Everything I’ve Done Wrong (So Far) in Getting Residency in Mexico
Everything I’ve Done Wrong (So Far) in Getting Residency in Mexico
Do you know the expression “the cobbler’s children have no shoes”? The same is true of expat service providers — I’ve been too cavalier about securing our own residency while I focused on other people’s moves. Here’s what it cost me, and why you should do as I say and not as I do!
After visiting Mérida on two scouting trips in 2022, we decided to move here. We scheduled an appointment at the Mexican consulate in Atlanta in mid-November of that year. It wasn’t an easy process, and I didn’t have any professional partners yet who could give me pointers. We had a lot of trouble using the online portal and couldn’t get a response to emails. Someone in a Mexico expat Facebook group reported success using a particular email address, so I DM’ed them and asked for it. I wrote to the email, and someone responded with the info that new appointments were released on Thursdays. I spent the next Thursday refreshing the screen like I was trying to score Taylor Swift tickets — not easy when the site required multiple complex captchas at every refresh — but I scored an appointment!
That next Wednesday, we drove to Atlanta and spent the night to get an early start the next day. Brett was qualifying by income, and I was qualifying by savings, so we printed six months of bank statements and pay stubs for him and 12 months of IRA statements for me (or so I thought). We snagged passport photos that morning in Atlanta and headed to the consulate.
The process there was really easy. We sat with the immigration agents while they went over our statements. I’d accidentally forgotten to print one month, so they let us run to a FedEx office and print it. We were so nervous trying to navigate directions, spotty WiFi, and a million passwords to get the documents, but we did and made it back to the consulate. They told us to come back one hour later and pay $45, and then we got our visas! (See our happy faces above!)
If the visa story ended there, I’d be several thousand dollars richer and lying by the pool instead of typing this post, but it absolutely does not.
After you get your visa, you have six months to cross the border into Mexico, then 30 days to register at the local immigration office. We planned to move in April 2023, about five months into our window. That March, Brett’s job changed their work abroad policy and wouldn’t let him go. We decided that Brett would come work full-time with me at Expatsi. We’d postpone the move and spend the next few months trying to grow the business so it could support us in Mexico.
Our visa would expire by then, of course, but it was so easy to get residency, and now we knew how to do it! What could happen?
After a few months of hard work and investments into Expatsi, we could see that it would eventually be able to support us. We planned to make the move in Spring 2024. Our move date would be just a month after we got back from the first Expatsi scouting trip to Spain & Portugal.
During that month, we sold most of our belongings through a yard sale and Facebook Marketplace. We donated everything else except what we were taking with us (our Instant Pot, hot weather clothes, and the pets) and a few items we put in a tiny storage unit. We did home repairs and repainted and staged the house. It hit the market the day that we crossed the U.S.-Mexico border.
We could have also gone back to Atlanta during that month to get new residency visas, but there were a few problems: Brett no longer had a salary because Expatsi wasn’t paying him (sorry Brett!), and I had changed banks when our advisors said they couldn’t handle our accounts anymore if we moved to Mexico. I was nervous about trying to explain the changeover halfway through the year.
We decided to pursue a path called Regularization, or RNE, to get our visas. This was a Covid-era program that allowed tourists stuck in Mexico to become residents. You didn’t have to show any income info — just a visa stamp prior to 2023 and a recent, expired tourist stamp. We planned to move now and work it out later.
Now, I should point out here that “moving now and working it out later” is a viable strategy, if you’re prepared for what working it out later entails. I do think it can be worthwhile to get out of the country and then explore options if it solves other problems you’re facing in the moment. You don’t have to solve every problem all at once — just do what you can.
When you cross the border into Mexico, you get a tourist stamp that’s usually valid for six months, but this timeline is up to the discretion of the border agent. In our case, we also brought our car, so we got a temporary import permit (TIP) and paid a $400 deposit. The permit is issued for the same length as the tourist visa. One problem that I hadn’t been able to solve was this: I needed to overstay my tourist visa to get residency. However, if the car overstayed the TIP, it was considered illegal AND I’d lose $400. BUT I could only renew the TIP if I renewed the tourist visa. And if I renewed the tourist visa, I couldn’t convert it to residency…
Anyway, all that turned out to be moot, because Brett and I needed to leave Mexico occasionally. Every time we came back, Immigration would give us ANOTHER six month tourist visa! It was nice to keep getting these little extensions at dealing with the problem, but it was also pushing the solution further out of reach.
I was really starting to sweat how to get a shorter tourist visa so it would expire already! Whenever we flew, we always got six months automatically, even when we asked for shorter periods (they’re onto us). I’d heard the possibility that we could get a shorter tourist visa by driving to Belize, but I wasn’t sure how to drive there and hadn’t researched it.
I had the idea to take a ferry from Mexico to one of the islands in Belize. That way, the car could stay in Mexico, but we could cross the border. We made a plan to do that in October 2024, right after we renewed the TIP at the border, but a tropical storm came and shut down the ferry! Instead, we stayed on the Mexican mainland and just renewed the TIP.
Here’s a little timeline:
- Nov ’22 Get residency visa
- May ’23 Residency visa expires
- Apr ’24 Move to Mexico, get six month tourist visa & six month temporary import permit for car, both expire in October
- Aug ’24 Fly to South Dakota and back to establish US domicile, get new six month tourist visa that now expires in February
- Sep ’24 Fly to Europe and back, get new six month tourist visa that now expires in March
- Oct ’24 Drive to Belize border and get new temporary import permit for car, but it will expire in March when the tourist visa we got in September expires (this is important)
- Dec ’24 Fly to Alabama and back, get new six month tourist visa that expires in June
The week after we renewed the TIP in October was the U.S. election. After that, we were so swamped that we could barely breathe. I learned that you could get the regularization process expedited for $3,000 per person and confirmed the info with our legal partner at MexLaw, but balked at the price. I decided to try my Belize plan again.
Oh, you sweet summer child
We had some scouting trips coming up in Mexico in February, and I was attending the ones in Oaxaca and Mérida, so I booked another ferry run for March 14. On the Mérida scouting trip, I met our partner Amy’s wonderful immigration attorney Hector from New Roots and planned to work with him after we got our shorter tourist visa.
On March 14, we drove the 6 hours to Chetumal, Mexico to board the ferry. I had completely missed the fine print that we needed to be an hour early for the ferry to handle immigration paperwork, so we had to stay in Chetumal for the night and take the next day ferry. That night in Chetumal, we learned live on TikTok that Mexico’s regularization program had changed, effective immediately.
We weren’t sure what to do now, but we decided to go spend the one day in Belize anyway. It was magical, by the way. We snorkeled and ate stone crab and relaxed. I forgot to mention that we brought our pitbull Squiggy with us, which was a whole other level of paperwork! We followed the process to have him imported to Belize, but the government didn’t respond, so we had to file paperwork on the island and pay a fine. For the record, he’s a real island boy and made a million friends.
On March 16, we took the ferry back to Mexico. We could have also gotten the TIP renewed then, but I completely forgot that it expired in March and not in June with our tourist visas from December!
This past Monday (March 24), I was working on our next plan to apply for residency when we left Mexico in May for Move Abroad Con, when I got word from Amy and Shasta (two of our Mexico relocation specialists) that residency might be changing again soon. I had finally, FINALLY learned my lesson about not listening to these two brilliant women and kicked our plans into high gear.
I started texting with Hector, then went straight to the consulate website and made an appointment for Wednesday morning in Belize City. (Pro tip: it isn’t easy to operate in Belize, but there are appointments every day). We realized that we still didn’t have enough financial info for Brett, but more on that later.
Brett and I drove to the border on Tuesday morning. This is when I realized that the TIP on our car had expired just days before. We’d have to deal with that on the way back. The drive to Belize for a one-night stay included a number of bureaucracy sidequests and took 12 hours — eight for driving, four for bureaucracy.
On Wednesday, we strutted two short blocks to the consulate to get our visas. The security guard said masks were required, but luckily I had a stash of them, so we were cool. Then came the bad news — the consulate wouldn’t accept my paperwork. I needed an original letter from my U.S. bank confirming the balances on my statements. I was gutted.
Brett and I headed to a nearby coffee shop to rally and strategize. I started looking for appointments at Mexican consulates all over the U.S. but didn’t see any appointments. I knew that Atlanta’s consulate might release some the next day, but there were no guarantees one would be available. I started looking up flights instead to pick up the letter and try again in Belize. That’s when I saw it: Brett could fly direct to Atlanta two hours from now for $800. We called our bank to see if we could get the letter and drove to the airport—first to the wrong one, and then to the right one. I scheduled a new consulate appointment in Belize City for Friday and texted the pet-sitters watching Squiggy and the cats.
By the time we reached the airport, the ticket had leapt to $1,500. By the time we actually checked out, it was $1,700. Whatever! I got him on the plane and went to find a new hotel room. Our financial advisor called and warned me that we needed to docusign for the letter and there were no guarantees they could get it today. I was starting to feel a lot more zen, so I told him we would accept any outcome. Brett landed three hours later, rented a car, and started driving to Birmingham. He was 30 miles out when our advisor offered to meet him at the next interstate exit. We all cried a little! Brett got the paperwork, drove back to Atlanta, spent the night, and flew back to Belize the next morning.
That night, we had a nice dinner and went to the grocery store to buy clean clothes. Nothing to do now but wait.
Grocery Store Fit Check
The next morning, we headed back to the consulate. I held my breath while the lady reviewed my paperwork, then gave a sigh of relief when she handed me a slip of paper and told me to go deposit BZ $108.95 into a local bank. Say less. I took the paper, and we were off.
There were 24 people ahead of me in line at the bank. I didn’t even care. It was the best day ever. Now, there’s something I forgot to mention. There was a sign above the window at the consulate that said visa processing could take up to 10 days. This was a huge problem. Either we’d need to stay in Belize for 10 days, OR leave and come back, and we still had the expired car to deal with. Nevermind, I was going to take it as it came.
When I got back with the bank receipt, the woman at the consulate window took it and told me to come back at 2pm for my passport! I was over the moon but still didn’t want to assume that my passport would have my visa in it. Thankfully, it did.
Now, we just had to go back to the border, check out of Belize, pay any fines for overstaying in Belize with the car, get Brett back into Mexico in spite of the sketchiest recent travel patterns on earth, and get the car legally back into Mexico.
Here’s how it went:
- Belize threatened to charge us thousands and impound the car (honestly at that point they could have taken it) but let us off with a warning
- Mexico let Brett in with 60 days on his tourist visa
- Mexico would NOT let the car in
- We spent the night at the border and got our landlord to send photos of our car paperwork
- We went back to immigration and were able to bring the car!
- It took us 26 hours to get home
Of course, we’re not done with the process. Since we didn’t get a visa for Brett, we have to get our marriage license apostilled in Alabama. Unfortunately, his birthdate on it is wrong (they put mine twice). I’ve already called in expert help from Melissa Di Nardo, and she says we just need our birth certificates. However, mine is in three parts because my mom had two stepfathers adopt me, and in the past decade, the state of Alabama somehow lost the last part, so there’s no record of it. We’ll see what’s next, but I’m happy to have an expert in my corner.
Also, I have to complete the second half of my paperwork here in Mérida and then renew the TIP on the car. I’m already thankful to be working with Hector.
The cost so far for all of these visa excursions and fees? About $6,000, plus weeks of time.
If you’re thinking of leaving the U.S., please make your plan now and work with experts. I have all the resources in the world at my fingertips, and have still managed to do basically everything wrong.
Or if not, try to marry someone like Brett so they’ll be willing to fly to Buc-ees to pick up the paperwork!
Relocation specialists for Spain, Portugal, Mexico, Costa Rica, Uruguay, Ecuador, the UK and more will be at Move Abroad Con!
Jen Barnett is the co-founder of Expatsi, a company that's helped thousands of Americans on their moving abroad journeys. She created the Expatsi Test, an assessment that recommends countries for aspiring emigrants based on lifestyle data. Jen has an MBA from Emory University with concentrations in marketing and innovation. Prior to Expatsi, she created Freshfully and Bottle & Bone—two businesses in the local food space—and spoke at TEDx on being brave. She lives in Mérida, Yucatán, along with her husband and co-founder Brett, pitbull mix Squiggy, and two rotten cats. How can she help you move abroad?
