New but not2 MX--looking for my soulmate city

I will submit Puerto Vallarta, Jalisco
Looks like it has all your requirements.
Great community, excellent health services , Go for a taste and stay a few weeks before you decide in any place.

Good Luck

I'm living in Puerto Vallarta. I'm old but not handsome. Your mileage may vary but I think this place has just about all of your criteria. You may want to check the flight times. I've been enjoying myself here for some bit of time. People are friendly. There is an ocean nearby. Health care seems good. There are tacos! Yay!

According to numbeo PV is a very expensive city.
A one bedroom in the city is like 600USD a month.
It might be great in other ways, but that's Mexico that a tourist town.
Thanks for the suggestions but I will keep looking :-)

Check out Veracruz--Coate[ec. Xico, San Marcos--all within easy reach of Xalapa for big city stuff, including a world class orchestraa. No beach, but great climate at about 4000 feet altitude.

I just moved to Lake Chapala.... look at my post history I did a long right up on how much I love it.   It doesn't have 300k pop but great selection of restaurants, perfect weather year round, wonderful medical care ( I early retired due to health reasons so I checked into that).

I have sent 2bd 1 bath for as low as $450 usd to over 1k usd a month but those are super places like the one I moved into up the mountain side with views of the lake and all of the mountains with a pool, well water with uv filter, solar heated pool and 2k of solar power.

We have only been here 2 weeks but large expat community and I call it mexico spanish on training wheels because the pop is pretty good at English or used to us not knowing it well. 

The Lake Chapala Society has spanish classes of all levels.

But this is coming from a mexico noob who never visited just decided with the wife this is where we were going to retire after alot of research here and all over the internet.

Anywhere in the Riviera Maya would be good. Great hospitals and healthcare, great shopping IE: Wal-Mart, Costco, Home Depot etc etc. Really laid back. Playa Del Carmen is around 300k in population and is only 40 minutes from the airport in Cancun. There is also Tulum which is smaller and is building an international airport along with the Mayan train which will take you all around the area. It's much cooler next to the coast than say Merida which is stifling hot but a really nice place.

myhomemycountry wrote:

I need some good info and advice. I am retired professional with some health problems looking for a final destination. I have been all over MX, but not recently. If you can help with suggestions or good advice, I would be happy. Here is what I am looking for:

A city from 300,000 or higher, but not D.F.
A city that has direct flights to USA cities OR US is reachable within 2-3 hours by land OR within an hour or two of any city like  D.F or guadalajara which have direct USA flights.
Not the border towns except for South of TJ (ensenada, etc)
A city where there is fairly decent shopping, both groceries, computers, not just Mexican stuff.
Where an old but handsome guy won't be too lonely. (🤣🤣🤣)
Where I can enroll in Spanish classes at reasonable rates-My spanish is beginning level.
Not too bad climate-no freezing days, no long stretches 90+F. No constant rain. No active volcanoes.
Beach town would be my preference but they are usually too expensive, I want fairly close to MX prices, not tourist trap prices.
Where there is a decent full service hospital and not a scarcity of specialists.
So far I am considering: Cuernavaca, Ensenada, Irapueta,aquascalientes to name a few and secondarily, the yucatan:(merida, but very hot), san cristobal de las casas and a few others.

Any help? Thanks for reading.

I'm currently living in a gated community (a former trailer park where all of the homes have been converted to double-wide prefab houses, on the southern outskirts of Rosarito in Popotla, in a second floor studio apartment on top of a private residence.

It's a really quiet part of the area (except for Jake brakes at the stop sign sometimes)

I pay $700 a month including electricity and water for this morning view on my private deck, with access to the semi-private beach, down a stairway from the top of the cliff.

I'm a native of San Diego and there's no way that I could get something like this there for less than $3,000 a month in the current market:



But of course you can pay more than this further outside Rosarito and less than this inside Rosarito, depending upon how close you want to be to the beach and how nice of you you want to have.

Lots of places available around here have few or any windows, or if they do the view is simply a view of another building.

Unfortunately you don't tell us your overall budget, but I can guess from the restrictions you mentioned that you may be coming down here and attempting to live on an income that won't support you in the United States.

That's not meant to be a pejorative comment.

Many others down here are in the same boat as you.

But there are also a significant number of people who can still live quite comfortably in the states, but they prefer the lifestyle down here and they don't mind saving some money as well.

There are a few paradoxes based upon your stated desires:

As an older foreigner you will find that you will get much more attention from local women in the touristy part of the town.

And while you didn't say anything about safety, this is generally a safe place to be as long as you watch your behavior.

So you want to avoid all of the vices if possible, such as prostitution and drunkenness in public and doing any sort of illegal drugs, as all of those things will get you quickly introduced to people who are very connected with the cartels and other criminal elements.

This includes those women who find you so attractive in the touristy areas.

It's a very common way for criminal elements to take advantage of foreigners here when the young girlfriend of a cartel member or a California prison gang member suddenly starts showing you a lot of attention.

In such situations, people who only lose money from the ATM reportedly feel very fortunate.

We have major stores here such as Walmart and Home Depot and Smart & Final.

More choices in Tijuana.

However, here in this town, even with all of the foreigners living here, you will often find it difficult to find the brands that you want from the USA.

For instance I went into Walmart the other day to purchase a coffee maker and a citrus juice squeezer.

The selection was extremely limited and when I made some choices from what was available, they turned out to be pretty cheap out of the box at home.

Fortunately if I really want something from the USA I have a postal service here in Rosarito that gives me a PO Box with PMB number in San Ysidro California, where I can have virtually anything shipped from the internet including Amazon, and the company then delivers to me in Rosarito.

If you have your own automobile and you successfully register for Global Entry or Sentri, you will probably end up doing what many people do here; making monthly runs up north of the border to shop for the things that you can't get here.

I haven't really heard of anybody giving high praise to any hospital here, though there are apparently some dependable ambulance services which will take you to the border where a quick transfer to a USA ambulance will get you to any of the fine Health Care facilities in San Diego.

On a slightly unrelated note, the blue line trolley that leaves from the border at San Ysidro has now been extended, effective November 21st.

You will now be able to ride it Non-Stop out to the La Jolla University Town Center shopping mall area, with stops at both the VA Medical Center in La Jolla and the nearby UCSD Medical Center.

Good luck with your search as you weigh all of your options.

On Face.book you might want to search for a group called Rosarito Living, if you want more detailed information.

Thanks for your suggestion. Pls see my post on MX CV restrictions. Thanks.

myhomemycountry wrote:

Thanks for your suggestion. Pls see my post on MX CV restrictions. Thanks.

Not sure what post you mean.

Following links on your profile I didn't see any posts that fit that description where you've said anything other than asking questions.

Maybe you posted a rant on the subject?

If you did it was likely and hopefully deleted, as this forum simply isn't a place for wide-open debates about the covid virus.

There are plenty of other places on the internet for that.

Moderators here will shut threads like that down, unless it's a thread about a specific covid policy within a specific nation of a particular forum.

I agree with you on most, I have heard good and bad about both playa del Carmen and Tulum. I know people that love it, and some say it is full of drugs. It's mostly isolated but beautiful. So I mentioned on another post we move to Cancun, the Hotel Zone. We rent a 2/1 condo on the beach for $1300, a little pricey for Mexico but we are on the beach with beautiful views. We know a lady who has a lovely 1/1 and she pays $700. We are right across the street from a shopping mall with a grocery store, with buses coming by literally every 2-3 minutes if we need to go into town. We have been to the Walmart and Home Depot. We would love to meet some more fellow Americans there! But most importantly he is right about visiting a few places for a few weeks and then decide what is best for you!

Wow that is pricey.  Got a 3br 2fb with private yard with private pool electric fence/wall security alarm, well with dual filter and UV, private septic system, 2000watts of solar, solar hearing for pool and views of the lake and mountains for 1200.

Now I'm not living in Ajijic or Chapala but just west but I like the burbs feel and we have a car so getting into the areas when we want too is super easy.

Nice! This is our first, and I must say temporary, condo situation. We have decided it is not for us. Most owners now rent it out on abnb or vrbo. We never know who our neighbors are going to be from one weekend to the next. We'd like a situation like yours, lol! House, pool, etc. I'm over the beach…

Well come on over this way.  Weather here they say is always perfect and everyone we have met so far have been super nice. We have been here just 2 weeks and are fully in love with this area.  But we are lovers of the mountains.  We left the Colorado mountains to come down here and have to say no regrets.  We were full time RVers living in a 40' Country Coach but colorado has gotten super expensive and Rving in the USA since covid has exploded.  So the fun had been sucked out of it.  We had been rving for 7 years full time and it hurt tort our rv go..... but we feel like we made the right choice.