Living in Mexico on $130 Monthly Pension

Welcome to Guadalajara. In this video, we will talk to Rennie, who lives on a $130 Canadian

pension

. By the way, she does not live in this neighborhood and that Canadian

pension

is not her only source of income because she has created a way to collect income in ways that may be interesting so that she can live off that small pension while

living

in a much nicer neighborhood that is in Guadalajara. This is actually the neighborhood I stay in. This is the limit of Colonial America. I thought colonial Americana was going to be really nice. I'm actually on one side, I mean, I'm on the not so good side, but even on the good side, I'm not that impressed, I think it was rated number one. neighborhood of the world by a group of hipsters and party people in their 30s.

But let's go across town to meet Rennie and see what she's doing to fill the gaps in her pension and what life is like here in Guadalajara, including a tour of her house. So now I'm on Rennie's roof in, what is this neighborhood? Mayor Gardens. Jardines Mayor neighborhood of Guadalajara. So let's meet Rennie. This is me, Rennie. I was born in Canada, in Labrador, believe it or not, in a community that only arrives by plane or boat and since then I have lived in more than 55 homes in 10 countries and have worked in six. And this is my last stop.

So let's delve into the origin of this video, about

living

on a 130 Canadian pension in Mexico and find out how money complements that to make it possible. So let's delve into the topic of money. The right of the stick. I lived in Canada until I was thirty, worked a little in Canada, had my kids in Canada, got married, da, da, da, da, and then I left. When I left Canada, I paid off all my debts, which was my university mainly, and I came out debt-free, with no money, but debt-free. So now I live on a pension of about 130 US dollars.

Nobody can live off that. You can't get a bed for that. So I bought my house here after working abroad and bought a house that had rental potential. I have a full time Mexican style rental for one year on the ground floor of the property. And then I have my apartment on the second floor. And in addition to my apartment, I have a vacation rental. Originally, this hall passed from there to everyone. On the other side of the house, I had this wall put up that separates my living room from the one next door, which ends up being the vacation rental.

And so they have done it, I have created this vacation rental in my house, living room, kitchen, bedroom and bathroom. So it's a great idea. Rennie took what were two units and turned them into three by simply creating a section of his house, giving him the vacation rental income. And between the two rentals and teaching business English online and in person. Everything works and it's surprising how well it works. So let's talk about what are the numbers that make it work. For my expenses. The house taxes for a year are, I think they are up to 5000 something pesos, but since I am old they give me a discount and they are 4000 something something, and if you pay them at the beginning of the year for the whole year, you get another discount.

So that's what I do. You can also pay your water for a year and my water for a year for this entire house for all the rents is like 2000 pesos. Electricity, I pay my electricity and the vacation rental, and then the rental downstairs pays for his own electricity. My electricity costs between 400 and 600 pesos every two months. Those are your big expenses. I have an ME BC card, which allows me to cycle around the city with the urban bicycle system. And it's another 400 or so, four 50 pesos a year. I have an old age card for my metro, which gives me half price on the train, on the subway, on the buses it also helps me a little, and since I am older, I can also get health laboratory material at a discount at Salud Dig .

So things are pretty good. And we'll get back to the topic of money before this interview ends, but first I want to make sure you click the subscribe button if you're interested in moving to Mexico from the US, Canada, or somewhere else. I have a lot of great videos for you, but let's get back to the interview. Let's talk about healthcare. This is the first time I think I've talked to someone from Canada about healthcare because we usually look at people from the US and how it works, Medicare Advantage premiums and things like that. Let's talk about what Rennie is doing in health coverage.

Because I have worked here in Mexico, I have the Mexican I M S S E S, I paid it for about 14 years, so I have the right to use it. It's not the best in the world, but it's functional for the basics. Apart from that, you have to have money set aside to pay for things that come up and are not that expensive. You can go to Dr Simmy or Aurora either for free or for less than 50 pesos for minor things, like if you have a bad cold and need something, that kind of thing. Actually, healthcare here is not as expensive as some people think.

I had surgery here and was fine in a great hospital, great stuff. I can't get coverage, additional coverage unless I have a lot of money because I'm a type two diabetic and everything can be listed as, "No, we can't cover you for that because you're diabetic." Oh no, we can't cover you for that. You're diabetic, so it's not even worth having. So I'm self-covering. I use another system that is pre-hospital coverage, I think it is less than 2000 pesos a year. I can call them, they will come to my house with a doctor and treat me. If I need to be taken to the hospital, they will transport me everything covered from my 2000 pesos.

They also have a clinic you can go to. If I fall in the middle of the street somewhere I call them, they transport me for nothing worth having as a backup and as a diabetic, if something happens I can just call and they show up. Above. So let's go back to money and paying taxes in Mexico again. And this is kind of a personal nuisance in terms of what you're supposed to pay to Mexico, what you're supposed to pay to Canada or the United States and all that, and how people may be getting around the tax law here. , perhaps even without knowing it because Rennie has a clear income in Mexico.

I want to hear what your opinion is on this and how paying taxes works here. Ah, taxes. They are very funny. In Mexico, as a businessman, you must pay your taxes

monthly

. That means you need to send your receipts

monthly

and make sure you've done your invoices and gotten everything cleared up. I have an accountant. I'm not going to do that every time I try it myself. There is a button that I have missed. It's not that complicated, but you really need to know what you're doing. So I have an accountant that helps me and it works well.

The tax thing is really weird. I pay taxes on the rent. I don't pay taxes on my teaching because English classes aren't taxable for some reason, and my taxes are about 260 pesos a month, which is actually almost nothing. I'm very happy to know that Rennie is making money in Mexico and paying taxes in Mexico, and it's pretty clear that that needs to happen. What's not so clear is when you're a part-time resident or a full-time resident, things like that. I think it is important that those of us who move to Mexico pay taxes. Clearly we are paying property taxes to pay sales tax, but if we owe income taxes, we should pay them too.

We live in this country and use the services of this country. Many people in the United States are angry because people from other countries come and are in the country. Illegal. I could rant about this, but this is just my call to make sure that as foreigners in Mexico, we are doing the right thing to pay our taxes here. But let's move on to how much Spanish Rennie speaks. Ah, Spanish. I left Canada practically without speaking Spanish and arrived in my first country, which was Paraguay in South America. And there were no people who spoke English.

You learned to point and shoot, that's what I want. What is it? And over the years, I learned Spanish along the way. My accent changes depending on the country I was in. But now, in Mexico, I don't master it. I'll probably never be competent. I have a good vocabulary. I understand most of what I hear, but the problem is always saying it. Not being able to put the sentences together, not being able to connect all those verbs in the right way. Yes, it's probably a bit brutal, but most Mexicans appreciate it so much that I'm trying.

I'm using what I know, even when it comes out backwards. They are really good. And if you listen carefully, most Mexicans will repeat what you said, but they will repeat it correctly. So if you listen when you have slaughtered it, they will repeat it to you, but in the right way and you learn, I will always make mistakes, but you learn. So I think Randy understands a lot of Spanish better than I do because actually, while we were sitting here, one of the trucks went by that he advertised first that it was like tamales and then there was another ad, anything made of plastic. .

And he did a very good job of understanding through that what they were saying. And that's one of the things that's starting to be really difficult for me: I could understand it if it was told to me clearly, but when it's a speaker, things can be very difficult to understand. Also, there aren't as many expats in Guadalajara as I expected. And in this neighborhood I don't think there are many. So let's hear more about the neighborhood and also about this house. Hardin Alde. It was a suburb built around the 1970s. This house and all the houses in the area are from that era.

In fact, I saw a photo of this area before and it was nothing. It was farmland. So this is kind of a new old subdivision. It is a very middle class neighborhood. The houses are well maintained. You don't see any paint label on the case. It's an older neighborhood in the sense that the people are older, they bought their houses back in the seventies. If they are still alive, they are still in their homes. Their children have grown up and some of them have returned to the neighborhood. It feels like a neighborhood. We know each other neighbors, or we know each other by name or we know each other by sight.

Some of my neighbors that I hang out with sometimes and they take care of me, they check on me, they look, is everything okay? Yes, I haven't seen you. Yes, I had a cold. I was in the house, whatever. And that's really nice. It is not the gringo bubble of Chipotle pack, Americana, Chapa, cia. It's more Mexican. It is a Mexican neighborhood. I have my market. I have everything I could want within a maximum of 15 minutes walk from my house. I chose to be on the second floor because I like the sunlight. And the only thing I felt when I saw this house was that I saw potential.

It had been abandoned for about five years. It was leaking. The upstairs living room had, well, most of the upstairs had wall-to-wall carpet. And if anyone has ever been to Mexico, you know that wall-to-wall carpet is an absolute no-no with a leaky roof, full of mold, and just plain neglect. But the structure of the house was good. So I bought this house for 2 million Mexican pesos, which was probably around 125. American Canadians, I'm sure, somewhere in there, 2017. And obviously I had to do some repairs, but surprisingly the biggest repair was repairing the roof . . Other than that, the house was pretty good.

Since then I have done many other things, but the house itself is a good solid structure, two floors and a full roof terrace. And the rooftop was what sold me. I am the only rooftop in my neighborhood that uses the rooftop. Everyone else has a roof, but they don't use it. I chose to live on the second floor. As you go up the stairs, there are two doors. The first door is mine and we enter my living room, which has an eclectic mix of things from all the places I've lived. And most of them, I either know the artist or I've seen them create whatever.

It's not just art, it's art that has a connection. The next room we pass through is my office. And I love the fact that my office is separate and this is where I do a lot of my online teaching. It is very comfortable and looks great in the kitchen. The kitchen is huge. This used to be a kitchen and patio. It would have been open to the ground floor. It would have been a terrace. But shortly after constructing this building they closed the terrace. Now I have this huge kitchen and skylights throughout the house because I like the extra light.

And my kitchen has all these plants, and it makes it really nice to live in. The original bathroom. It had a really funky tiled bathtub, which we had to take out just because nothing was working anyway. So now it's a nice new modern bathroom with seating area. And I have a second bathroom with a living area and two bedrooms. Thus each bedroom has its own bathroom. So the resistance pi is the ceiling. The roof is my saving grace. The roof saved me through Covid. It was a place where we could meet and safely, the air flows.

No one had to wear masks. We could have dinner here and feel normal. And it has evolved. It started with nothing and now has two different coatings. It has different planting areas. Here are tons of my herbs that I use in cooking. The tea we are going to drink today is made from cron, which is lemon verine. Lots of things on my ceiling. The tea is very good and I'm sure I'm jealous because it's raining like hell here. It would be very difficult to have so many pots because you would have to water them maybe even twice a day to keep them alive.

So different parts ofMexico, different climates. It rains right here and everything is very green. So, a warning upon warning: right now it's rainy season and everything is lush and beautiful. But in the dry season, which lasts from October to June, the month of May, I am here watering every day. It's scorching hot up here and many of the plants don't survive, but the seeds are ready. By the time it starts to rain in June, the seeds are in the ground and things start to grow. Yeah, that's a good reminder to me that wherever you go, it's not exactly the same if you're there at a different time.

And also the hottest months of the year are different months when you travel through different parts of the country. So it's not like everyone is super hot in July. Some places are very hot in September, other places are very hot in May. So definitely do your research and figure out when you're going there, whether it's the best or worst weather to visit. At the beginning of Covid, when none of us knew what was going on and what was happening, and there was a lot of scaremongering because not everyone knew that this whole house was empty except me.

And they were talking about more robberies and this and that. So I contacted a couple of dog adoption agencies. And two of the places I contacted, I said I would take them in because I hadn't had a dog in a long time. And I said, okay, I'll take him in. And the other said, we don't welcome. I thought, wow. People were giving up animals. They didn't have money to pay them. So I let it go. And about two and a half weeks later, this woman who saw that she had tried, contacted me and said, we have a dog that desperately needs a foster.

Would you be interested? And I said, well, okay. It's a little bigger than I thought and I had broken my leg the year before. I'm not sure it's a little big, but I said, sure, as long as I can return it, if it doesn't work out, come into my world. This guy they called Dumbo was skinny and had huge ears. When they found his friend, he had distemper and 50% of dogs with distemper die. And of the 50 that remain, 50% end up with epilepsy so severe that they must be euthanized. He survive. The vet didn't think he would survive.

He overcame everything. The only thing he notices is that he has a tic in his head and in his tongue. He makes it a little silly. He always has his tongue out, and he's a little softer and a little less energetic than most dogs because he ticks constantly, which constantly uses up his energy. He was with me for about 12 hours before becoming my dog. He was quite a gentleman. He was very patient. When I came down, he waited for me, so he didn't push me. He was just a gentleman. So his name immediately changed to S Buddy because he's a Gentleman, a real gentleman, and he's been my covid buddy ever since, and he's just a doll.

So I need to get this over with because I'm heading back across town to Lon Americana, which was rated the number one neighborhood in the country. I could make a video about this because it is totally false. So if that video is really, if I make that video, if I'm willing to go there, you'll find it here. Otherwise, there will be other interviews from my trip here to the Guadalajara area. I hope to see you in another video. I follow. Thanks Doing, you have your feet crossed, your tongue sticks out your little tail car.