Tag: american in ajijic
Guess What Inspired This Couple to Retire Early and Embrace Life in Ajijic, Mexico
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I have a strange feeling I just found and that's house who is the person I'll be interviewing in this video she runs a local dog rescue here in ahi Beach okay so if you watch my channel before I might have mentioned that my spirit animal is the turtle check out this tortoise back here on the wall inside you can tell that a net is definitely an animal lover and I can hear some of the animals right now by the end of this video you're going to understand why those murals made me understand that I was in the right place but we're gonna talk now to Annette her husband Mike is not around and that's gonna tell us a little bit about how they ended up in Mexico and how Jordan and Maddie were part of that story we were living in College Station Texas because my husband and I went to Texas A M and our kids were grown gone off to college and graduated and we were wondering what to do next we were only 51 and 54 at the time and I happened upon a video on YouTube I don't know why it was suggested to me I wasn't looking for videos about Mexico or retirement But A video popped up in my feed from a channel called Tangerine travels Jordan and Maddie were a young American couple that were traveling all around Mexico and they had settled in ajijic for six episodes or so it doesn't really feel like it's lost that Charming Mexico small town vibe that a lot of towns have and I watched their videos and just fell in love with with ajijic I knew that that I wanted to visit and probably wanted to retire there however my husband didn't want to retire outside of the United States so I said well let's just go for a short vacation four days go go see what it's like even though we have been into Cancun and Playa Del Carmen and the vacation parts of Mexico we had never been to the interior of Mexico and we flew down to Guadalajara and stayed in the Airbnb and I knew as soon as we got here that this was the place for me that that this was going to be my happy spot and so I was trying to patiently wait for my husband to catch up with my vision and I took a nap the second day and while I was sleeping my husband went for a walk and found an open house and the realtor that open house told him how inexpensive the property taxes were here and said oh yeah for the house he was looking at it was a pretty big house and it was a 350 us a year in property taxes and that was amazing because in Texas we were spending 1500 U.S a month on property taxes and so we really could actually retire early because of the low property tax taxes here in the lower cost of living the house costs were about the same as Bryan College Station because that's a small town in rural Texas so it wasn't a huge difference like it is for people from the northeast or Northwest U.S or California it's really cheap here compared to to those States but Texas it was pretty pretty equal and we came down and once we realized that we loved it here we said okay we have to come back for a longer trip then so that we can look at houses and we did and we found the house that we're in now we bought it and it was back about about four years ago and we had a nine month Gap until we could close because there was some snowbirds from Ontario that were living in the house and they didn't want to leave until it was the end of the winter and they could go back to Toronto and we moved down we rented a house actually we rented two different houses one and then another and then finally moved into our house house after living here about six months you know I've heard the story of moving to Mexico to rent in Little Bits before your house is ready especially with new construction or with pre-construction sometimes once you make the decision to move to Mexico you just got to get down there even though what you're purchasing is not ready so it's very common for your real estate agent to work with other agents about getting you a rental house while you're waiting for that close for us our closing took nine months it was during covid there was just government closures and things like that but it worked out perfectly for us because it was during the summer that were those months and so we actually got into it December 1 was when it closed and that's when we wanted to get into our house so sometimes things just work out perfectly in a way they don't it works out perfectly because you get to live in a different part of town in a different house for just a little bit when we moved here all the like the other expats here like in the Facebook group they had said oh you should rent first you should get a feel for the different parts of town where you fit in the best but when we were here we knew we felt very comfortable going ahead and making a decision to go ahead and buy a house and part of it was because we had several dogs we didn't want to have to bother trying to find a rental that would allow our several dogs plus my husband has a bunch of woodworking equipment which is super heavy and there's no way he would move to Texas I mean moved from Texas to Mexico without his woodworking equipment and we decided to bring my parents down they decided to move here with us and share the house because it's big enough for two two families and it would be too disruptive to move my parents twice also so oh and also we had lived in other countries before we had lived in Ethiopia and in Haiti and were already used to culture shock so we felt like Mexico culture shock would be super easy because compared to Ethiopia so Annette just mentioned her parents actually I met Dad out back and we're going to do a tour of the house and show you everything because this is a gorgeous place maybe we'll meet some dogs along the way I want to talk about her parents because I eat is a location that is known for Elder Care for people from the states or Canada and I've got a video that I'm working on about that if it's if it's ready it's going to be one of those Corners up there Annette's mom has dementia and so this is going to be a good opportunity to kind of bridge the gap between those two videos because it is becoming more and more common for adult children of parents that need extra care to move to Mexico especially to the ajijic area I want to hear a little bit more about that from from her perspective so let's talk about your parents my mom head had a stroke a few years ago before we moved here she didn't have any movement issues arise because of the stroke but she did have Aphasia which made it hard for her to choose the right words when she was talking and then she started developing dementia which is uh also what her mom had her sister had we were we were expecting that to eventually be a problem but it was really expensive in Texas to get in-home care and even though my mom and dad were living in the same town as us and Brian College Station Texas we just couldn't provide enough support and it was draining on Dad so we knew that it would be much easier for them to get good care down here and then we could get In-Home Care at a very reasonable price in fact when we started here we start first moved here I hired some aides to come and help with Mom for four dollars U.S an hour we later hired a nurse for five dollars U.S an hour in the last four years we've raised it to six dollars U.S an hour but you still can get AIDS for four dollars U.S an hour very very loving people because Mexican culture really values their elders when we moved down here Mom and Dad were a little hesitant at first because they had not explored Mexico been to Mexico before they weren't adventurous Travelers like me and my husband so we brought them down and showed them the house that we wanted to buy and share with them and they said oh yeah definitely go go for it but when they initially got here they were a little hesitant so dad's a big fisherman so we set him up with a fishing guide who took him out on Lake Chapala for the day and he went bass fishing and he loved that they caught a bunch of bass and my mom is just happy go lucky uh very easy to live with she and I looked at all the beautiful colors we had a golf car we rented the golf cart and drove around the little streets and all of the colorful houses and the beautiful flowers and just how tropical and green it is right here in the village year round I really it appealed to Mom and then we went to a place in San Juan cos a lot for dinner and they had a folklore so ballet demonstration by a bunch of young Mexicans and just it was a beautiful a beautiful performance it cinched the deal for my mom and dad they said oh yeah this is an exciting fun place at the house we bought is three blocks from the Lake Chapala Society my dad knew he wanted to go over there and get involved with the different activities and clubs and groups during the day because my dad is very social it turned out to be a great decision and not only were we able to get that help from my mom for a while it was 24 hours a day now we have it from 9 A.M to 9 00 p.m one nurse that comes during the weekdays and another comes on the weekends but you can get night nurses also now that we have them we we were so lucky to get a nurse that will also do cooking and cleaning so my mom and dad have a wonderful breakfast made by her and a wonderful American lunch she makes anything but has a recipe in English today she made chicken fried steak for them for lunch and she cleans their their Casita every day so I just feel so pampered we have another we have a gardener also who's four dollars an hour who comes to take care of the yard every day and because it's a big yard so most people have a gardener once or twice a week but I just feel like I'm living like a queen yet it's costing it's costing so little compared to to like in the United States well we're going to talk more about this gorgeous house and also how much they paid for it and things like that what their property taxes are before we do that I want to talk about the dogs because that is a big thing here uh in a nuts life and really in a lot of people's lives who are down here a lot of people end up volunteering with dogs also Lake Chapala Society uh that she mentioned where her dad volunteers there's a video that I'm working on about that too so I buy one of those in the corner too watch for that video but let's talk about the dogs and how she's gotten involved with dogs here each time that I came down to Mexico which is four times before we moved here I volunteered with a different organization to see what it was like and so where I might be able to fit in and I discovered that I really wanted to help dogs down here I did not do dog rescue in the United States I had adopted rescued dogs but never done day-to-day rescue work with dogs but when I came down to visit I saw how many dogs were in need and also on the Facebook groups you always see people saying I just found this precious dog on the side of the road please won't someone take care of it I already have five dogs I can't take anymore I started volunteering with Carrie LeClaire the director of bon voyage dog rescue when I first got here she was just a Dynamo and doing it all herself but running herself ragged so I said what can I do to help and I gradually got more and more involved in doing the a lot of the administrative work that she was overwhelmed with some fostering but the administrative work which is kind of harder to sometimes get people who who want to do tedious paperwork so I I got into that and then Carrie eventually got to the point where boom garage was just bigger than she was comfortable with she preferred having a smaller organization and it had grown a lot and so she decided to move to busurias about a year ago and asked me to take over bon voyage as the Director and I did and just all consuming I I love doing volunteer work but really the dog rescue work just ended up taking over my life I didn't think that I was going to be really busy when I was down here I thought oh I'll maybe volunteer two hours a day but it ended up being much more than that and it doesn't have to be there's a lot of people that know how to say no um and have a nice balance of play and volunteer work I love doing it I did adopt of children when I was in the United States I had orphanages in Ethiopia and Haiti and Kenya my husband and I have the six adopted children and so my husband would not let me do child adoption down here I saw the meat and I said honey let's let's do International adoptions or at least an orphanage and he said no way we did that for way too long in the U.S we need you need a break from that I need a break from that so I said okay I'm gonna rescue dogs then so I still uh sometimes miss working with orphanages but that's okay I can do that a little bit on the side Mama Cleo's ran out of food last week so I went shopping for a bunch of groceries and took it over to them Tigger is subscribe to this channel so if you're not already subscribed be sure to click the Subscribe button the Bell icon and all dogs I think are kind of taking the place of children since I used to have six kids my house was busy all the time and now it's busy with dogs instead of children and they give me an outlet for my love in nurturing and I think that's a lot true for a lot of the people down here after they've retired they want something someone to love on and that ends up being a dog and cats also but for me it was dogs Okay so this video might be going a lot of different directions but and I just talked about her hobbies and I was like well what about your husband's hobbies and that got to be a bit of a story and so I'm going to have her tell that story to you about a year and a half ago I got a call from a local hospital to tell me that my husband was there in the hospital and I rushed over there to find out that he had been in an accident on his e-bike his electric bike he and a friend were coming back from lunch in Chapala both on their e-bikes on the secret Pista the bike lane between the two Villages and Mike my husband hadn't been hit by anything but I don't know for some reason he fell off his bike and he was probably going too fast he wasn't wearing a helmet he had a helmet he usually wore his helmet he didn't wear it that time he he had no abrasions on his hand so he did not break his fall at all and all of the force went right here and it broke his skull in several places his nose his cheek he had a brain bleed on his left frontal lobe and the hospital here which was San Antonio Hospital is where the ambulance took him and they had done a CT scan by the time I got there and said he's going to need surgery the shards of bone from his skull have gone into his brain his brain is swelling we've got to do something and they said we'll get the brain surgeon to come from Guadalajara and this was around three o'clock in the afternoon well by five o'clock in the afternoon I threw was still no progress on getting the surgeon here so I got on the phone with the surgeon and the surgeon said oh no I have no plans to go there they didn't tell me I have to go there except you really should come to Guadalajara for brain surgery rat they don't have the microscope that I need in their surgery room come to Guadalajara oh the San Antonio Hospital people were not happy with that because I think they were hoping to get the money from the surgery in the hospital stay there here in San Antonio but I said no I'm taking him to Guadalajara then and they wouldn't even give me uh a number of their Ambulance Service I had to call a friend say please help me find an ambulance that can take my husband to Guadalajara so I did I found I found one they came I had to pay like fifteen hundred dollars for the CT scan before they would let my husband leave the hospital to go to Guadalajara so I put that on my credit card drove with the ambulance driver to the hospital in Guadalajara where the surgeon had told me that she practices when I got there they said okay we're gonna need a 4 000 deposit on your credit to Church his treatment here and do the brain surgery and I had just put 1500 on my card and I have a 5 000 daily limit on my credit card not I didn't know that but my four thousand wouldn't go through so I said please I have a house in ajijig I promise I can pay this money just do the brain surgery and the fortunately the surgeon went to bat for me and said okay we'll we'll do it but you have to pay tomorrow so they they did the surgery at the teaching Hospital Guadalajara has wonderful medical facilities I felt very confident in the surgeon's ability in fact after the surgery she came out and she showed me her cell phone and it was my husband's brain with his skull folded back and all of these pins to hold things together and she was so proud to show me the picture of his brain which is okay with me because I have a medical background and it didn't make me upset or throw up but uh it was a just a very different different experience from being in the U.S because you have to stay there in the hospital with your family member or friend when you go to a hospital in Mexico the nurses don't provide all of the little care things that they do in the United States so I slept there in the hospital room the nurses did not speak English the doctor spoke English I tried to use Google Translate but we had some really difficult times in the middle of the night with nurses trying to do stuff that he he didn't want them to do he was so out of it after the surgery anyways so I started also during the surgery texting my family and saying please can you send me some money because I have to pay tomorrow morning four thousand dollars for the surgery and my credit card for some reason is not working because I didn't realize I had maxed out my daily limit and so my brother sent uh like five thousand dollars by PayPal which I've been transferred into my oh it was such such a problem Oh and then one of my friends that I had met down here she had visited here she and her husband were in Houston and I texted her when it happened I said please pray for my husband he's in surgery and she said what can I do and I said well I need four thousand dollars by tomorrow morning and she sent me money too and so it was I mean normally I didn't think there would be any problem paying for this but I now know I must always have a buffer in my Mexican bank account or a credit card with plenty of space on it that will let me pay pay for medical emergencies because you must pay before you get service fortunately he was just there for three days the total bill was fifteen thousand dollars for brain surgery and three CT scans and ambulance service and he's fine now it took him about a year to get over the traumatic brain injury but he's fine now and I'm I feel it was so stupid for not having Insurance lined up in advance he had been rejected for insurance when we first came here because we just looked at Mexican insurance but Mike has high blood pressure and high cholesterol and that was no go I mean I thought that was a tiny issue I thought most people had those issues but that eliminated his ability to get regular insurance and two weeks before the accident I had gone to another insurance place which is known as a U.S insurance company that will cover accidents in Mexico and I had not yet turned in my paperwork and paid paid for that insurance so I now have a buffer in my bank account I haven't gotten the insurance yet but I'm going to but it's so cheap here some people just decide to self-insure because it's it's so inexpensive compared to us medical costs these guys are younger than 65 so Medicare is not an option and I'm gonna have some videos about that coming up also tomorrow I'm going to be going to a place called Lakeside Medical Group it seems like what their their deal is is they will take your U.S insurance including Medicare Advantage and sort of translate it into the way that Mexican Insurance works this is kind of a new idea Lakeside might be the only people doing this and it's not available all the way across Mexico but I'll know a lot more tomorrow about that but it's very common for foreigners to self-insure because I mean brain surgery for 15 000 US Dollars that's yeah that's kind of amazing the problem is when you have something even more serious someone in my town of el centenario had also had a bicycling accident he got hit by a car and I'm not sure if he ever woke up but it was six or eight months of surgeries at in-home care and lots and lots I think his widow said that the cost came up around 130 thousand dollars for six months worth of all that intensive care so in the US that would have probably been in the millions but they didn't have insurance most people who are able to move to Mexico fifteen thousand dollars for brain surgery is it's not chump change but it's something most people could afford but 130 000 is big I want to do more videos about insurance there'll be more coming Medicare Advantage plans if you are retired at a kind of a more normal age I guess they can cover emergency surgery in Mexico so there's ways to cover it it can be a little bit complicated okay so it is time to transition to that tour of this beautiful house this is Tigger is one of our Fosters right right now for bon voyage so Tigger is here at my house and he is super energetic young poodle adolescent poodle so he may be jumping up during our tour walk us through the front door and walk us around the house okay first we have the living room which is very very upholstered sponge chair holstered big overstepped chair it was only 200 U.S for both the fabric and the reupholstery work and he did it in 24 hours for us so I was really amazed and we said okay go ahead and do the sofas then we have my husbands and his father's Texas Aggie boots over here by the fireplace they were in the corps of cadets and they were bronzed after they finished the course so we had to bring those down here beyond the living room we have the dining room the formal dining room but we really don't eat in there very much except for Christmas and Thanksgiving and parties we have a guest bedroom over here which is kind of small so we don't use it very often and the guest bathroom and the office is over on the opposite side of the living room and we have a we have so many fireplaces I think we have five fireplaces in the house but we never use them well we maybe use one of them most of them are non-functioning anyways and there's a safe in the fireplace over here the no one including the previous owner knows the combination too so it just sits in the fireplace and someday it'll probably end up end up having some sort of interesting thing inside if we go through the kitchen over here we'll be moved in there were the shelves and the cabinets on the left but there was no island and there were no cabinets here on the right where there there are now but my husband likes to build Furniture that's his hobby so he built these kitchen cabinets to add on and then this uh Island is just a an old piece of furniture which we repurposed one thing that I really miss about cooking in the U.S in my U.S kitchen is the oven because in Mexico almost everyone uses gas instead of electricity for some reason this gas stoves down here do not have a heating element on the top I had never had a gas stove in the states so I didn't know if that this was a normal problem and so the stove will not brown things when I bake so when I make a turkey or cookies or bread there's no brown browning on the top so I may give in and and get a dual dual fuel oven so that I can have the heating element on the top but still cook with gas because gas is less expensive than electricity here and we're one of my few friends that that don't have solar power solar panels yet that was on our to-do list we'll get solar panels eventually but right now we pay like 150 us a month for electricity in the summertime which is when it's the highest because we have two air conditioners one and my parents Casita and one in my Casita and that's every month or every two months uh we get it every two months but it breaks down to 150 a month so it's a 300 bill every two months electricity pricing in Mexico is really very interesting because it's all through CFE through it's it's government run electricity but the rates are different by what month you're in and also where you live so electricity in La Paz especially in the summer is much cheaper than electricity here in ajijic at the same time of the year so it really has to do with how much you need electricity they'll they'll lower the cost of it people who do have newer homes who have a lot of air conditioners and things like that it starts to make sense especially in these higher tariff zones to install solar let's continue moving from the kitchen into whatever's next next this is our outdoor living room and it has another mural by the same muralist that did our others and we use this for watching television last year I had Zumba classes for me and my friends where we watched YouTube I was during covet we watched it during covet and exercised outside and watched the YouTube videos and then of course over here to the left is our pool we have a pool room a bathroom an outdoor kitchen we actually leave the doors open all the time year round the doors are open I really only use air conditioning usually in May and June because that's when it's hottest and then the rest of the year I just use fans and it does get cool for in the winter time so that I put on flannel sheets and flannel pajamas and it's a nice change my parents Casita is up here at the very back of the yard there's actually two Casitas my parents mainly live in the left one the right one is has dad's exercise equipment and a Murphy bed that my husband made in there for when guests come when my mom had a Night Nurse she slept in that room also above us up here on the second floor is the guest Suite we have a big bedroom with a high ceiling and a canopy bed and a guest bath and then above that is a Mirador which is like top floor balcony and the mirror door has really nice views of the mountains and we have electricity up there we installed that after we moved here my my husband he had to bring his tools so the first thing we built was we made the garage area into his Workshop so it's like a three-car garage space that is now for all of his woodworking tools we also built a roof on the top of the mirror door because it was really hot without the roof there's a bar refrigerator and drinks up there when we have volunteers come down to help bon voyage such as to be flight escorts to take dogs up to Toronto and Montreal and Vancouver Seattle Portland we have them stay for free and our guest suite and the mirror door and they can just relax for up to a week and enjoy their time here before they take dogs back this one needs a needs a flight you need a flight don't you please okay um over there is the master bedroom where you see all those dogs up against the window wanting to get out so we're not gonna go in the master bedroom but it's pretty spacious um it has big master bath we just took out the old tub and put in a new tub I'm so happy to have it to have a lot of houses down here don't have tubs you only have showers so it's a luxury now for me to have a tub so Annette did promise that she's going to share the price that they paid five years ago for this and that's gonna be a pre-covered price and that means it's going to be much less than it is now prices in Mexico really went up during covid because everyone in the states in Canada realized that they could either retire or work remotely and so the there's a lot more demand down here now but we're not going to do that until Annette tells us how you can get involved with her dog rescue non-profit because that is important before we talk about the dogs I have to tell you about the mosquitoes during the rainy season the mosquitoes can be pretty bad down here and I have not had my yard fumigated for mosquitoes yet this rainy season so they're all around us right now and the first year that I was here during the rainy season I got Dengue Fever as did my dad and our gardener they come from standing water not all of the mosquitoes carry Dengue but it is endemic here the government sprays for it but still all it takes is one mosquito to bite you the bad thing about Dengue is that it lowers your platelets which causes your blood to clot so you can actually die from Dengue and it's not normally the first time you get Dengue but it's on a subsequent case of dengue because you can get it multiple times there are I think three variants of it made me feel like my bones and joints were oh it's very very painful and there's nothing to do the doctor said okay well you need to take paracetamol which is sort of like Tylenol and mango leaves or something some traditional remedy you need to have your blood tested every few days to see if your platelets are staying high enough but it took three weeks of being flat on my back in bed to recover from that and in the meantime my my appetite was nothing which was the only plastic so I because I lost a lot of weight during it but my dad who's already super skinny he lost a lot of weight when he had Dengue and he couldn't afford to lose weight so he actually afterwards I started a contest contest with his nurse with Mom's nurse so that she would get paid extra money for every pound he gained each week so she would make all sorts of sweets and fattening things to get him back in shape okay that's for for the mosquitoes you have to wear bug spray as for the dog bags and we always need more volunteers with bon voyage dog rescue we have two rescues out past Chapala east of japala where we need people to help watch dogs and play with the puppies and socialize them we really really need foster parents who can keep a dog at their home um usually only for four weeks until the dog flies to an adoptive family of North and also people who want to do administrative work or social media publicity marketing to help get the word out and cities where there are there's shortages of dogs from Texas I never knew there were shortages of dogs but we actually have a pretty great demand for dogs in the Canadian cities that we fly to which is mainly Vancouver Montreal and Toronto and in the Northeast and the Northwest United States there's sometimes the shortage of dogs and so we fly them up there also we also need people who will fly the dogs you buy five dogs if you're going on Volaris or seven dogs if you're going on Aeromexico and we take you to the airport and check you in and check the dogs in and your med at the other and up north where people take the dogs from you um it's really wonderful to see the dogs meet their adoptive families and that all the happy happy tears at the airport up North but we love having volunteers and it's a great way to meet other people with similar interests so I love that idea if you're thinking about moving to ajijic this might be a good introduction is just to do a a visit to take some dogs North so do something good with your trip along with learning about ajijic and maybe staying in the extra room here that's a great way to try out uh just a little bit or do one of those exploratory trips if you've followed my channel you know that Kat and I kind of made a spur of the moment decision to buy a house in Mexico a lot of people do do suggest that you rent somewhere and really get some exposure to it but so many people have been really happy including us all of us to just jump right in so don't worry you can always back out in the future you can say you know what this Mexico thing's not for me sell your house down here especially in the market now you can definitely sell a house down here no problem and move back to the United States move back to Canada move back to Europe I would say though do it now make it happen make it happen when you're younger because you can live down here so much less expensively than you can in this States so you can retire early and that's what this channel is all about it's getting to Mexico before that typical retirement age so hopefully that will be in your near future speaking of buying houses I know you guys want to know how much this house cost so let's get the big reveal before we wrap up the video we bought this house in 2019 moved in in 2020 for 850 000 plus a fifty thousand dollar furniture package we could have just said take all the furniture with you but there are some really big pieces that we wanted and so we went ahead and said we want this particular group of furniture for 50 000.
Because we shared the cost with my parents it ended up being a really good buy and that is a great idea the idea of sharing with your parents because the cost down here for their care is less so everyone it's kind of a win-win-win-win-win and and it's nice because it made this property a possibility to have two families living on it it might sound like a big number for Mexico but I think it is also we're right here on Lake Chapala in a place with some of the best weather in the world everything else Healthcare is inexpensive we've already covered that also just going out to eat is inexpensive so once you get here your costs are low your taxes are low all that is great and a house like this in somewhere that would be similar would probably be somewhere in California really you know that's kind of the closest thing I would say and it would be a heck of a lot more expensive one of the ways that we were able to retire at 51 and 54 was because we had saved a lot in our 401K my husband worked as an electrical or a mechanical engineer for 30 years for the same company and there are some loopholes of how to get money out of your 401k without that 10 penalty I did not know all the detail our financial advisor was the one who told us about it but it really did work when we're able to get monthly payments sort of like we're still drawing a salary but it's coming out of our 401k and there's no penalty to do that so I hope you enjoyed this interview as much as I enjoyed doing it and seeing this home and learning about all the different things there's so much more showed up in this interview than I expected and I've got other videos from the Lake Chapala area like the Lake Chapala Society if that one's ready is going to be up here and also about medical care or Elder Care in Mexico and particularly in ajijic so I'll see you in those videos hasta luego
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