Strong American Dollar Has Made Retiring in Mexico a Whole Lot Cheaper Ben Steverman - Bloomberg
go to original March 17, 2015

Every year, more and more Americans retire abroad. About 615,000 Americans received their Social Security checks outside the U.S. last month, up 57 percent since 2000. That doesn’t count thousands of additional Americans who live abroad full- or part-time but continue receiving checks at U.S. banks.

Those checks just became a lot more valuable, too. After a decade in the doldrums, the dollar has gotten significantly stronger. The U.S. Dollar Index, which measures the value of a dollar against a basket of international currencies, is up 25 percent since July, boosting the buying power of expatriate retirees, from Buenos Aires to Paris.

Jim Horn, a retired professor who lives in Cuernavaca, Mexico, figures his daily expenses are down 11 percent—and that’s before a recent further drop in the Mexican peso. Horn says he already had a comfortable income from Social Security and a pension priced in dollars. “So I am living quite well,” he says. His only regret: He put the proceeds of a condo sale in a Mexican bank, rather than his U.S. account. The Mexican peso is down 17 percent since last year’s high.



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