kcowan
Give me a museum and I'll fill it. (Picasso) Give me a forum ...
back in 2003, we started spending more than our 3 weeks provided by our timeshare (fixed time, fixed unit) because we had just retired. So we rented additional time in Old Town. First an extra month and finally an extra 10 weeks. We also had a former workmate who had retired to Mexico in 1997. He had moved to Ajijic, then Manzanillo, PV and finally Mazatlan.You live in two nice places that I’ve enjoyed visiting a number of times. I get the lifestyle benefits but, since you maintain two households, do you think you save money overall by being a snowbird in PVR? Obviously, your real estate outlay is higher but I wonder about everything else net of real estate.
We worked with him to establish COL Comparisons to Vancouver. Utilities were easy but we got a comparative on food by comparing the weekly sales fliers from Safeway and Soriana.
We concluded that the savings were 60%! Everything like property taxes and insurance was included. This was in 2004 when the C$ was 7.1 pesos. The main things that provided savings were food and beverage (as well as services like haircuts and house painting). Internet, gasoline and technology were equal or more.
So we purchased in 2007. Our yearly savings were about 40% which included more eating out and outsourcing in Mexico. Of course the current exchange rates help a lot!
Now all that is BAU. With Covid-19, all bets are off. Given the choice, we would likely choose Mexico as our home base and travel in the summer. Most expats here do that. Mexico away from the oceans is quite cool and dry in the summer. But that normal mode may take a year or two. We are prepared to drive because we would treat each trip as a different adventure since we are retired.
This is the latest we have ever stayed in Mexico and, so far, the weather has been fine. We were also lucky to sell our first condo for 6 million pesos last July just 4 months after listing it.
Carrying our Vancouver penthouse costs $60k/yr so it is not trivial!