federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour-and it’s double that in some states-meaning if workers can send even a portion of their daily earnings home to family in Mexico, it represents a huge sum.Įxpats occupy a position of extreme privilege, particularly retirees able to use the culmination of a lifetime of working in a more expensive and better paid economy. It comes down to social inequality for Mexicans and the sheer amount of money available to those who work in the U.S. Although it’s mostly online trolls asking it, it’s a good question and one worth answering. I am often emailed a question that’s roughly this question. Before the inflationary pressure of the past couple of years, it sat at just $6.20 per day in 2020. In fact, try this on for size: The Mexican government raised the 2023 minimum wage to 207 pesos (about $10.82) per day. The average annual wage in Oaxaca, for example, is around $10,500-that’s an average and many Mexicans live on less than that sum (particularly indigenous and rural populations). Expats, retirees, and digital nomads often love living in Mexico because of proximity to the U.S.-all of the country’s bigger cities offer direct flights to the States, and they’re affordable too!īudget, however, is the driving impetus for a lot of expats moving to Mexico. This is important to understand, because many of the most popular expat spots are about that far removed from the extreme cartel violence you might read about. It’s located below most of the United States, so imagine driving from Texas to Seattle and you have an idea of what it might take to get to another area of Mexico.

Relevant Links & Resources for Moving to Mexicoįirst off, Mexico is a big country.

What Did Daily Life Look Like in San Pancho, Mexico?.Cost of a Month of Living in San Pancho, Mexico.Average Cost of Living Across Mexico: $600 – $2,000.So, with that in mind, this post below outlines my my expat stints across Mexico-from a tiny beach town on the Pacific coast to the food capital of Oaxaca. It’s close to the U.S., the food is both terrific and familiar, and it’s fairly easy to make the move. And Mexico is often the first place American retirees and digital nomads consider when looking at places overseas with a lower cost of living. Long story short, that post went viral and a million visitors have read about the $650 baseline costs to live in Thailand.Ĭlearly the financials are interesting.

As the months passed, I was so surprised by how affordable living there was that I shared a cost of living post … mostly for the readers in the A Little Adrift community who had written me over the years wondering how they could afford to live or retire abroad. Thailand was the first time I stayed put in one spot and became a semi-expat.

Then I lived in Mexico twice-two different spots-for roughly a year. Before settling on living in Spain, I lived in Chiang Mai, Thailand for five months and loved it enough to move back the following year. I have lived and worked from around the world for more than 15 years.

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