There’s been major reforms to Mexican tax laws in the last couple of years and it’s getting pretty wild out there with a lot of misinformation, a lot of mistranslation, and a lot of freakouts about the fact that everyone, including residents with no tax obligations, need an RFC (tax ID). I’ve been waiting for a proper write-up about the situation to fully understand it, and this is it:
When I got here, I had it confirmed by both INM and Hacienda that because I only have foreign-sourced income and I pay my taxes to a country that has a tax treaty with Mexico, I do not need to get tangled up with taxes here.
That has changed. Now, Mexico wants everyone to have an RFC, and you have to get it in person with an appointment. There’s a couple of reasons behind it. The big one is to cut down on identity theft because our CURPs (SIN/SSN) are public information. By making people get their tax ID in person, they can verify people’s identity. And then there is the added benefit of being able to then track people’s financial activities, with the idea being to of course prevent tax fraud/get more taxes, but also to make it harder to keep financial dealings under the table as a back-handed way to choke off the flow of money to the cartels.
The article I linked to above really spells out everything and will probably reduce panic. I think the July 1st deadline is what is causing the most headaches, but it’s not like you’re going to get slapped in handcuffs if you don’t have your RFC by then. Hacienda knows that’s impossible. The July 1st deadline is actually for something else, explained in the article.
The RFC is apparently now needed to buy a car, and I’m going to need one when I do the official transfer of the house to my name. I also expect to seek out more credit products from BBVA in the next months. So I’m going to get started on this project before I absolutely need the RFC as it looks like there are huge delays in Mérida. The SAT office is walking distance for me, so not a huge deal to get to, so I’ll get in the virtual queue for an appointment and take my appointment when it comes. All official dealings here on on ice until I sort this out, but, again, no huge pressure at this time for me. I am just a bit frustrated that I could have done this when I was last at Hacienda, but at the time the word from on high was if you don’t need one, don’t get one.
Today, I visited what is probably Mérida’s best-kept secret, and which I’ve known about for a long time but just couldn’t get to, the Parque Eco Arqueológico de Xoclán del Poniente, a huge nature preserve with ruins located in the heart of the southwest quadrant of the city.
I’ll skip ahead for a minute and mention that I met a really nice guy near the end of my visit who confirmed something I’ve long suspected — it’s not part of the culture here to go seeking nature so it’s not my imagination that even long-time residents of the city have no idea where the green pockets are. Here’s a case in point. He showed me photos and video of the giant lake behind Walmart Pensiones. Wait, what? There’s a giant lake behind Walmart Pensiones? You’d never know by looking at a map!
We had such a lovely chat. His Spanish was perfect for my ear and it was like conversing with someone in English and French, it was that fluent. He showed me videos of the park at different times of the years and also of some animals he’s spotted, including a huge snake!
So the Parque Xoclán (what I’ll call it for short) is not next-door to me at all. It was a full 30-minute Uber ride in pretty heavy traffic. My Pilates teacher is away for a week so I fit my adventuring in the slot for class this morning, figuring even just a one-hour hike in nature would be better than no workout at all.
I would have loved to have brought Bonita as dogs are allowed on leashes, but taking her in an Uber is such a crapshoot and I was afraid we’d get stranded.
The outer edges of the park have flat well-groomed trails, but the deeper in you get, the more you get proper hiking trails that even have challenging bits. I was so happy!
The heart of the park is the lake. The water was very low right now as we are technically in a drought. The levels will be much higher by the autumn.
See, proper hiking trails!
I met the guy at the northern tip of the park. After our chat, I walked a couple of blocks over to the Paseo Verde, a nearly 10KM stretch of walking and bike bike paths that are mostly tree-lined.
It was as I expected not very “naturey,” but boy do I wish I had something like this much, much closer to me! The park has both these concrete walkways as well as asphalt bike paths.
The city has been adding bike paths all over and is starting to slowly create a connected network that is making me think that I might start biking again now that Pilates has worked miracles on my bad leg. There’s no way I’d be using a bike as a way to actually get around — the roads, traffic, and lack of bike parking make that a very bad idea unless you have absolutely no way to afford a better option — but if getting to pleasant areas to bike, like the Paseo Verde or the Biciruta on the Paseo de Montejo Sunday mornings, becomes easier and safer, then taking up biking for fun and exercise again would be such a joy. I’ve biked so much in my life and it was sometimes my only means of transportation. I’m not quite ready to give it up!
What a lovely morning this was. I’ll definitely be back to explore the other side of Parque Xoclán!
(post 179 of 263 — I back dated posts, so scroll down to make sure you didn’t miss any!)
I’ve been wanting a video doorbell for ages. I don’t hear the wired doorbell in my office with the headphones on and I’d like not to run all that distance to the door when I do hear it to find someone selling something I’m not interested in. I also liked the security monitoring features of capturing whenever someone is near the door.
Unfortunately, the only Apple-approved video doorbell, by Logitech, is not available in Mexico so my choices were Nest (Google product? No thanks!) or Ring (Amazon product, lesser of two evils even with the hacking scandal). Well, Amazon Mexico was practically giving away their 2020 Ring 2 doorbells a couple of weeks ago, so I picked one up. Ha, little did I know I’d bought the proverbial mouse a cookie.
I woke up on a Sunday morning raring to go to install the Ring myself. The instructions made it seem like a DIY thing. First off, I checked the Wi-Fi strength at the front gate and, finding it low, I moved the signal booster closer until I got nearly my full 125Mbps download speeds at the door.
I’ll skip ahead here to warn Ring users to read all the fine print because the device has a number of nasty secrets that are buried in the fine print. One of them is that the basic models of Rings will not connect to modern 5Ghz Wi-Fi, only the older 2.4Ghz protocol. That Wi-Fi isn’t as strong and I barely had a signal at the gate on that network despite the booster. But I didn’t know any of that yet.
It was ominous that setting up a Ring user account took over two hours, over 50 attempts, and a very long DM conversation on Twitter before I was able to do it. As an Apple user, I just don’t have the mental energy for any BS when it comes to setting things up. That just setting up an account was so broken was mind-boggling. It took all that time for the service rep to say, oh, wait, the app might be buggy. Let’s try to set up you account through the website. Which worked immediately. Auuuuuuuugh.
So I was pretty cranky already as I began to take apart the old doorbell to see what I was working with and how I would install the Ring. So there’s the other little fine print thing that the Ring just glosses over. The instructions give the impression that if you hardwire the Ring to any wired doorbell, that it can ring the chime for that doorbell. FALSE. It will only work with a small number of doorbell models. Had I known this, I doubt I would have bothered hardwiring the doorbell because it wouldn’t be as simple as the instructions made it out to be.
My doorbell wiring was set into a standard electrical junction box. The Ring mounting bracket just covered the hole, but that left nowhere in which to screw the bracket. I had a think about it and then headed out to the closest hardware store open on a Sunday, the Ace Hardware on Calle 60. Had a chat with one of their clerks and he agreed that my plan was a good one — I would install a metal outlet cover with a hole in it for the wires and drill four holes into it in which I could screw the Ring bracket. I made sure to pick up an appropriately sized drill bit and some caulking as well. Looking back, the only thing I would have changed, if I could, would have been the colour of the outlet cover, which I’ll explain in a bit.
I put duct tape around the edges of the hole to prevent possible wear on the wiring. I then centred the Ring bracket on the plate and marked the four screw holes.
Drilling the holes was easy and they came out neatly.
I had no trouble mounting the cover and then screwing over it the Ring bracket. But I was not able to then complete the installation of the Ring because it involved wrapping the two doorbell wires around two teeny tiny screws on the Ring. I simply do not have the dexterity to do such fine work. I had dropped one of the screws about three times when I heard a timid “Can I help you?” I turned around to see my neighbour from across the street. Turns out that she and her boyfriend work with electronics and do this kind of thing all day long. When I saw that they were genuinely happy to help me out, I was happy to hand over the tools! They got the Ring connected in minutes, something I know I would never have been able to do with my fingers being the way they are, and I learned some new tricks!
So this is what it looks like, and why I wish the cover had been another colour. Rings are silver, aren’t they? I’d never seen them any other colour. So imagine my surprise when I pulled this out of the box! It’s a beautiful burnished bronze colour, what I would have selected had I known it existed. So that was a good surprise, the only one to come out of this mess!
I will have to unmount the Ring in about a year to power it (despite it being hardwired). At that time, I may decide to spray the plate to make the colour match the Ring better. But even like this, I think the installation looks pretty good!
I could then not get the Ring to work well, and that’s when I discovered the Wi-Fi nonsense. I tried to get some help on the Ring forum and through Ring support, but no one was listening to what I was asking and instead talking over me, repeating over and over that I could not connect the ring to the 5Ghz network when what I was asking was how I could create 2.4Ghz Wi-Fi from the wired connection at my TV. I knew that had to be possible, but I was drowning in technobabble.
The next day, Monday, I went to my friend Tim’s house to see how his renovations were progressing (WOW). I realised that he knows about networks and such, so I asked for help and he had an answer for me! I got home and bought on Amazon a TP-Link Deco mesh Wi-Fi system. I was not happy to have to buy another pricey device to make the Ring work, but the price on the mesh system was just right and promised that I’d have strong internet in every corner of my property, so it seemed to be worth it.
Amazon delivered the mesh system the next day and it was pretty easy to set up and delivered what it promised. That was all surprising since I’ve been using TP-Link Wi-Fi boosters for years and they’ve always been a nightmare to set up and underwhelmed at performance.
The Ring, though, was still not satisfied. I still had the booster, so I set that up between the front door and the gate (thank goodness I have an outlet on my covered porch!) and that still wasn’t enough. I was livid by this point because it was clear that the problem was that it had a shoddy Wi-Fi receptor and that Amazon thinks that everyone lives in cardboard houses with their modem literally behind the doorbell.
I got into another DM Twitter chat with a Ring person who had the patience of a saint. How’s this for another surprise, my new mesh system wasn’t compatible with a Ring because a mesh system, by definition, combines the 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz frequencies. So while the Ring was connecting to the new network, it was not effectively connected to the 2.4Ghz frequency. Ring was pretty useless after this point, so I thanked the person for their help and moved to TP-Link to see if there was a way to isolate the 2.4Ghz frequency. No, because that goes against the idea of what a mesh network is, but there was a workaround!
I had to create a guest network on the mesh system that only had the 2.4Ghz frequency active. I did that and connected the Ring to the guest network. Still wasn’t good enough and I realised that I hadn’t “boosted” the guest network, so I went through all the steps to create the new boosted guest network on the booster. I then had to connect the Ring to the new boosted network. By the way, every time you want to change the network the Ring connects to, you have to remove the two security screws, pry the Ring off the bracket (careful you don’t disconnect the wires!), and hit the orange reset button on the back of the device. Are you exhausted yet? I sure was.
But it worked! The resulting connection was just the minimum for a stable Ring connection. Here’s all of that summarized in a video:
The device has worked great since. I’m happy with the camera quality. Here’s night mode:
I like that it’s essentially an intercom, so I can answer from my desk and let someone know I’m coming. There’s lots of steps to answering the Ring, but turns out there’s a separate app to do that (Rapid Ring). So much fine print!
One of the feedbacks I’ve been getting is that people can tell there is no doorbell ringing in the house, so if I don’t answer through the intercom, they do the usual yell to get attention. I didn’t want to throw any more money at this thing, but a couple of days ago refurbished Ring-brand Chime devices popped up on Amazon for $750, so I picked one up.
Speaking of yelling to get attention, the Ring is useful for folks who skip straight to that as I get a notification that someone is standing in the doorway.
The Ring comes with a one-month subscription to the service where you can review past events. That would have been useful after the burglary as I would have had footage of the thief leaving the house. I heard a lot of complaints about the cost of this service, but it’s only $3USD per month! There are other Ring security devices that I may consider if they show up on Amazon Mexico that would bump up the cost to $10USD, still a bargain, as long as the device continues to work well (who knows how much longer the version 2 is going to be supported?).
So my feelings about the Ring are pretty well mixed. Setting up an account shouldn’t be a nightmare. 2020 wasn’t so long ago that it’s acceptable for a device to not work with 5Ghz Wi-Fi. I absolutely don’t hold the installation issues against them. Customer service was very good. Actual function is excellent. So I’d say 3.5 stars out of 5 overall?
(post 178 of 263 — I have been back dating posts, so scroll down to make sure you didn’t miss any! There are four new posts as of May 19th.)
I’m so happy with how the refresh of my upstairs bathroom turned out! Of the three bathrooms, that one was in the best shape in that the wall tiles still looked good and it just needed updated flooring and fixtures since I don’t mind that the shower doesn’t work well, having the new one downstairs.
In this picture, you’ll note a very tired mirror (the frame is just paper!), the old outlet, and the pedestal sink with no storage and very gunked up taps. You can also see a corner of the old vanity that I used for storage that was impossible to keep tidy. It has a new home in my cleaning fairy’s dining room!
Here’s the nasty old toilet in all its faded glory. The base was cracked, it was way too short for me, and the shutoff valve was seized shut.
And here’s a sample of the really gross floor that you could see from the bedroom when the bathroom door was shut.
Now, you walk into a much warmer space. I’m still working on the floor as I caulked the joints and the caulking keeps appearing as it cures, but I’m not bothered with by the look as it rather blends into the pattern. I am starting to scrape it and tidy it up as my knees allow.
I love how the dark wood carries through from downstairs and warms up the space. A new custom vanity purchased on Mercado Libre opens up to shelving that gives me a ton of space for little items I use daily that used to be on the turquoise vanity. I also had the outlet and light switch changed.
I found a cabinet with the perfect dimensions for the space. It was natural wood and white, so I used contact paper to make it match the new vanity. I have one drawer and several adjustable shelves.
I bought the same toilet as I did for the downstairs bathroom and it has a new shutof. A new rug warms up the space. Behind the shower partition are ugly things like the dirty clothes hamper and the toilet brush!
(post 177 of 263 — I have been back dating posts, so scroll down to make sure you didn’t miss any!)
Before the pandemic, I had started to take the cinema for granted despite having a luxury one within walking distance. Now that it’s closed, probably for good, I realised that the adage is true that you don’t appreciate something until it’s gone. I’m pretty sure I’ve been to the cinema more since December than I had in total my three years here pre-pandemic. My first post-pandemic film was “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” which I timed perfectly to see in a nearly empty theatre. I so regretted seeing “Black Widow” on a small screen, so I was thrilled to see Spider-Man at a theatre!
The next movie I saw was an impulse, the first time in ages that I thought, gosh, I’ve been cooped up at home for ages, wonder if there’s a good movie on! So I checked the listings and realised I had just enough time to take a walk (about 40 minutes) to Plaza Las Americas to catch a showing of “Marry Me.” It was a week night, so the cinema was pretty empty as well.
Then, I saw “The Batman,” and despite going during the week, the theatre was packed, which made it difficult to relax and enjoy the show, but I’m still happy I saw it on the big screen.
Finally, today I went to see “Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness,” but of course! There were a few more people than when I went to see Spider-Man, but nowhere near as many as for Batman.
I like to pair my planned cinema outings with a good meal. For all but “Marry Me” I ended up at Galerías, which only has two good restaurants, Sushi Roll or Chili’s. The last two outings, I did ribs with the margarita of the month at Chili’s, and I’d like to make that a monthly thing! I’m not a fan of regular margaritas, but their monthly offerings are so creative! The one I had before Batman had tamarind in it, the one after Dr. Strange had Granny Smith apple.
Yucatán is now fully reopen, with only an indoor mask mandate to remind us that we are coming out of a pandemic. This feels very right as we were locked down so tightly that our current numbers are super low and we haven’t had any COVID deaths in weeks. I thought I’d have a hard time reengaging with the world, but it’s happened so gradually that the transition has been easy. It feels amazing to go out for meals, shop in person without entering a store being a huge procedure, and, of course, to freeze for a few hours (why do I always forget to bring a blanket to the cinema!) while watching an entertaining tale on the big screen. But you know what I appreciate most about going to the movies? Cinema mode, so a blissful two to three hours free of notifications. I need to start implementing that kind of break in my daily life!
