Fwd: 5 Top Markets For Expats In Mexico

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From: Lynn Mulvihill <editorial@letters.overseaspropertyalert.com>
Date: Tue, Oct 19, 2021 at 3:07 PM
Subject: 5 Top Markets For Expats In Mexico
To: <stevescott@techacq.com>

The Best Places To Move To In Mexico For Expats | Too Many Emails? Overseas Property Alert – A Free Publication of Live and Invest Overseas 5 Top Markets For Expats In Mexico Plus: "If I Have Irish Ancestry, Must I Still Show An Income Of 50,000 Euros A Year?"... Diversifying Out Of The U.S. Dollar With A Budget Of US$200k... Oct. 19, 2021 Waterford, Ireland The Big Profits Are In The Health Food Market Investors are now flocking to the ultimate crisis-proof product: Food. "Booming investor interest in ag-tech should hardly come as a surprise. Market potential is nearly limitless precisely because our appetites are, too. We all need to eat, and our population is rapidly growing." --The World Economic Forum Our own Lief Simon is one step ahead, already working with a proven ag-tech project which offers you a crisis-proof 399% ROI... If you'd like to add US$125,752 to your retirement funds, safely outside a volatile stock market... you'll want to take a look at this. Dear Overseas Property Alert Reader, Lynn Mulvihill Over the past four decades, Americans have voted Mexico the world's #1 place to live or retire in the way that really counts: They've packed up and moved there. This country is home to more American expats and retirees than any other— at least 1 million and as many as 2 million, depending on the survey. Americans looking to start a new life in a new country primarily seek three things: warm weather, beautiful beaches, and a low cost of living. Mexico delivers in all three categories. While the living is not as cheap as it was in the 1970s when Americans first began migrating south in volume, Mexico is a bargain on the global scale. Thanks to the U.S. dollar's strength against the peso in the last few years, the cost of living appeals to retirees on a budget. In some parts of the country, this translates to super real estate deals, too. The other big attraction of Mexico is its convenience. Depending on where you choose to call home in this diverse country, you could drive down from your U.S. base. This makes it attractive to expats who want to keep up regular links with family and friends—or even a business—back home. Possibly the greatest challenge with Mexico is finding the right place to go. When you can choose from Pacific or Caribbean coast... historic city or laid-back beach town... how do you know what's best? To help narrow your options, today we're going to look at the top five places expats tend to settle in Mexico—all of which offer a great lifestyle. Buying here, you could live full- or part-time... or invest to rent to tourists or other expats looking for long-term rentals. 1. Puerto Vallarta/Riviera Nayarit Puerto Vallarta has been one of Mexico's most-popular resorts since the 1960s, although its rich colonial history goes back hundreds of years. Unlike many resort areas, PV has a number of coastal sections with beaches interspersed among them... meaning different areas have their own unique character. For LGBT expats and travelers, PV is the most inclusive destination we've found in Latin America. You could also get along speaking mostly English in Puerto Vallarta. And, it's a pretty self-sufficient town with big box stores and solid medical care. Puerto Vallarta excels when it comes to ocean views. Here, you'll find lots of properties perched on lush, green hillsides, and long views looking out to the ocean. More resorts are now expanding north of PV, along what's known as the Riviera Nayarit. These past few years, FONATUR has been working on this coast—and on the roads needed to get to this coast—to develop a brand-new resort known as Costa Canuva. This will provide a quieter alternative to Cancún and the Riviera Maya on the Caribbean side. If you're interested in a tranquil beach lifestyle, now's the time to make your move in Nayarit. In a gated community in Puerto Vallarta, you can buy a one-bed, one-bath condo for US$189,000. The complex is set in landscaped gardens with lovely mountain views, and the unit is 99 square meters with a wraparound terrace. In a luxury, highrise building with views over the city, there's a 145-square-meter condo with two bedrooms and two bathrooms. In an excellent neighborhood with strong rental potential, it's asking US$295,000. 2. Ajijic/Chapala Ajijic is a 500-year-old village located on the shores of Lake Chapala, Mexico's largest lake. Located at 5,000 feet above sea level, the weather is just about perfect all year. In fact, National Geographic recognized Lake Chapala as having the second-best climate in the world (after Atenas, Costa Rica). Ajijic is a picturesque and friendly colonial town. The narrow cobblestone streets are lined with colorful houses, along with more boutiques, galleries, and restaurants than you'd expect in a town this size. Ajijic and Chapala are the better-known towns, but you'll find other attractive villages within easy reach. Because of the high expat population, English is spoken everywhere. For shopping and good medical services, Guadalajara is less than an hour away. In a gated community, there's a brand-new condo with two bedrooms and two bathrooms. It has 172 square meters of living space and lake views from the rooftop terrace. Price: US$194,500. 3. San Miguel de Allende Voted the world's #1 city by Condé Nast Traveler, San Miguel de Allende sits in the middle of Mexico, some 10 hours south of San Antonio. It's a 450-year-old city of 150,000 people that works hard to preserve its colonial features. The weather is sunny most days, without humidity. Temperatures are in the 80s by day, dropping to the 60s at night. For a small Mexican town, San Miguel has a diverse community with a strong international flavor. English is widely spoken around town. Many expats come here for the art scene. With a busy festival calendar, there's always something going on around town. Close to shopping and a hospital, there's a 206-square-meter, colonial-style home with two bedrooms and two bathrooms. With beautiful mountain views, it's asking US$156,310. If you're after something bigger, there's a 147-square-meter home for sale in a new development. It has four bedrooms, four bathrooms, and a rooftop terrace with mountain and city views. Price: US$161,000. 4. Merida/Progreso Merida was the first-ever city to serve as the American Capital of Culture. That was back in 2000, and the city reclaimed the title in 2017 (so far, it's the only city to hold this honor twice). Located in the north of the Yucatán peninsula, just under 200 miles west of Cancún, from here you can explore the rich Mayan history of the area. Once a wealthy colonial town, Merida's old architecture is well preserved, boasting wide plazas and beautiful cathedrals... as well as plenty of museums and galleries. Those who enjoy a tropical climate—and can cope with humidity—do well here. Daytime temperatures tend to stay above 86°F year-round (reaching 100°F in the hottest months), and humidity is moderate to high. Merida also has the advantage of being close to the coast. It's about 40 minutes to the beach town of Progreso and an hour to Sisal—both good options for those who'd like to live by the beach but have access to a cultural city. Restored haciendas tend to come at a premium, but you can still find affordable options around town. A renovated colonial in the center of Merida is on the market for US$339,000. It's 366 square meters with six bedrooms, six bathrooms, and a swimming pool—an ideal B&B or large family home. Meanwhile, beachside lots at San Benito (close to Progreso) are on the market for US$65,000. 5. Riviera Maya/Tulum/Playa del Carmen The Riviera Maya is the section of Caribbean coast on the eastern side of the Yucatán Peninsula between Playa del Carmen and Tulum. It's about 125 miles long. Development in this area is moving southward from Cancún and Playa, as developers and pioneers seek unspoiled beaches and towns that remain convenient to Cancún's international airport. Not long ago, the town of Tulum consisted of a handful of cabins and a few fishing shacks. Today, the population is 46,700, and it's full of opportunity. Over the last 18 months, it has become especially attractive to the digital nomad set. The Riviera Maya features warm Caribbean waters and pristine beaches. The Great Mayan Reef—the second-largest barrier reef in the world—is located offshore, providing world-class diving and snorkeling. Another draw to this area is the presence of the best-preserved Mayan archaeological sites... plus a few world-class golf courses. You can choose between an established market with its chic lifestyle and good returns at Playa del Carmen near the north end... or invest for capital gains in a less-developed environment by buying in the path of progress as you move south. The advantage of this area is year-round tourism where 80% occupancy is typical. In the center of Playa del Carmen, there's a fully furnished condo, 100 square meters, with two bedrooms and two bathrooms. With strong income potential, it's priced at US$185,000. In a popular new neighborhood in Tulum (close to restaurants and stores), a two-bed, two-bath, 95-square-meter condo is US$199,000. Finally, the markets I've chosen today don't represent the lowest prices you'll find in Mexico. These are the places most expats choose for the quality of life on offer. For investors, they are proven markets where you can find solid rentals.  Lynn Mulvihill Editor, Overseas Property Alert P.S. If you'd like to find out more about your options for living and investing in Mexico, now's your chance to get your hands on our just-released video kit, Mexico On Demand... As well as 27 video sessions and a bundle of special reports on our top destinations in Mexico, you'll also get an introduction to the people on the ground who can help you follow through on your plans. Full details on this bumper kit are here... along with your 40% discount. Be A King... But Not An Elvis When the King of Rock and Roll died in August 1977, his estate was valued at more than US$10 million. After years of court battles, the US$10 million estate was passed on to Elvis' only child, Lisa Marie. But, between taxes and legal fees, the King's heir ended up with only $3 million... Yes: 70% went straight to the taxman and the lawyers, while his daughter was left with just 30 cents on the dollar. The cruel truth is that Lisa Marie could have enjoyed nearly 100% of her inheritance if Elvis had properly arranged his affairs... Here's how to do better than Elvis—no matter your estate size. Letters To The Editor In response to our recent coverage of Ireland... "I have Irish ancestry. Any breaks in the 100,000 euros income per year per couple?" —Kathy D. If you're eligible for naturalization through Irish ancestry, once you get your citizenship, you can live in Ireland without restriction—that is, regardless of your annual income. You'll find help on determining your eligibility here. *** "Hi Lynn. It appears there are not many properties within a USF$200k price range available in Ireland. I am interested in a rental property which would provide some positive cash flow and diversify away from Canadian and U.S. dollars. If any of these become available please forward to me." --Suren M. You're correct. If your main goal is investment, you'd need to look to Dublin for the best returns. But you'd need a minimum budget of 350,000 to 400,000 euros to break in. With a budget of US$200,000, you could achieve the currency diversification you're after by buying in Montenegro or Northern Cyprus. At the prices currently on the table in these markets, you could pick up a property in each for less than US$200,000 total... and get a backup residency (or two) into the bargain. Have a question? You can write to Lynn here. The Latest From Overseas Property Alert... It's Official... This Is The Best Place To Live In Ireland Revealing The Best Place To Live In Ireland What Expenses Can I Claim Against Rental Income? What Hollywood Doesn't Tell You About Pigs (And Profits) Top Property Investment Pick This Month

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Fwd: Debatable: Can lab-grown burgers help stop climate change?

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On Oct 14, 2021, at 3:01 PM, The New York Times <nytdirect@nytimes.com> wrote:

Humanity has a meat problem.

View in browser|nytimes.com Continue reading the main story October 14, 2021 Illustration by The New York Times; photographs by Paul Tillinghast and Olga Chetvergova via Getty Images By Spencer Bokat-Lindell Staff Editor, Opinion Humanity's love of eating animals should worry you, even if humans are the only animals you care about. Meat and dairy production is responsible for 14.5 percent of the planet's greenhouse gas emissions, with about two-thirds of those coming from cattle. To keep global warming below two degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, the limit established by the Paris climate accord, the World Resource Institute says much of the wealthy world needs to cut its beef and lamb consumption by 40 percent — and that's on the low end of such estimates. Americans are among the top eaters of beef in the world, and persuading them to cut down on it or swap plant-based burgers for their steaks is a challenge. Enter lab-grown — or, as some prefer, "cultured" or "cultivated" — meat: In the past few years, a small but fast-growing industry has sprung up with a mission to create meat from cell lines that doesn't just taste like meat but actually is meat. Last year, a restaurant in Singapore even put lab-grown chicken on its menu. As the sector has bloomed, so too have predictions of its imminent usurpation of meat of the slaughter-requiring variety. But how close are we really to that future, and is it the one we should be aiming for in the first place? Here's what people are saying. The urgency of reducing meat consumption Vexing as the problem beef poses for climate change mitigation already is, it's going to get worse. That's because the world is getting richer, and when people get richer, they eat more meat. Since 1961, global meat production has more than quadrupled, to more than 340 million tons from 71 million tons. By 2050, the Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that global demand will reach 455 million tons. "The 7.8 billion of us on this planet cannot have a steak every night," Inger Andersen, executive director of the U.N. Environment Program, told The Times in April. "It doesn't compute." And climate change isn't the only issue at stake in the race to cut down on meat: Pandemics: The increasing demand for animal protein is one of the major risk drivers of pandemic outbreaks, according to the United Nations. Another is the "intensification" of animal agriculture that the growing demand for meat requires: Animals are bred to be genetically similar and crowded together in huge facilities that promote viral transmission and mutation. Since 1940, agricultural intensification measures — dams, irrigation projects and factory farms — have been linked to more than 50 percent of zoonotic infectious diseases that have spread to humans. Animal welfare: You don't have to believe that eating meat is per se immoral to object to the incalculable suffering factory farming inflicts on billions of animals — including human workers — every year. Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT READ MORE The Mistakes That Will Haunt Our Legacy Antibiotic resistance: About 65 percent of antibiotics in the United States are sold for use on farms, often just to prevent animals from getting sick. That's contributed to the rise of antibiotic-resistant diseases, which are already killing 700,000 people a year worldwide. By 2050, the number could rise to 10 million. Food-borne illness: Lab-grown meat could reduce the threat of food-borne pathogens like E. coli and salmonella, which kill 420,000 people every year. Why lab-grown meat isn't filling grocery stores just yet As Vox's Kelsey Piper has reported, there are still a number of hurdles lab-grown meat has to overcome before reaching commercial viability: Scaffolding: Growing ground beef is one thing, but replicating the structure and texture of a steak, say, requires shaping cultured cells into complex tissue — and researchers are still working out how to do that. Scale: As Piper wrote, "it's not enough to be able to make one steak — you need to be able to make steaks at the same incredible scale that factory farms do." And at least for the moment, the economics and engineering challenges of building full-scale facilities are prohibitive. Cost: Lab-grown meat is staggeringly expensive. In early 2019, the Israeli-based company Aleph Farms said it had driven the cost of producing a beef patty down to about $100 per pound. Eat Just, the company behind the Singaporean lab-grown chicken, initially said making a single nugget cost $50. For lab-grown meat to start replacing factory-farmed meat, all of these problems will have to be solved. Should we launch a moonshot for affordable, lab-grown meat? While other countries have thrown money behind alternative proteins, America's lab-grown meat industry has emerged without the support of the U.S. government, which spends $38 billion each year subsidizing the meat and dairy industry. My colleague Ezra Klein believes that should change. In an April column, he noted that the Good Food Institute, a nonprofit that promotes the alternative protein industry, had asked the Biden administration for $2 billion in funding, half of it for research and half of it to set up a network of innovation centers. The institute estimates that with enough investment, by 2030, cultivated meat would be able to compete on cost with some conventional meats, requiring only $2.57 per pound to produce — a stunning reduction. Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT "I've never seen anything like this in terms of the volume of money being talked about and the opportunities to do something transformational," Representative Earl Blumenauer, an Oregon Democrat, told Klein. "It wouldn't take a lot of investment in alternative protein to take it to a whole different level. It'd be a rounding error in terms of the money going through Congress." State involvement may be needed not only to accelerate innovation but also to ensure that innovation is widely shared. The international regime of intellectual property law that has governed the world's disastrously unequal vaccine rollout offers "a troubling preview of how other lifesaving technologies might be apportioned, including those needed to keep global warming below two degrees Celsius," the climate journalist Kate Aronoff writes. "Setting technology transfer as a baseline at this early stage of cellular agriculture's development could (optimistically speaking) set a precedent that discourages other sectors from using patents to charge exorbitant rents for everything from cultured salmon to clean energy." But some say lab-grown meat won't be able to start displacing conventional meat in time — or perhaps ever. David Humbird, a Berkeley-trained chemical engineer who spent over two years researching a techno-economic assessment of lab-grown meat, believes the industry faces extreme, intractable technological challenges. In interviews with Joe Fassler of The Counter, he said it was "hard to find an angle that wasn't a ludicrous dead end." Even the chief executive of Eat Just conceded that the challenges Humbird raised need to be reckoned with, leaving it "very uncertain" whether cultured meat can displace slaughtered meat in the next 30 years. In Fassler's telling, for cultured meat to be a meaningful climate solution would require several scientific breakthroughs worthy of many Nobel Prizes — and in the next 10 years, not 30. Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT A strong case can be made for the state to stake money on those breakthroughs, just as it did on vaccines for the coronavirus. But then again, conservative members of the Senate have fought to pare back the size of prospective climate spending, potentially forcing policy trade-offs that climate experts and activists would prefer not to make. "The environmental ravages we face are vast, destabilizing, and encroaching on our real lives right now," Fassler writes. "The fires, the floods, are already at our door. In all this, it would be so good to know we have a silver bullet. But until solid, publicly accessible science proves otherwise, cultured meat is still a gamble — a final trip to the casino, when our luck long ago ran out. We should ask ourselves if that's a chance we want to take." We could also just eat less meat Perhaps, as Piper and Klein hope, lab-grown meat will eventually become more widely available, and even if its cost never reaches parity with that of factory-farmed meat, a meaningful amount of substitution will become possible. But as Aronoff notes, diets need to change now, particularly in the West. And people generally exercise a degree of control over what they eat in a way they simply do not over how their electricity is generated. America's love of beef might seem intractable, but another beef-loving country, Brazil, has shown what the beginning of a national shift toward more climate-friendly diets might look like. READ MORE Brazil Is Famous for Its Meat. But Vegetarianism Is Soaring. Although vegetarians and vegans have the smallest dietary carbon footprints, adopting a more climate-friendly diet doesn't require becoming one, as the Times food columnist Melissa Clark wrote in her meat-lover's guide to eating less meat. Following the World Resource Institute's recommendations, she started focusing more on chicken, pork and seafood (especially mollusks), which produce far fewer greenhouse gas emissions than beef and lamb, both of which she has relegated to special-occasion status. READ MORE How to shop, cook and eat in a warming world "I like to loosely think of my approach as mindful meat-eating," she wrote. "Now, when I do simmer up a pot of beef short ribs (or smear cream cheese on my bagel, or go for sushi), I'm thoughtful and deliberate about it, which makes it taste even more delicious, seasoned with anticipation." Do you have a point of view we missed? Email us at debatable@nytimes.com. Please note your name, age and location in your response, which may be included in the next newsletter. Subscribe Today New York Times Opinion curates a wide range of views, inviting rich discussion and debate that helps readers analyze the world. This work is made possible with the support of subscribers. Please consider subscribing to The Times with this special offer. READ MORE "'Cultured' meat could create more problems than it solves" [The Conversation] "The Problem With Lab-Grown Meat" [Slate] "Lab-grown meat isn't about sustainability, it's big business" [Financial Times] "What Omnivores Get Wrong About Vegetarian Cooking" [The New York Times] "Quiz: How Does Your Diet Contribute to Climate Change?" [The New York Times] 💌Did a friend send you this? Get your own newsletter by signing up here. Continue reading the main story Need help? Review our newsletter help page or contact us for assistance. You received this email because you signed up for Debatable from The New York Times. To stop receiving these emails, unsubscribe or manage your email preferences. Subscribe to The TimesGet The New York Times app Connect with us on: Change Your EmailPrivacy PolicyContact UsCalifornia Notices The New York Times Company. 620 Eighth Avenue New York, NY 10018