Work, education, language, culture- there are so many changes to anticipate when you decide that you might want to leave your home country and move abroad, but how can you prepare for these things? How did we set ourselves up in advance to successfully leave the United States and still provide for our family? This is the topic I will discuss today.
So you want to leave your home country and move abroad, but how? Almost 6 years ago we were faced with this same proposition. When we left the United States, it was with a heavy heart, but it was something that we knew we needed to do for the future of our family. Back in 2018, we were a family of 3. We had remote income from Google Adsense of about $2,000 per month. We also had a company that we were working remotely for, owned completely, and had most clients in another state. This was good practice for working and living in a different place from where our income came from. After about 6 months of exclusively working remotely, and not seeing any clients in-person, we made the leap from the United States to Mexico. This came many years after establishing our business, it was not an overnight process, nor a short journey.
Why did we choose Mexico?
There are two reasons why we chose Mexico, and both are directly related to income and livability. Mexico was livable for us, because our income met the qualifications for the temporary residency visa. It was also on the same continent and time zone, making travel back to visit family and work hours match what was normal to us. We traveled from North Carolina, where we were living at the time, to San Antonio, TX. In San Antonio, we visited the Mexican consulate, submitted our paperwork for the visa, and 2 out of 3 of us left the consulate that same day with the visa in our passports.
So what about the third person?
Because he was undocumented in the United States, he could not obtain the visa for Mexico from a consulate in the USA. One has to be in legal status to obtain a visa in whichever country they are in, for whichever country they want to immigrate to.
Because of this, we first had to travel to Honduras, where they had legal status (ie citizenship in this case), and obtain the visa from there. When we left the USA as a family of 3, it was with a LOT of unknowns and a tremendous amount of uncertainty. However, two weeks after we arrived in Honduras, we were on our way to Mexico, via Costa Rica, with all of our residency visas to Mexico in hand.
In mid-September of 2018, we arrived in Mexico. About 6 months later, the birth certificate that would make my husband a citizen of Mexico came through from Honduras.
If you want to keep track, this was passport number 2 for him.
This is also about the same time the pandemic hit. This brings us to March of 2020, when the whole world has started to go on lockdown. This was obviously not ideal for the start of a life abroad, which was supposed to be full of language learning, culture exposure, and traveling!
In April of 2020, we had our second baby, who was born abroad in Mexico. I could write a whole post about this and why we chose to give birth in Mexico during a pandemic, but it was largely related to my husband not being able to re-enter the United States to be present for his birth.
Through a series of different circumstances, like controlled travel due to the pandemic, a bad encounter with the healthcare system in Mexico, and a general annoyance at the United States government (we were realizing after almost 2 years, that going home on a hardship waiver was going to take many more years than we had hoped it would), we made the decision to move to Spain. I have already gone into those details in this post.
Let me back up a couple of steps before I get into moving to Spain. During the heat of the pandemic when “Florida was closed”, my husband had begun to self educate on the topic of SEO. Most of our clients were in Florida, so Florida being closed was bad for our remote income. Our primary source of income at the time, was our LLC in the United States. We also still had an additional source of income, which was from internet marketing, as I have already mentioned, but in order to be able to “expand our horizons” and ever leave Mexico or live the digital nomad life, we wanted more financial security, that is more income, more money honey.
The pandemic is a huge part of our story for many reasons, as I am sure it is a part of yours too. This is something that impacted the whole world, and I am sure it played an instrumental part in the story of many of our lives. For us, it forced us into restriction, which we hated, but it also pushed us into learning more things, because we had tons of time to do so.
While my oldest son and I were busy learning about gardening and raising chickens, my husband was investing hours of his new free time into SEO. He needed to increase the internet marketing income, in order to compensate for the loss of the LLC income, at the time. In the background, I was also researching other countries that we could possibly move to one day, so that we could hack our way through the travel restrictions.
Eventually, he learned about affiliate marking, where you can promote a company on your websites, and then earn a commission off of those purchases. He signed up with a company that was related to his website niche, and immediately started earning.
This became our 3rd source of income.
Eventually, the combination of internet marketing and affiliate income began to increase over the LLC income. Ultimately, it became enough to qualify for other visas in other countries- those countries that had higher income requirements than Mexico. Mexico was good practice for moving abroad, we could afford to live there on our LLC and internet marketing money (either one was enough on it’s own, which gave us a sense of security to move abroad).
So now back to moving to Spain.
In November of 2020, we made a plan to be able to move to Spain. We had already extensively researched all the possible options for us, and determined that Spain was going to be our number one choice. Sight unseen, the same way we moved to Mexico by the way.
With our passive income (internet marketing is passive, since it involves renting your webpage space), LLC income, and a small savings account, we were able to submit our visa application for Spain in March of 2021.
We now had two kids, one with 1 passport, and the other with 2 (the baby had Mexican citizenship by birth and US citizenship through me).
In April of 2021 we moved to Spain. In 2022, we began the process of obtaining Honduran citizenship for our sons. They qualified for this because the law in Honduras is similar to the one in the United States, which says that if you are born abroad to a citizen, then you are considered a citizen of the country. This process took some time to complete from Spain. We had to have apostilled documents of our kid’s birth certificates and our marriage certificate- all of which I already had. Never move abroad without multiple copies of these things! The longest part of the process was waiting on Honduras to process everything. Two years later, we are still waiting on our marriage certificate from Honduras, BUT the boys did get citizenship after many many months of waiting.
This meant that our oldest now had 2 citizenships/passports, and our youngest had 3.
In Spain, the NLV (non lucrative visa) has to be renewed after the first year, and then again every two years for two cycles, for a total of 5 years. After 5 years, a person can apply for permanent residency and receive a work permit as part of that residency type. Five years later (10 years total), citizenship becomes an option. What this meant for us, was that for up to 5 years we needed to maintain our remote passive income.
One caveat is that Spain offers a shorter pathway for citizenship to IberoAmericans.
Of course there is no way to know how long the Spanish citizenship process would take. Given everything I have already shared, we live largely day by day, with hope that it will all work out- but the decisions we make are based on what is best for our family today and probably tomorrow and next month, but beyond that, our sense of stability was pretty low.
Fortunately, we were able to renew our residency for all cycles, with success and ease. One the day after the two year point of legal residency (April 2023), we submitted my husband’s application to Spanish citizenship. His application took almost exactly 11 months to be approved, which meant that during the wait we had to do our final residency renewal.
Finally, in August 2024, my husband received his Spanish birth certificate, and went to get all of his Spanish identification, which is a passport and DNI (Spain, like many other EU countries, has a state identification card). For the first time in his adult life, he has the right to vote and the right to work in a country.
Sure he could have worked in Honduras at anytime, and he also could have worked/voted in Mexico, if he had lived there during an election after he received citizenship there, but we didn’t live there long enough for that to happen- and as for living somewhere where he could do both as an adult- as not happened until now.
To update the passport number, this was 3 passports for him: Honduras, Mexico, Spain
We had left the United States with a lot of unknowns, but NOW he has obtained an even stronger passport than what the United States can offer. He is now a citizen of a “first world” country, with freedom of MOVEMENT (something you can not do when you are undocumented in the United States), and with this citizenship, he opens up the opportunity for our boys to receive Spanish citizenship as well…& me too if I choose to do that.
I can now also apply for permanent residency in Spain, which if approved, with give me a work permit. I have recently submitted the application and am only waiting for an approval or denial. You can see here, how the situation is a lot more complicated for my husband to receive the same type of visa in the USA.
What’s next?
There are a few things on our short list of what’s next. On one hand we are still obtaining passports for our kids. We are waiting on their Spanish birth certificates, which will give them each another passport.
That will be a total of 4 for one child, and 3 for the other. As for the oldest, who only has three, he now qualifies for citizenship in Mexico, since they changed their citizenship rules about a year after we left.
In the past, you couldn’t get citizenship through your Mexican parent, IF they became a citizen AFTER you were born. This is the case for our oldest, since he was born in 2014 in the USA and my husband became an official documented Mexican citizen in 2019. Technically, he has been Mexican since birth, but for some reason, they didn’t have a pathway for my oldest son, but that changed with this law change.
Once we receive the Spanish documents for our children, we will use them to obtain Mexican citizenship for our oldest. This will give our boys all the same citizenships and passports, which is the ultimate goal. After their dad was in the USA for 25 years, with a life controlled by a lack of a visa, and a weak passport- the last thing I want is for my kids to EVER have to deal with this in their future.
So some people have asked us why all the passports- what’s the point- well, now you know. When we go through experiences, we make future choices and plans, if we can…and for me, it was to leave the United States, travel, show my child(ren) more of the world, earn multiple incomes for financial security in doing that, and collect passports for my kids.
May they never marry someone and find themselves in a situation like we have- where they need to desperately look for income sources and visas just to keep their family together. They will now have the freedom to move about a large portion of the world, they will be able to work in some of the strongest economies, they will have many affordable educational and health options- their lives will be better because of this.
Thank you for reading. I hope you have been inspired to travel, to move, to get out, to take control of your situation, for the betterment of your family.
Thanks for reading,
Ashley
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