The Woodard's Journey to Becoming Delighted Expats in Mexico [Podcast]

Podcast #305 – The Woodard’s Journey to Becoming Delighted Expats in Mexico

Description:

In this episode, I am speaking with my fellow expats and good friends Camille and Scott Woodard. They have lived in Mexico for over a year, and I wanted you to hear the story of their journey to becoming expats. Camille is retired but Scott continues to work as a career coach. They took a slightly different approach than my wife and I did in becoming an expat.

Camille and Scott mention needing to get an RFC #. The current president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, also known as A.M.L.O. or AMLO for short, vowed to reform the immigration and tax systems when he was elected in 2018. The RFC # is the equivalent of a Social Security #. Early in 2022, the federal government required everyone to have an RFC # including foreign residents and that was to be complete by July of 2022. That was extended to the end of 2022 and many of us still do not have them because it requires making an appointment at an SAT office to apply. SAT is the equivalent of the IRS. It is still difficult to get one of those appointments.

You will hear Scott say that there always seems to be one additional step that needs to be done for every process in dealing with the government. You just have to be patient.

I want to tell you we recorded this interview in person at Camille and Scott’s home. This is the first in-person interview I have done since 2019. I used my H4nPro portable recorder and tried to be a bit more sophisticated than I needed to be. Well, it did not work as well as I would have liked, and I had to do a lot of work in post-processing to improve the quality. You will hear a couple of trucks pass in the background. Their home has very high ceilings and like almost all Mexican homes a lot of hard surfaces, i.e., concrete walls and tile floors. This is not optimal for audio recording but you will be able to easily understand both Camille and Scott.