Business, Real Estate and Investing
By Jim Karger

Is it Really Cheaper to Live in San Miguel?
Part I: Food—Eating in, Eating out

In this five-part series, Karger looks at the commonly shared belief that it is less expensive to live in Mexico, specifically in San Miguel de Allende, than in the United States. It is an important inquiry because many expatriates leave the United States in part because they believe the cost of living here is materially less. In this article, Karger compares the cost of food, both groceries and restaurants. In the second installment, he looks at land and construction costs, as well as utility costs. In the third article, he will compare the cost of services – from maids to lawyers, insurance to car washes. In the fourth installment, Karger addresses the cost of travel, including the cost of automobiles, licensing, taxes, gas, oil, maintenance, and insurance. And in the concluding article he puts the pieces together, tabulates the totals and provides an anecdotal conclusion to the question of whether living in San Miguel is, indeed, a financial bargain compared to living in the United States.

“What is madness?” asked Voltaire. “To have erroneous perceptions and to reason correctly from them,” he answered.

Nowhere does this ring truer than in Mexico where “facts” are few and beliefs are many, where fantasy becomes truth based on the number of times a fiction is repeated. 

What fictions? One good example is the myth of 1,000,000 US expatriates living in Mexico. It has been repeated so many times that it has become the truth to many even though it is pure fantasy. In 2000, Bill Masterson wrote an interesting article entitled, “Yanks Abroad: The Numbers Game” detailing his efforts to discover the number of US expatriates living in Mexico. He asked both the Mexican and US governments. The US Embassy in Mexico City admitted they did not know. The Mexican immigration agency could account for only 124,082 US citizens residing in Mexico, which included those here for business, as well as immigrants, students, and legal residents.

Two years later, Masterson updated his research in, “How Many Americans Live In Mexico?” He revealed at least one possibility for the erroneous “million expat” estimate. He recounted that an anthropologist professor in Mexico City cited her own research in an article indicating that the number of US citizens living in Mexico was, indeed 1 million, with an unbelievable 600,000 of those million US expats living in Mexico City. When Masterson asked the professor to describe the methodology she used for determining what percentage of Americans living abroad were living in Mexico, she provided no explanation. Masterson concluded that he had “seen nothing . . . that would cause me to change his opinion that “the best factual estimate of Americans living in Mexico is below 150,000.’”

That was five years ago but even if one assumes that the population of US expatriates has escalated 50 percent in that half-decade (a real stretch), that leaves only 225,000 US expats in Mexico today—far below the “million” commonly thrown about as fact.

The “myth of a million” is but one of many and leads to this series that evaluates another commonly heard assertion— “Mexico is half to a third less costly to live in than the United States.” Is it really?

In this series, we will compare the cost of basic items of the same or similar quality, both goods and services, commonly used by expatriates. In this article we look at food—the cost of basic staples and the cost of eating out in San Miguel compared to identical or similar items in the US.


Eating At Home

For purposes of comparing “apples to apples,” we use prices collected at one of the large grocery chains in San Miguel and a Super Wal-Mart in St. Louis, Missouri. How does the cost of basic foodstuffs compare off grocery shelves? (Items have been converted from kilograms to pounds and Mexican pesos to US dollars using the conversion rate as of the writing of this article, 10.8 pesos to the dollar. It does not take into account the cost of converting dollars to pesos.)


Item: San Miguel St. Louis, MO

Bananas $.39 $.46 

Red Apples $.94 $1.44

Tomatoes $.31 $1.67

Onions (white) $.31 $1.08

Eggs (Dozen/large) $1.25 $1.54

Bread (Loaf/whole wheat) $1.89 $2.16

Milk (Gallon/Whole Milk) $3.67 $3.98

Cereal (500 g corn flakes) $2.00 $2.50

Hamburger $2.01 $1.39


Conclusion: San Miguel wins hands-down. A basket of these items in San Miguel was $12.77 versus $16.22 in St. Louis, a 27 percent discount enjoyed by those living here.



Eating Out

Comparing restaurant prices is far more difficult in part because there are so many restaurants serving different food, few exact duplicates of menu items and recipes, differences in portion size, and widely varying quality of service and ambience. I compared three restaurants in San Miguel with what I deemed their equivalents in the U.S, including a popular Italian restaurant in downtown San Miguel with a popular higher-end fresh ingredients Italian chain in the US—Maggiano’s Little Italy in Oakbrook, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, using three comparable entrees.



Item: San Miguel Italian Maggiano’s (Oakbrook, IL)

Linguine al mare 11.57 11.95

Veal Milanese 10.64 19.95

Shrimp 20.37 22.95


San Miguel is the better bargain. The items in San Miguel totaled US$42.58 with the same (but notably larger portions at Maggiano’s) totaling US$54.85, resulting in an almost identical savings of 28 percent.

While admittedly a limited sampling, these comparisons are consistent with my anecdotal perspective developed over the last six years traveling to and from the US— food is less expensive in San Miguel, about 25 percent less expensive than comparable offerings north of the border.

In two weeks, we will look at rents, land and construction costs, and the price of electricity, water, and gas.

Jim Karger is a resident of San Miguel de Allende and writes the “Business, Real Estate and Investing” column for Atención.