Keeping in touch while living in Mexico

Hello everyone,

What are the best ways you've found for keeping in touch with friends and family back home while living in Mexico? How frequently do you stay in touch with loved ones?

Are there local equivalents to common instant messaging and online video calling services that you prefer or are more widely used?

If there is a sizeable time difference, how do you manage this?

Do you make international phone calls from a landline or mobile phone from Mexico? What do you think of the cost?

Thank you for sharing your experience.

Priscilla

I stay in contact almost as much as I did. I use email and very rarely call because it is a 2 hour difference. Here I mostly use whatsapp.

I speak with family weekly on Skype and it is free.  Also, I get to see my granddaughter rather than just talk.

Phone and email. Both free with landline/internet.

Text, e-mail, Facebook and telephone. Not hard and not expensive.

We are using Vonage which we set up before leaving the US. That only required us to obtain internet in Mexico and plug in our Vonage box here. This allows our friends and family to call our US phone anytime to reach us. (Only the lonely do however, as most calls originate with us). The cost is about $33 per month.  I think Magic Jack might be a solution as well. We have heard that others use it, and there is a very low cost per year, maybe $30.

We also use AT&T Mexico as our cell phone service. This gives us the ability to call Mexico, the US, and Canada at no cost. TelCel, the Mexican cellular company owned by Carlos Slim, also has the same cellular plan for about the same price, and we alternate plans when the price is cheaper on either one. We always purchase a whole year in advance because both plans offer five months free when you pay for seven.

In addition to Vonage, we also have TelMex because that is where we get our internet service for TV, Vonage and email/web services. There are other internet and TV cable companies available, depending on where you live. We have not yet been able to get Megacable for TV and internet because we live just outside San Miguel de Allende, and they havr not extended their fiber optic cables to us yet.

Because property taxes are so inexpensive, and because we do not need air conditioning in our home, we are probably a little lax in changing to the most economical solutions.

Hope this helps you with your decisions. Nothing is overly critical anyway, because you can always adjust when you arrive.

Hi. I speak with them quite frequently via Facebook, WhatsApp and Viber and going back home, to Serbia once per year. Usuall y its during the rainy season or during the New Year and Christmas holidays like i have planned during this year. The hardest thing in general is traveling from Mexico to my country. It's more than 10 hours and it can be quite difficult

I have kept in touch with my son. He is the Service and they will not let him come to Mexico. We keep in touch by phone and email. We use the Mexican phone service called Telcel. It is very reasonable.It is a mobile service although they have a land line I prefer Mobile. We talk once a week and meet once in a while somewhere.

I am currently living in Mexico City.

Right now I am using a paid Skype account that has a proper USA phone number. This way my family and friends in the US can call me just I like am living in the US. Conversely, when I call them, it appears that someone in the US is calling them. Nice!!

I make and receive perhaps a dozen calls per month, and this more than pays the $18 or so that Skype bills my checking account quarterly to maintain my USA phone number. There is also another monthly fee of about $6 or so that I pay for the unlimited USA/Canada plan.

Living in CDMX, the time change is a nominal concern, as we are in the Central time zone, just like back "home". Most of my calls are to the Pacific or Mountain time zone, so that makes for some no-brainer time difference math on my part, LOL!!

I'm happy with the call quality, considering that my ''phone" is my laptop.

So to sum this up, I really like the service; a lot of my older family members aren't very tech savvy, so calling a USA number seems "safer" to them. It still makes me laugh when the same folks who I call worry that my phone bill might be high because of our lengthy conversations. :)