of the minimal possessions we felt we absolutely had to have with us: our computer equipment (communications, on-line banking, music and video capability), sturdy, sensible clothes (having already checked out the climate), a couple of boxes of favorite books (in case English language reading materials were scarce), some basic tools for household repairs, and all the documents and paperwork we could possibly anticipate we might need. And that's about it.
The only thing we now feel we would do differently would be to offload the rest of our possessions now sitting in a storage locker in our old US town. We were not absolutely certain that Mexico would work out, so we kept enough furnishings for a US apartment if we moved back. We're pretty sure we won't be going back, at least not to the US, so all that stuff is just sitting there, costing us $1000/year storage. But that's about all we would change.
Hope this was helpful, and we're glad to hear that you are soon to unchain yourself from the US rat-race and join the wonderful world of expat retirement.
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