To avoid the two big mistakes I made moving to Mexico, here's a bit of unsolicited advice you on things you might not think of.
I left the US for Mexico without ever having made a will. I was pretty young to be retiring (I retired at 54), and I was thinking it would be easier after I got rid of my US house and cars. Being single, I'd always just put it off, partly because I didn't know what I wanted to do with my estate.
That turned out to be a bad choice. Now that I'm in Mexico, I can easily get a will done here, but I tried and failed to get one done back in the US to cover my remaining US assets (all financial) because I was told that to file the will I need to be a resident of the county that I file it in, and I'm not.
I think I have specific beneficiaries on all my US financial accounts, but it would have been better to have made a will before leaving.
I also tell everyone to get all their bank accounts set up first, because that was the other big mistake I made. After you lose a US residential address you can't open a US bank account as a US person anymore. I had planned to close my local credit union account and open instead a bank account with Citi, a bigger international bank, but I couldn't open the Citi account.
I left the US for Mexico without ever having made a will. I was pretty young to be retiring (I retired at 54), and I was thinking it would be easier after I got rid of my US house and cars. Being single, I'd always just put it off, partly because I didn't know what I wanted to do with my estate.
That turned out to be a bad choice. Now that I'm in Mexico, I can easily get a will done here, but I tried and failed to get one done back in the US to cover my remaining US assets (all financial) because I was told that to file the will I need to be a resident of the county that I file it in, and I'm not.
I think I have specific beneficiaries on all my US financial accounts, but it would have been better to have made a will before leaving.
I also tell everyone to get all their bank accounts set up first, because that was the other big mistake I made. After you lose a US residential address you can't open a US bank account as a US person anymore. I had planned to close my local credit union account and open instead a bank account with Citi, a bigger international bank, but I couldn't open the Citi account.
