It’s Hard To Become a Mexican Resident, Part 2

[Note: continued from yesterday’s post]

Showing you’ve already got enough money to keep you in tacos and cervezas forevermore is called the Savings and Investments route. It’s the one we took. You can also show them that you make enough money every month to qualify instead of a single pile in the bank. It varies from consulate to consulate, supposedly, but it’s $4,400 a month, net, after taxes where we went. Got a spouse, or child to cart along? Add another $1,400/month per person. You have to prove you’ve made that much for the last six months, unless you go to a fussy consulate, and then it’s twelve month’s worth of proof. If you miss on the low side for ten minutes, the calendar goes back to zero and you start again. Even though it’s ostensibly any kind of income, it’s still aimed at retired people. Mexico hates anyone who will move there and take any Mexican’s job. They’d really prefer that you make that almost $70,000 a year completely passively. And, you know, spend it all in Mexico.

If you’re a digital nomad, you can find any number of places on the internet (teehee) that say that Mexico loves you. Hell, the current Mexican president ran an ad campaign inviting digital nomads to Mexico City when she was the mayor there. Later, she expressed solidarity with protesters chanting gringo go home, stop taking all the good apartments. So I’d keep the “nomad” part of digital nomad in the back of your mind at all times.

In any case, good luck proving to the authorities that you make that kind of dinero every month. If you’re a freelancer, the paperwork is nearly impossible to produce to their satisfaction. They understand W-2s, but your digital bank statements with weird money coming in fits and starts from all over will get you an adios muchacho as often as not. Most digital nomads simply enter the country on a regular tourist visa, which usually allows you to stay for six months. Then they bugger off somewhere else, and then re-enter Mexico later to get another six months. That’s true, unless the immigration officer at the airport doesn’t like the fact that you have no return trip on your plane ticket, and stamps a few weeks on your passport instead of six months. That’s happened to people we know.

Remember, these are all numbers to allow you to stay legally in Mexico for a single year. You’ll have to renew it every year for three or four years, keep your nose clean the whole time, maybe pay Mexican taxes if you’re still working some, including tax on your Social Security as if it was regular income, and pay a substantial fee each time (about $650 per person, per year), until they relent and make you a permanent resident. If you want to become a legal permanent resident right away, you have to have approximately $300,000.00 parked in your accounts for a year, or earn $7,400 a month, net, after taxes, and prove it for the last six or twelve months to their satisfaction. You’ll have to pay more for your spouse, too.

This is just the warm up for proving things, by the way. You’re going to need your birth certificates, and marriage certificates if you’re currently manacled to anyone ’til death or a divorce lawyer do you part. But you’re also going to have to prove that the documents are legit to their satisfaction. To forestall problems, you should send away to the secretary of state of the state you were born in, and married in, enclose your documents, pay a fee, and have them apostilled. If you’re unfamiliar with the Hague Convention of 1961 as it applies to your birth certificate, join the “I’ve never heard of an apostille club.” We meet every other Thursday, and liquor is served. An apostille is a way to certify who is who no matter where you’re from, or where you’re going. The apostille punches two holes through the cover sheet and your document, and certifies it’s real by putting a blue ribbon through the holes, and then affixes it with a giant gold seal. It ends up looking like the kind of document used to legally cut off Anne Boleyn’s head.

Whoah, there, big fellah. You’re not done yet. The Mexican consulate can’t be expected to read the underlying document, because it’s all in English and tied to the back of your apostille. So you have to hire a certified translator, who has to read all the info on the apostilled documents, and translate everything into Spanish. But you can’t separate the cover apostille from the document, so you have to take a bunch of pictures of it by rolling up the cover page every which way, peeking at various angles, and blend it into a kind of mosaic picture of the underlying certificate. Then they translate it into Spanish for you, with an official CERTIFIED TRANSLATION stamp and signature on the document. They generally spell your father’s name wrong, and the town clerk’s name wrong, and about a dozen other mistakes, which you correct for them so they can charge you money for this exact translation.

You’ll need passport pictures. Don’t smile or they don’t like them. I haven’t smiled in thirty years or so, but my wife’s face almost broke trying to look serious. Bring at least two copies. The internet (teehee) says you don’t need them, because they take your picture for your visa anyway. Whatever the internet might think, the consulate took the photos we brought and pasted them on our file, and would have sent us away if we didn’t have them. Oh, and by the way, you need extremely sharp photocopies of everything I’ve listed, including color copies for your passports, usually in triplicate. I compiled a binder for each of us, both over an inch thick. I used clear sleeves to hold the documents, which can’t have any staples, and if you three hole punch anything, go back to square one and start over.

[To be continued]