Transcription
Wow, it's been a while. Welcome back, guys.
You're wondering where exactly we've been for the past week or so. Both of us were taking turns getting sick, and then the day we decided to do a video, it rained the whole day and the day after that. And now there's a bus. (Jordan laughing) It's the only bus that exists in Puerto Morelos.
(laughs) And what are we doing today?
So in our last video, we were telling you why moving to Mexico was basically the best decision we've ever made. In today's video, it's a little bit different. It's those, any of the reasons that we feel like we regret making this decision, whether that's before coming, since coming, and now.
So what are those regrets? Probably not what you think.
So the first regret on our list is not taking every possible opportunity to learn Spanish before and after coming to Mexico. For me, it's that despite doing 30-minute lessons every day for almost a year leading up to coming to Mexico, and sometimes two or three 30-minute lessons a day, there's still so much more I could have done in the United States to prep for coming to Mexico. Like, the crazy thing is, half my family speaks fluent Spanish, so I could have been calling any and all of my relatives, or going over to my grandma's house and just having conversations. They're not gonna judge me, but I let my own fear of embarrassment, or awkwardness, or not knowing how to say things the right way, I let that stop me from taking those opportunities to practice. And also, sorry, what were you gonna say?
And that awkwardness, that's the first big hurdle to get over. That's hard to get past. And I feel like those audio lessons really, really helped us to start speaking the language and getting used to talking with someone. But even still after coming here, I know I didn't take every opportunity to learn the language. Before coming here, what was your idea like? Did you think it was gonna be easy to learn a language once you were in Mexico and it was just gonna come to you?
Oh, absolutely, because people tell you these things like, "Oh yeah, just immerse yourself in the culture, immerse yourself in the language, and you'll become fluent in no time," as if by osmosis, you will just absorb it from everything, from menus, street signs, people talking. But that is so, so, so not the case. If you are not making a conscious effort to look up every word you don't know, take the opportunities to practice in conversation with locals or people who speak the language and doing continued lessons, you're not gonna get, it just doesn't come to you.
Yeah, if you come to Mexico and think that just because you're living here, that you're going to learn the language, that is absolutely not true. You're not trying every single day and taking the opportunities, you can't learn the language. That's the only way it's ever going to happen at any reasonable speed.
Yeah, and and so for us, we've tried taking more opportunities like watching Netflix shows in Spanish, watching YouTube videos in Spanish, actually pushing ourselves to have conversations, even when it's a huge train wreck (laughs) and trying to to read books in Spanish. I mean, immersion is making it everything. Even us talking to each other in English, that kind of sets us back, I think. And we still obviously do that.
Yeah, but you know--
You can't get around it.
We've been here for almost a year and we've probably learned at least 10 words every single day. And with our vocabulary that we had built up before coming here, we probably know about 5,000 words in Spanish right now, and we're nowhere near fluent. People who are around us who don't speak Spanish, they think we're fluent, but we know we aren't. We're not close.
We're not close. I would like to clarify one thing, I do not regret learning Spanish or continuing to learn the language, I want to become fluent at any cost, but I do regret not doing more sooner.
Our next big regret is not starting to sell our stuff sooner, and not making a plan of attack. Seriously, the most stressful part about this whole thing for me were those last few months trying to get everything finalized, trying to get everything sold, trying to get my business sold, our personal possessions, and getting everything ready to come down here. We were selling everything on the app offer up.
I would not do that differently, that was amazing, and a lifesaver.
Yes, that was great, but what I would do differently is start selling it sooner and make a plan of attack like, "Okay, I'm going to list 10 items for sale every single day starting--
(laughs) Every year of my life (laughs).
Starting a year in advance, because I had a big storage unit full of inventory for my business. We had a three bedroom, two bath house, and we had to take everything and fit it into four suitcases. If you've never done anything like that, you just don't realize how difficult and how much work it's going to be.
And I will admit that this all would've been way easier if we just donated everything and didn't need the money to put into savings for our travels, or were way more flexible on price. But we were sort of like, we need as much money as we can to put in savings for a cushion. So we wanted to put in the extra time to try to achieve that.
Because really every dollar counted for us. Just 10 bucks, that can mean night's lodging, and that's a big fricking deal for us.
Especially when starting out and not knowing any of this would turn into what it has (chuckles). And you asked me what would I do differently about this? Honestly, nothing. And I think that's due to my favorite book in the whole world, which recently has blown up and there's now a show about it on Netflix, and that's called "The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up." And basically, it just helps you to let go of things that are weighing you down and not bringing you joy. That's like the huge premise of the book. I would recommend if you're gonna do something like this to get that book, read it, or listen to it on something like Audible, which we just became an affiliate of. So if you guys want to try out that book, listen to it on audiobook, you can can use our link in the description for a free book and starting your trial, or you can continue on with a subscription after that.
You can get not just that book for free, but any book in their selection.
Yeah, any book at all. The next thing on our list is something that sort of comes with traveling. There's some things you can't anticipate, some things that you don't know you don't know. This was one of them (laughs). I have to take these specific vitamins for a mercury detox protocol, and I didn't think to research how difficult or easy it would be to get those in Mexico. You can drive them across the border with no problem, but if you want them shipped here, I have to apply for special permits or something. And they're very expensive, so if we had any recommendation on this point, it would be if you need something specific and you don't know if it exists here, find out how you can get it to yourself or stock up before you come, because that's been one of the biggest, most--
Headaches.
Pain in the ass things that we've dealt with just getting--
Yeah, it really has.
Vitamins that I need to take. I would like to mention one thing here, although we are framing this around the concept of things that we regret about what we did before, during, or now that we're living in Mexico, there aren't a whole lot of things in my life that I truly, truly regret because I kind of think it's a silly premise, sort of like being mad at someone and they don't know you're mad at them, it only really hurts you. But instead, these are more things like hindsight's 2020, this is how we would've done it differently. And I look at stuff like this as like, "Oh that's a very valuable life lesson." Or "Okay, now that I know this, I'll do it better the next time."
Number five or whatever number we're actually on (laughs). And that is letting negative news reports get to us. After we told our family that we were doing this, not a single day passed that we didn't get an article about all the bad shit happening in Mexico. We knew we were being lied to to some extent, but we didn't really know how much. Getting something sent to us every day by our friends or family--
It sort of got under our skin a little bit.
Yeah, after a little while, you're like, "Well, how much of this is true? How much are we going to worry about? Are there going to be bodies in the street every (indistinct)?"
A shooting every day, like, we didn't know. Perfect illustration of this, by the time we were in Mazatlan, we heard something.
Which is only a week into our travels.
Yeah, only like a week or so into our travels. We heard something outside, and it was on a megaphone, we didn't understand what it was. In my mind, I was like, "Oh my gosh, this is the police, they're out looking for a criminal, they're saying, "Everybody get inside your house now, this is not a drill." So we asked our (laughs). So embarrassing. We asked our host like, "Oh my gosh, what's going on? What's on the loud speaker?" Well, you know the like (speaks in Spanish). (both laughing) It was that guy, it was someone asking for your old junk like metal stuff that they could buy off of you.
But the thing is, in the US, the only time you ever hear someone going around on a loud speaker--
Yeah, it's just not really common.
Is if it's the police or something saying, "Stay inside, we're looking for a criminal."
Yeah, so that's what we thought, but just don't believe everything you see on the news, 'cause we probably would've been so much more carefree and easy going about trying out new things if there wasn't that thing in the back of our mind like, "What if this is a trap? What if this is really dangerous? What if it's the cartels?" Like, I don't know. The next thing we wish we would've done differently, I have to give you a little background on this. In Arizona, you are not required to have a front license plate on your car. So we searched in a Facebook group, asked people and they were like, "Yes, you should get a vanity plate." So I went and got a vanity plate. I got one from the state of Oaxaca because it had the Mexican flag on it, red, white and green. I'm like, "This is perfect, I'll be super Mexican." I put my family name on it, Salazar, and we're like "Perfect, good to go, this is going to be great." (Jordan laughing)
So since being in Mexico, we've gotten pulled over dozens of times. At first, it was because of that front plate, that's not a common thing to have a vanity plate in Mexico. In fact, it's unheard of, you always have two matching plates. So they're like, "Why do you have the name of a Mexican drug lord on your car?" (both laughing) "Why do you have one from Oaxaca when you're all the way in Sonora?" So we took it off since then though we get pulled over all the time and they're asking about the plucker, "Where's your front plate?" And we don't have one, it's not necessary in Arizona. So what we would've done differently is go to the freaking DMV and get an identical plate from the back of a card, just put it on the front, we will do that when we go back to the US.
But I honestly don't even know if you can. I think you can, but--
I'm just gonna tell them we lost it. But when you order your registration, you literally only get one plate from them.
So could we just lose it? (Jordan laughing)
This one applies to us as someone who started, or as people who started a YouTube channel, and that is not slowing down sooner. When we first came to Mexico, we were literally working every single day, from the moment we woke up to the moment we went to bed. That put a lot of stress on us.
And it kind of didn't allow us to really enjoy all of the experiences we could have, because we were just focused on working. Like, we had to make something work in order to fund our travels to keep doing this. I would like to share that before starting this YouTube channel, I never, ever, ever, ever considered ever that it would be a possibility to be a YouTuber.
Oh heck no, me either.
And even when we were doing this, in the beginning, I never thought eventually this will be a big YouTube channel. We thought we were going to make our living from Steam It. We were going to make videos, and that would supplement our blog post on Steam It, not grow a YouTube channel. So I think once we realized there was a little bit of a possibility to make YouTube the main thing, that's when we started working our tushies off from that's sunrise to sunset and to wee hours of the night. But I think there's a part of the Mexican culture that we should have adopt sooner, and that's working when it's time to work and then relaxing after that. Like, turning off that work side. So this is definitely the biggest financial regret I have from all of this. And that would be getting a bunch of dental work done before we came to Mexico. I had some insurance money left on my contract that I had that I could use up before, so I thought, "You know what? Might as well use this money or it's gonna go to waste." But I still ended up paying thousands of dollars for dental work even with the insurance coverage. So ultimately looking back, I wish I had gotten it done here, it would've been cheaper and not have that headache while we were trying to do everything else that we were trying to do. Sell everything, prepare, get our documents in order and all that.
Yeah, so even despite you having insurance in the US and not having any dental insurance here, it still would've been dramatically cheaper here.
Much cheaper.
Something else we wish we would've anticipated is to just not expect everything to go as planned.
Yeah, I think that one might more directly relate to me because I'm a huge planner. I used to plan everything out super far in the future, be super organized with my schedule. "Things will happen at this time, then this time we will go here at this like, whatever."
That's quite the personality I have for constant travel.
Yeah, it doesn't work out at all. Originally, we had planned out, we meaning me, I spent hours and hours looking at, "Okay, we're gonna go to this city, then this city, then this city," and map the whole thing out all the way to our dream place, the city that we thought we were going to fall in love with, Puerto Escondido.
We still haven't been there.
Still haven't gotten to that place (laughs). I mean, I literally thought it was going to be like this very structured boom, boom, boom, go to these places, spend a few days in each one. I mean, travel just doesn't go like that. So I wish I had gotten that out of my head before traveling, and I think a lot of situations would've been less stressful because it's just like it's never ever going to go the way that you want it to or the way it's supposed to go, it's gonna go the way it's gonna go.
And a lot of times that means shit happens, but other times, it means, hey you love this place and you thought you were going to go right onto the next place. For us, that was Guadalajara.
Yeah, we were told three days, that's all you'll need there.
And then we're like, "What the hell are you talking about?"
It's huge, it's a huge city.
We ended up spending four months there.
If I had to say something on this, it's you will find freedom and happiness when you don't expect things are gonna go a certain way and you just let them go the way that they're gonna go and be open to the idea that even if it doesn't go the way you think it should, it can still be good, or better, or just okay.
Another thing we would've done differently is not only knowing what paperwork we needed to get, but knowing exactly when we were going to get it. For example, we knew we had to get Mexican car insurance, but we didn't actually buy until we were literally on the road the day we were going to cross into Mexico.
In fairness, we thought that it would be okay to just buy it for a few days and then like once we got our bearings in Mexico, find whatever the cheapest or best coverage.
But then on the way to the border, we stopped into a place that sold it, and it turns out three days of insurance was like a hundred bucks and you can get a year's worth of insurance for 450. And then we knew we had to get a temporary import permit for our car, and we had to get visas. With the frustrations that we had crossing the border into Mexico, we ended up forgetting about it, and we drove a while and then had to turn around.
The we decided to return back to the border when we were in (indistinct), thankfully, there's an office of (indistinct) (laughs).
So the lesson from this is just know exactly where those offices are located before coming here at whatever border crossing you're at.
And I will also say that at the end, some stuff was so confusing and overwhelming and we just had so many--
[Man] At the end of what?
At the end of like, right before we came to Mexico, we were about to cross a border. So much stuff was high on our priority list that it was overwhelming to deal with it all, and we were sort of just like putting out fires like, "Okay, insurance is now the number one priority. Okay, getting our visas are now the number one priority." So as much planning as we did, there was just stuff that like, it came up along the way and we're hoping to help you guys, our mistakes are your benefits through these videos. Next thing on our list that we probably should have done differently is after we were so stressed out, getting everything finished and ready to go into the country was just spending a few nights in each place. And that, I mean, that rule still applies to now. I think it's super exhausting to spend days or long hours of driving, and then just stay for a night somewhere. We found that it's much better and preferable to spend at least a week for the exhaustion factor, and also you end up saving a lot more money that way with for instance, weekly discounts on Airbnb. And by the way, if you're new to Airbnb, please use our link that we're gonna put in the description so you can get $40 or the equivalent in your currency off your first day.
If I were to do this over again, I would try to make a good online friend or two, who already lives in Mexico before coming. Because the day you arrive and even before, you're going to have a ton of questions, and you're not going to know how to do anything. Whether that's ordering gas or water, or just make a friend, it'll make your life easier.
With the owner of a Tangerine cross box, please come get your car out of Puerto Morelos, there's only room for one Tangerine vehicle in this town. Something that totally goes along with staying in places for more than a few nights at a time is something that personally bothers me a lot about traveling, or maybe like, the one thing that I sort of circle back to a lot of times, and that's not having a place to really call home like a comfortable place to go back to, because for me I'm kind of a homebody naturally, and I like having my own own space to retreat to. If everything in the day goes wrong, I just have a bad day or I'm sick or something, I find myself throughout our travels a lot of times being like, "I just wish I could go home." But we don't have a home, we don't have a home back in the US, we don't have any home in Mexico really. If there's something we could do differently, it is just staying in places longer to have that home.
There's kind of a problem here though, if you have a limited budget, it's a lot more expensive to have a home and travel.
Yeah, so there's pros and cons to it. I mean, obviously, not paying for double rent is nice, so we're just paying for wherever we are at the time, but that does mean we don't have anywhere to nest and feel that homey vibe (chuckles).
But that is what we're trying to change now.
In Puerto Morelos a home base for once.
And that's what we're going to try to do here in Puerto Morelos. We'll be here, we have a place here for at least three months, probably longer. We don't plan to stay here the entire time, we will take trips but have this to call home.
Within like three hours or less, we can go to Cancun, (indistinct) like-- (indistinct)
Yeah, the Yucatan Peninsula is not very wide, so there's a plethora of places that we can go to. Well, having that nice homey home that I've been missing for so long.
If you haven't traveled like consistently before, I had never done this in my life.
Me either.
But after a while of constant travel, you realize there's a lot of things that's really nice about having a home. Because when you're traveling somewhere, all of these decisions that, or all these things in your life that were just, you didn't have to make any decisions before, it was just--
It was sort of like, routine normal things.
Every routine thing becomes a decision, it becomes a problem to solve if you're in a new place.
Which is exhausting after a while. Like, not knowing where the closest grocery store is, or where you can do your laundry, or where you can pick up, I mean, like when we got us both being sick, I didn't know where we could go buy bags of herbal tea, little things like that.
Last thing on this point, I have to say I kind of knew going into this that since I'm a homebody, since I'm pretty much an introvert or an ambivert, I'm sometimes extroverted, but most of the time I resort to my introverted ways. I knew this was going to be a challenge, like really pushing myself. But I do think that builds up. Like, about every three months, I get to the point where I need that again or I'm completely miserable. So for others who might be like me, that's something you have to really consider 'cause I don't think there's really a solution for someone who's a home body and needs that concreteness other than actually having a home somewhere. For this next one, we have to lay a little bit of groundwork. So before coming to Mexico, I anticipated being able to work remotely with my old company. It didn't end up working out like that. And for Jordan, his business was completely inventory based, so there would be absolutely no way to bring all of that with us.
Nor did I want to, I hated it. I hated that business so much and I wanted out.
Yeah, truth be told, I'm so, so glad that I'm not still working at that old company, I'm much happier now. And then the other part of this is...
In a relationship, I think there's various steps and stages where you really find out if you're meant for that person. And the very first thing is just spending a certain amount of time with the person. After like few weeks, months, or even years, you might find out, hey, you know what? We just aren't right for each other. And then the next step is moving in together, that's often something that's challenging and--
You find out little, quirky things like how clean they are or whatever it is.
Yeah, often leads to relationship struggles, and you really find out the strength of it. And then something else that challenges relationships is travel. You really see another side of them sometimes and--
You notice, and for friendships too, I've lost a ton of friends after big trips, because you find out what people are really like when they're under pressure, when things don't go how they expect.
Oh imagine that, they don't go how they expect.
Yeah, who would've thought? (both chuckle) Money issues a lot of times, like, who pays for what and splitting stuff up. So travel for any relationship, even families too, it just like really brings stuff out of the cracks that nothing else can.
But where we're getting with this is another level of that relationship challenges is starting at business together. So we're literally doing all of these things at once, we're traveling together, we're starting a business together, we're living together.
We're traveling in a car together.
Yeah, watching our videos, you may not realize this, having a YouTube channel very much is a business. We have to treat it like that, it's our livelihood, it's how we continue doing the things we're doing.
The regret, or if looking back, something that we would've wanted to address or do differently is just us being in business together. How we approach that. And I think we didn't really think of this because it just happened just so gradually. We could have done our own thing online, we could have had our own videos, or I could have done content writing online, or you know, different things. But it just happened to be that we started this YouTube channel and then it went somewhere, and so that became a serious like venture for us. And we're both all in kind of people. Like, if I'm gonna do something, I'm going to do it to the max. Like, if I had to do it the best possible, and I think you're like that as well.
So how would we do that any differently? Maybe some other solution is learning how to separate the business from everything else.
And maybe just making time for us where there's no camera or no responding to comments. But I mean, this is just something like a life thing too, whether it's travel or not, I think that's like a really good life lesson that we figured out is, first of all, thank goodness we have such a good relationship, it's strong, it's held up through all of any conflict that's come up because of this, I'm so happy for that (chuckles). Where was I going with that?
I have no idea.
I got distracted. (both laughing)
But oh yeah, just good life lesson to know. If you're planning on making a business with your significant other, it can put a pretty big strain on the relationship, so it's gotta be a strong one. And like we told you in the beginning, we sold everything we owned except for what fit into four suitcases and all the crevices of our very tiniest tinies.
Tiniest.
Oh God. (both laughing)
Tiny (indistinct) (laughs). (indistinct) (both laughing)
That's such a gross word that I just made up. (both laughing) Well, there's some stuff. (both laughing) Oh my gosh, who knew I was so funny? Wow! There's some stuff that we brought that turned out to be sort of like a waste of space or a hassle. We made a whole video about that, and we'll link to it right here.
Our final and biggest regret is not doing this sooner. We've said this to each other so many times.
And I think I personally let every reason in the book deter me for wanting to do this. Jordan was on board with the idea long before he convinced me to do it. But I was thinking, "What are we gonna do for money? What if we don't like it? What if it's dangerous? What if it's scary? What if we can't learn the language? What if? What if? What if? What if?" So many of those, I wish I had just told those voices to shut the up (laughs) and then we had just done it. And even if that meant no business came out of it, we just had to use all of our savings to do it, I think it still would be completely worth it, and I wish we would've done it sooner.
It has been such a fulfilling life.
And travel in general, I mean, I don't think there's anything quite like it to open your mind up to things that you don't even know that you don't know. I always go back to that pie graph.
It's stuff that I know, then there's a sliver stuff I know I don't know.
Oh, yeah.
And then the rest of it is stuff I don't know I don't know.
And the more we travel, the more I find that to be true. We are learning so much every day about people, food, culture, language--
Language.
The world, but then the more we learn, the more I'm like, "Wow, I have no idea about so much stuff," it's humbling and unparalleled. So I do wish we had done this sooner, that's my regret.
So if we can give any advice out of this, if you have anything inside of you that's like, "Man, I really wish I could do that, I really want to do that," do it.
Don't let stuff hold you back. Don't let that voice inside your head tell you not to do it, we think it's worth it (laughs).
Thanks for your kisses.
(laughs) Thank you guys for watching this video today. If you can think of someone who might like it too, please share it with them on Facebook or WhatsApp, wherever you share it. Give this video the old thumbs up if you enjoyed it, and subscribe to our channel if you would if you haven't already. And one last thing... (bell ringing)
Oh, the hell!
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