Our 2 Year Anniversary in Cancun – How we got here

On 1st September 2004 we left the shores of sunny England, for the far distant land of Mexico. Just over two years later we have no regrets, and plan to be here for a long time to come.

This was not a snap decision but a carefully thought out and researched plan that had taken two years or so to achieve. The idea was born because, although I had a reasonably paid job in England with great benefits, I was never going to earn the money required to live in the house I wanted in an area I wanted. After 16 years in the same job and moving up through the ranks every couple of years, the thought of another 25 years of this was depressing to say the least. The excitement of my old job had long since passed…. about 15 years previously!

I had always been interested in computers since my mid teens,

I much preferred games and the Internet (when it first became available to the masses I was about 23!) to watching the TV and it was a great way to unwind. But I found myself wasting time playing online games, collecting fictitious gold to buy fictitious items that would allow me to earn more fictitious gold. It was time to try to emulate that with real ‘gold’. ‘Gold’ that could be used to provide a living for us.

I scoured the web for articles on designing websites and search engine optimisation, I was already pretty active on various Cancun message boards that existed at the time and could see areas that weren’t covered there. Having visited Cancun a ton of times I had photos and information, people always say build a site about something you know about, and so cancuncare.com was born.

I slowly built my first website, just as a hobby site to teach myself something new and to give me an alternative to slouching in front of the TV each night. It surprised me that people began to visit it, and in greater and greater numbers. I started a message board that gradually became popular, largely due to the help of a couple of Cancun message board addicts at the time and the visitor number began to grow further.

It was kind of a hard decision to turn the site from a hobby site into something that would actually generate revenue, as it wasn’t a popular decision with some of my online acquaintances at the time. However, I pressed on. I added new pages and developed relationships with tour and hotel providers in Cancun, and the site started to generate income. Learning (and failing much of the time with ) Search Engine Optimisation helped the site grow, and we were soon seeing 2000 visitors a day.

It was about at this point that one month my day job salary was actually surpassed by my online income for the same month. We thought to ourselves if we can make a success of Internet sales in Cancun from the UK while working part time, then how much more successful can we be if working full time in Cancun itself.

We put our house on the market, but it took a long time to sell. By the time we did manage to complete the house sale it was June 2004 and moved into a friends house to lodge temporarily before the big move. We had aimed to move here in November but we’d just found out that Jannet was pregnant with our daughter Daniella, if we moved in November she’d be 8 months pregnant and that would too far gone to fly, let alone deal with finding a place to live, buying new stuff and finding medical care for both as the only Spanish speaker.

This kind of threw us into a turmoil. Do we leave earlier than planned and have the baby in Mexico? or do we stay and wait until the baby is older before the move? We decided to move early.

I was fortunate that my job offered a benefit of one years unpaid leave, with option to return to the same job and salary one year later. I had to write a business case as to why it would be good for my employer if I were granted this leave. All sorts of BS was written “opportunity to understand the needs of different cultures” (PC was big at the time), ” gain an appreciation of running a small business”, “learn a second language” not to mention the fact that my replacement would be cheaper than me!

I was fortunate that my managers supported my application, (as many applications were not approved)… not because they wanted rid of me (I hope) but because they knew of what I had done so far and had some admiration for it, and possibly a hint of jealousy that the ‘dream’ that many people dream of was a distinct reality in this case.

My application was granted and on August 1st I walked out of my office for the last time after a small presentation, and not without a tear as I said goodbye to all my colleagues. I went back to my four crates of possessions, having already sold, trashed or given away 95% of our hard earned belongings.

One year later, I had no hesitation in sending my resignation via email.

Two years later, I still have no regrets….. but I often wonder how my life might be now had I not met a special someone in a Cancun nightclub while on vacation ten years ago.