LIFE IN MEXICO: Settling Down - Finding a home, Setting up utilities, Equipping the h

[losguerra]

Experts - Can offer your advice on these or any other issues related to this topic?

This is where people's specific experience with particular towns and regions will be helpful.

What are the average rent/mortagage payments in a particular area?

Any tips on searching for a home to rent or buy? Websites?

What are the advantages/disadvantages of life in a particular area - rural, urban, border city, specific city (DF, Guadalajara, Querétaro, Veracruz, Monterrey, etc.)

What are the best options for things like phone service, cable, internet, and any tips on getting them hooked up?

Any tips on shopping for affordable furnishings and appliances for the home?


Have questions or advice about a different topic related to life in Mexico? Check the master list (http://immigrate2us.net/forum/showpost.php?p=148907&postcount=1) for all the threads about life in Mexico!

[ourboys2]

Here in Mexico my husband owns his own home.

We have the same things as we do back home, like indoor plumbing except it is not exactly indoors. Our shower and toilet are in a room outside the house

l--------l
l RR l
l_______l_________: _______________________
l l l l l
l BR l LR l BR l KIT l
l l l l l
l_______________; __l________; l___; _____l

As you can see our house is not huge but it is big enough for a family of 5.

Our kitchen has a small stove, and fridge, along with a few counters.

The entire house is made of cinder blocks and finished off with concrete. Normal paint on the walls. The ceiling of our house is also made of concrete.

I have phone service, high speed internet, and television. The electrical outlets are in the walls like back home.

Our water heater heats water by burning wood, it looks just like the ones back home except they have an opening to put in the wood. By choice I don´t have a washing machine, since we don´t know how much longer we will be here. We also have not purchased a more modern water heater for the same reason.

That uncertainty prevents us from purchasing alot of things, believe it or not, since we will not be taking them back to the US with us. We are some what hesitant to purchase alot of things. Our home does not have closets, but we will be building some this week.

I have not found one second hand store here, otherwise we would have purchased a few more things. Our life style is very much like it is back home, except we don´t go out to eat very often. We don´t live in a large city, but there is US fast food a couple of hours away.

If you have any specific questions, you can ask I don´t mind, k.

[ourboys2]

This is where people's specific experience with particular towns and regions will be helpful.

We live in Cadereyta, Queretaro, a few hours from Mexico City.

I have 3 young kids, all boys.

It is not rural here but it is not city life either. Most people travel by car or public buses. I´m not sure the cost of the bus, but it does not seem very expensive. I say this because my inlaws use the bus to get around quite a bit.

People here in this area don´t commute to larger cities to work. I would estimate that approx. 5% to 10% at the most commute to a larger city to work. The closest larger city is about 2 hours I think. We don´t go very far from our home for any reason. There is a larger super market, just like Walmart, except smaller 15 minutes from our home. There is a department store about 30 minutes away. Just about everything is sold in seperate store here. All the shops only sell one thing each

There is a shop for everthing but you have to go to all of them in order to buy groceries, or hygenie products.

tortillas
chicken
beef and pork
shoes
vegies at one shop
fruit at another
paper products
school supplies
all womens interior clothing
hardware store for home/construction not both

I found this to be a hassle to try to do my shopping since you have to carry your bags with you to all the shops. So we go out of town to do our shopping.

In our town you can´t go to the local grocery store and buy tomatoes or school supplies. They also package there own bulk products by kilo not lbs.
Milk is purchased in cartons that do not require refridgeration, along with eggs. You can purchase refridgerated milk but I found that my kids like it the same. Huge saving on vegies and fruit all organic. They don´t use chemicals on the produce here. But when you get it home everyone is serious about washing them anyway.

You may or may not want to learn the metric system.

Everyone is Catholic, not really, but we do respect that most homes have an average of 100 or more saint figureines or post cards with the Virgin Mary.

You never greet people informally, it is always ¨Buenos Dias, Buenas Tardes or Buenas Noches¨. People pay very close attention to the noon hour and correct themselves repeatedly until they are sure of the hour.

I think that is it for now, but if you have a specific quesiton please let me know,k.

[ourboys2]

What are the best options for things like phone service, cable, internet, and any tips on getting them hooked up?

Have your spouse or family member of their´s get the services connected for you. Do not go and try to do this yourself you will be paying a much higher rate and they will charge fees for installation, processing fee, make copies of your IDs, have to send some out to verify you have accurate information, and charge you for sending them.

This has just been my experience. I look just like any other hispanic, but they know I am American as soon as I start to speak.

There is no point in insisting on speaking to the manager for anything they will not attempt to assist you, even if the employee is wrong. They will just justify the delay, extra fees, and still leave you waiting till all other customers have been assisted.

Remember you are not in the US and that they could care less if you go shop somewhere else. Plain and simple :rolleyes:

I am pretty easy going but I have learned to be extremely patient and act humble.

[bohorquez]

What is the cost of the high-speed internet accesss? What about SKY?

[ourboys2]

For us here in Cadereyta it cost us $26 a month and Sky cost $45 a month for cable service

[Glühbirne]

This is where people's specific experience with particular towns and regions will be helpful.

We lived in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico from the summer of 2004 to the summer of 2006


What are the average rent/mortagage payments in a particular area?
We always lived in nicer areas near the border. We rented two one bedroom apartments and one two bedroom apartment during the time we lived there. The rent ranged from 3000 to 3500 pesos a month, which is the equivalent of 300 to 350 dollars. A three bedroom two bathroom unfurnished house near the border would run about 400 to 500 dollars. A place further from the border or in a less prestigious area would cost a lot less.

Any tips on searching for a home to rent or buy? Websites?
In Juarez, a US citizen cannot buy or own property. When it comes to renting in Juarez, it is best to look in the rental secion of the classifieds and make appointments to go and see places you are interested in. Your landlord will most likely ask you for an "aval," which is a guarantor, no matter what your income is. If you don't know anyone who can be your guarantor, you can ask the landlord if you can put down a special deposit, but be carefull. We never got our depost back for any place we rented. There are both furnished and unfurnished apartments. Sometimes "unfurnished" means that there isn't even a stove or a fridge, so make sure you ask about these things before signing any contracts. IN Juarez, make sure you rent a place with a cooler of some sort. It gets hot in the summer and cold in the winter. Unvented gas heaters are common there, so make sure you take the proper precautions, always leaving a window cracked and putting a carbon monoxide detector in your home. The stove and water heater will most likely be natural gas. You will probably have a shower but no tub. Also, you may have just a stove top but no oven. Ovens are not a given in Mexico like they are here in the states. Most people don't use them.


What are the advantages/disadvantages of life in a particular area - rural, urban, border city, specific city (DF, Guadalajara, Querétaro, Veracruz, Monterrey, etc.)
The advantage to living in Juarez is it's proximity to the consulate and the border. El Paso is a short drive away and the point of entry isn't as busy as it is in other border areas such as Tijuana. Juarez is a large city that offeres all the modern conveniences found in the states. It has several malls, restaurants, grocery stores, movie theaters, parks, cultural events, and churches.

What are the best options for things like phone service, cable, internet, and any tips on getting them hooked up?
If you rent, your basic utility bills will come in the name of your landlord. Telephone lines are expensive. There are different programs, such as a prepaid phone line where incoming calls are free and you need to add minutes that you buy on a card or "ficha." It's called a "Multi-phone." The landlord may already have a phone line in the apartment so you will not have to set it up, but you wil have to pay the bill. If the person who rented the apartment before you owed the phone company money, they may tell you that you cannot get a phone line until you pay that person's debt. At least, that happened to us.

In Juarez, high speed internet is cheap and fairly reliable. We got ours through Cablemas. It was about twenty bucks a month and included the cable modem.

You can also get TV cable through Cablemas, but we didn't have it. We were able to get plenty of Mexican and American stations with just the antenna on our TV.

Any tips on shopping for affordable furnishings and appliances for the home?
In Juarez, there are plenty of furniture stores in througout the city, like Futurama. Also, Soriana and Walmart sell furniture and appliances. Most of the things they sell seem to be lower quality than the things you can get in the US. We didn't buy furniture when we were living there. If we would have, I probably would have tried to bring it from El Paso.

[losguerra]

In Monterrey, Multimedios seems to offer the best service for the price on High-speed DSL/Cable/Telephone. Particularly if you want to set up all three, you can get solid packages for under US $80 a month.

We are only using the DSL and Cable package, which costs us about $50 per month. We get unlimited DSL (we added wireless, so it's a bit more than if you just get basic DSL). Our cable package is great, my husband and I are international soccer fanatics and we get the best of all the European, Argentine, and Brazilian leagues, plus at least 5 channels that show primarily US programming in English (with subtitles). We aren't getting a landline phone because we use cell phones pretty exclusively and Skype for any calls outside of Monterrey.

We also have dealt with ridiculously incompetent providers. For example, we were getting awful throughput on our internet service for about a month and a half, and whenever we called about it, the service operators knew less about internet and networking than we did. They simply claimed our computer had a problem. Later, I guess enough neighbors complained that they finally boosted the bandwidth to our neighborhood. Ugh.

[Dorothea]

What are the best options for things like phone service, cable, internet, and any tips on getting them hooked up?

Have your spouse or family member of their´s get the services connected for you. Do not go and try to do this yourself you will be paying a much higher rate and they will charge fees for installation, processing fee, make copies of your IDs, have to send some out to verify you have accurate information, and charge you for sending them.

This has just been my experience. I look just like any other hispanic, but they know I am American as soon as I start to speak.

There is no point in insisting on speaking to the manager for anything they will not attempt to assist you, even if the employee is wrong. They will just justify the delay, extra fees, and still leave you waiting till all other customers have been assisted.

Remember you are not in the US and that they could care less if you go shop somewhere else. Plain and simple :rolleyes:

I am pretty easy going but I have learned to be extremely patient and act humble.
Yeah, there is no such thing as customer service in Mexico... :)

[Papi]

I think to best answer your questions, we need to know where you will be at. Life in Mexico City is different than that en "un rancho" ya know?

[ciscohiker]

I lived in Mexico for more than a year. One other forum I found helpful was www.vivaveracruz.com.

We lived with my in laws and built a house as well near Veraucruz.
For internet we used Prodigy DSL.

Best of luck to you and your family.

[Family]

We have a house in Guerrero outside the capital. All of our utilities are in my husbands name. Unless you are in Mexico on a visa other than tourist you are not able to have anything in your name. We pay about 55 dollars a month for phone service with internet included from TelMex. Cable in our town in about 20 dollars.

You are able to rent, if you need to I would have your husbands/wifes family look around and tell you about the rentals before you come. Have them arrange a contract for the rental. As soon as people know you are coming for US, the rent increases triple in some cases.

[pistolera]

What are the average rent/mortagage payments in a particular area?

The average rent in Zacatecas runs between 400 a month for a room shared in an apartment to about 1300 for a house in a medium income colonia. if you want to live in the high end of the city you can rent a house for about 3000 pesos. Mortgage payments depend on the price of the home you buy. most home run between 15,000 dollars to 95,000 depending on location and property

Any tips on searching for a home to rent or buy? Websites?[/B] Try the local newspapers El Sol de Zacatecas.

What are the advantages/disadvantages of life in a particular area - rural, urban, border city, specific city (DF, Guadalajara, Querétaro, Veracruz, Monterrey, etc.)?

Zacatecas is a relativly modern city very welcoming to tourists. you can find just about everything found in your typical american city Mcdonalds, Sears, Sams club, several american style supermarkets, and pretty soon were going to have a Starbucks. unfortunately most jobs in this unfortunaly most super markets have american style prices and certain things are best purchased in bulk prices. Theres a mercado de abastos where you ca find just about everything.
buses cast 3.50 pesos per ride and theres a bus that takes you almost everywhere. Cab prices depend on the area you are traveling.

What are the best options for things like phone service, cable, internet, and any tips on getting them hooked up?

Telmex is the only option for a phone service besic service is200 pesos for a line or you can buy an antenna based system for 2500 pesos. you can use phone cards with that system. you can get internet service from them for an additional 150 pesos. theres several options for cable tv but the best options is Cablecom monthly price is 150. Telmex has a local office you can hook up the services there. you need proof of address and id to set up services.

Any tips on shopping for affordable furnishings and appliances for the home?
never settle for the sale price. haggle whenever you can and shop around for the best deals