Something shocking happened at work. I was hosting an event to share recent vacation pictures with the group. Our other presenter had recently spent a month in Mexico. He even wrote a blog post for our company about how to successfully work from anywhere. He used 2 weeks of PTO to basically work half time and extend his time there. Their main goal for the trip was to look into buying a house near Puerto Vallarta.
When he was showing us his pictures someone asked why he wanted to buy a house and basically move to Mexico. He replied “I don’t want to work until I’m 45 or 55. I want to spend more time with my friends and family…Was saying that a career ending move?” I tried to be supportive while keeping my secret FIRE identity to myself. One member of our group, the HR lead interestingly, just did not understand what he was saying. “Why would you ever want to stop working?” It totally didn’t compute and he basically repeated himself and when she still didn’t get it he made a joke and moved on.
The ER bomb had been detonated and I made a mental note to look him up in a few years when I am also retired and traveling through Mexico 🙂 . His overall plan is very different than mine and quite interesting. He and his wife own a multi-story home in Seattle and are turning the downstairs portion into a mother-in-law suite. That way they can rent their 1 home to 2 people and cover the mortgage that way. They then are going to buy a house in Mexico and basically live there full-time.
Apparently you can buy a house for $100,000 there that is massive and near the beach. Though he also explained some of the strange laws and expectations people have in Mexico about housing. Some are designed to keep white people from buying all the beach front property and charging too much for locals to live or stay there. Smart. The rest of it involves shady dealings, such as bribing officials, not getting inspections and not really knowing what will happen if you buy a house. Fascinating.
But he’s willing to risk all of that for the chance to retire in 3-4 years. After he got blank looks from HR he qualified retirement by saying he still wants to work, but maybe half-time remote work or 30 hours a week. I imagine that will actually be 1/2 time surfing (which he loves) instead of stuck at a computer. But we’ll see..