Live Abroad

The café con leche costs thirty pesos. The apartment has a rooftop terrace with a view of a pink church that's older than the United States. My commute is the distance between the bedroom and the kitchen. I live in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, and I'm not on vacation.

This page is everything I've written about what it actually takes to move your life to another country — not the Instagram version, but the version with visa paperwork, unfamiliar grocery stores, and the specific kind of loneliness that comes from not being able to follow a joke in a second language.

Why San Miguel de Allende

My father retired here in the late 1980s. He left the States for reasons I didn't fully understand until I was old enough to want the same thing: slower mornings, warmer winters, and a cost of living that doesn't punish you for being alive.

San Miguel de Allende is a colonial city in the state of Guanajuato, about three and a half hours northwest of Mexico City. It was founded in the 1500s. The cobblestone streets are real cobblestone — not decorative, but the kind that will destroy a pair of cheap shoes in a month. The architecture is all bougainvillea and wrought iron and thick walls that keep the inside cool when it's 85 outside.

It has one of the largest expat communities in Mexico. Depending on the season, somewhere between 10% and 20% of the population is foreign-born. There are gringo restaurants and English-language bookstores and AA meetings in English. But the city is fundamentally Mexican, and the best version of living here involves learning the language and eating at the market where nobody speaks English and the tortas cost forty pesos.

I chose it for three reasons:

1. Family connection. My dad lived here. I knew the streets. I had a reference point for what daily life felt like.
2. Cost of living. A family of three can live well here for about $2,100 a month. Not survive — live well. That includes a beautiful apartment, real groceries, restaurants, and the occasional mezcal that costs less than a Starbucks back home.
3. Safety. San Miguel is consistently ranked among the safest cities in Mexico. It's a UNESCO World Heritage Site with a tourist economy that depends on the city feeling walkable and welcoming. It mostly delivers.

The Real Cost of Living

Numbers matter more than adjectives. Here's what our family of three actually spends:

• Rent: $1,200/month for a colonial-style apartment in the San Antonio neighborhood. Rooftop terrace, two bedrooms, more charm than our old place at triple the price.
• Groceries: $400/month from Mercado Ignacio Ramírez and the Tuesday market. Avocados are five for a dollar. Tomatoes from the woman who grew them.
• Utilities and internet: $150/month. Internet is reliable enough for video calls. Electricity is subsidized. Water comes from a cistern that gets filled weekly.
• Dining out: $200/month, and we eat out plenty. A nice dinner for two with wine runs about $45. A street taco costs fifteen pesos — less than a dollar.
• Everything else: $150/month for transport, phone, gym, miscellaneous. We don't own a car. Taxis across town cost 50 pesos.

Total: roughly $2,100/month. In the U.S., our expenses were closer to $3,800, and the apartment was smaller.

Visas and Bureaucracy

Mexico offers a Temporary Resident visa for people who can prove income or savings above a certain threshold. As of early 2026, the income requirement is roughly $2,800 USD per month (or equivalent savings of about $47,000 in bank statements from the last 12 months). The visa lasts one year and is renewable for up to four years, after which you can apply for permanent residency.

The process:

1. Apply at a Mexican consulate in your home country. Bring bank statements, a passport, photos, and patience. The consulate interview is the easy part.
2. Enter Mexico within 180 days of your consulate approval.
3. Complete the process at INM (Mexico's immigration office) within 30 days of arrival. This involves paperwork, fingerprints, a fee of about $250, and multiple visits to an office that operates on its own timeline.

The bureaucracy is real. It's not hostile — just slow, opaque, and occasionally contradictory. Different INM offices interpret the same rules differently. Bring printed copies of everything. Then bring more printed copies.

I've written about this process in detail. The short version: it's manageable, it takes longer than you'd expect, and a good immigration lawyer is worth every peso.

What Nobody Tells You

The travel blogs tell you about the Jardín at sunset and the rooftop bars with fairy lights. They don't tell you about the water truck schedule, the gas delivery system where a man with a truck drives through the neighborhood honking, or the fact that the mail system is essentially decorative — anything important gets shipped to a P.O. box service in Laredo, Texas.

They don't tell you that your kid will be the only gringo in the classroom for the first month, and that this is both terrifying and exactly what you wanted for them. They don't mention that you'll miss random things — not the big stuff, but the specific stuff: a particular brand of hot sauce, the sound of English spoken fast in a crowd, the way an American grocery store is organized in a pattern you understand without thinking.

And they definitely don't tell you about the first night you sit on your rooftop with the Parroquia lit up pink against the dark sky, mariachi floating up from the Jardín, a mezcal in your hand, and you realize you're not on vacation. You live here. The feeling is less euphoria and more vertigo.

That vertigo goes away. What replaces it is better.

Who This Is For

If you've ever opened Google Maps at 11 PM and zoomed in on a town you've never been to, wondering what rent costs there — you're the right reader. You don't have to be retired. You don't have to be rich. You need a remote income (or enough savings), a tolerance for bureaucracy, and the willingness to be uncomfortable for a while in exchange for a life that fits differently.

The dispatches below are field reports. First-person, real costs, real friction. The version I wish someone had written before I moved.