Cost of our travel to Mexico for 3.5 months

We recently wrapped up a 3.5 months (106 days to be exact) trip to Mexico where we slow traveled to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico City, Oaxaca City & San Miguel de Allende. We choose these places based on few factor which the main were 1) wifi quality (especially for Mrs. Nomad Numbers who was working remotely on that trip), 2) things to enjoy over a relatively long stay (4 weeks in average for us) and of course 3) safety.

In this spending report post we look at how much we spent in Mexico, project what our yearly cost of living in this country would have been and give a few tips to reduce this budget even further. Let’s dig into our Mexico spending report!

Spending summary

From a high level, our total budget during our 3.5 months (or 106 days) in Mexico was $7,638. This represents about $26K over a year, $2,200 a month or $36 per day per person

This budget includes our stay in four different cities with different costs of living that we broke down in the graph below:

Oaxaca City was our most affordable place (with $27 / day / person – see our destination report) followed by San Miguel de Allende (with $30 / day / person – see our destination report), Mexico City (with $33 / day / person – see our destination report) and Puerto Vallarta (with $34 / day / person – see our destination report).

We also spent money to get in/out of these cities for a total of $996(*). We are excluding our cost of getting in/out of the places we slow travel to as we believe such cost can vary greatly and will add unnecessary noise when trying to compare cost of living between various cities in the world

(*) This amount doesn’t include about $700 that we saved by using airlines miles rather than our own money to book some of our flights.

Spending per category: Accommodation is the major expense

We were a bit surprised by how much we ended up spending in Mexico since we were told that it’s a relatively inexpensive country, especially when compared to the rest of North America. In retrospective, we did not compromise on lifestyle since we embarked on our nomadic life and Mexico was no exception. As an example, we tried more restaurants than we would have otherwise done while living in California. We also made sure that our accommodations would provide us with the amenities we needed to live comfortably. This probably explains why accommodation (51% or $3,922) and eating out at restaurants (14% or $1,107) were our top two spending categories as you can see in the pie chart below:

Year adjusted spend for Mexico: $26K

If we adjust this budget to an entire year, we would need about $26K to live in Mexico. This is still lower than the average cost of living in the USA. (We wrote a post about explaining how a year of living in San Francisco cost us about 50K / year).  

To date, we spent $15K to support our nomadic slow travel. If we adjust this budget to a year we are at about $30K.

If we do decide though to spend a full year in the same country, we would probably be able to spend less than our projected $26K a year because of the following reasons:

• We could stay in places for much longer (think a few months at a time instead of 4-6 weeks) which should give us access to longer term rentals at an even greater discount than AirBnB. We would not be surprised if you could find accommodation at half the price.
• We could get in touch with the local community to access the same deals (including rentals) that the locals would have access too.

Our bottom line

Since we started our nomadic lifestyle, we have more space to prioritize what really makes us happy and felt less stressed. This new lifestyle gives us the freedom to spend our time on the things we care about like reading some life changing books, learning news skills, starting projects we are excited about like this blog (which includes our cost of living expenses series, our daily Instagram feed or some drone footage from the place we visit). We have also prioritized to spend more time with our friends and family in the months and year to come which is pretty exciting.

As an added bonus, we are realizing that slow and nomadic travel is much much cheaper than what most people think. Mexico turned to be a was a great example that you could live in a beautiful country for a fraction of the cost of staying at home and we hope this article is showing that.

If this is the first time you found our blog and don’t know what a slow travel life can look like, please check out our story and then read our destination reports, weekend guides or take a peek at our carry-on packing list for nomadic long-term travel. You might realize that this lifestyle can be more affordable (& accessible) than you thought.

Did you think Mexico could be that affordable? Have you had a different experience in Mexico? Please let us know by leaving your feedback on the comments section below.