We Closed on the Mexico City Apartment (Premium)

This past week, we closed on our apartment in Mexico City and were able to stay there for most of the trip. We had a lot of work to do. And still do. But we did make some progress.

Here, I’ll provide a high-level overview of what happened this past week here for the curious and will look at some of the tech-related decisions we made for the new apartment.

We were originally supposed to close on the apartment on Monday, April 18, and six weeks prior we had booked flights, a hotel, the dog kennel, and someone to feed our cats for about a week around that date. It was a long and stressful six weeks that involved us laboriously transferring money in small amounts from our U.S.-based account to an intermediary account using a service called Wise, and then watching the exchange rate so that we could transfer it into Mexican Pesos at an opportune time. But then, just three days before our flight, we got bad news: a piece of paperwork required to complete the purchase hadn’t arrived and, because of the Easter long weekend---Mexico is a Catholic country---it wouldn’t arrive in time. We had to cancel everything.

This was deflating. And stressful because of the uncertainty: the seller had no idea when this paperwork would show up, but they would tell us when it happened and then we’d try to get there as quickly as possible. They were also nice enough to offer to refund us any change fees the flight cancelations had cost us, and that amounted to about $600. Finally, we received word, and we rebooked everything. And we flew to Mexico City last Monday, May 9, about three weeks later than originally planned.

There are two flights from Newark, New Jersey to Mexico City each day, one in the morning and one late in the afternoon. We very much prefer the earlier flight and had always taken that one to date. But because it was almost twice the cost of the later flight on this particular day, we went with the latter option. And it started off fine: we had no issues at the airport, and I heard the pilot mention to someone that we were expected to arrive in Mexico City about 45 minutes early, or around 9:30 pm. That would make a big difference because our closing was the next morning. Or it would have.

As we were approaching Mexico City, the pilot warned us that there would be bumps towards the end of the flight because of some rain. And there were. As we descended, the plane bumped around as rain hit the windows, but I just continued watching whatever movie on my iPad, knowing we’d soon be on the ground. Then my wife touched my arm. The pilot had informed the plane that we were no longer landing in Mexico City and were instead diverting to Toluca because of severe weather. Ugh.

Without dragging this out, we ended up sitting on the ground in Toluca for a few hours and arrived in Mexico City two hours late, not 45 minutes early. And by the time we got to the hotel---we had booked for three nights because we woul...