Coffee Time LIVE in Armenia, Colombia 23 October 2022

Coffee, you're set to do, you saw the heartaches I've caused you, it won't take the place I'm loving you, I know, I'll just have a cup of coffee, then I'll go. Good morning and welcome back to the channel Grand Columbia and welcome to Coffee Time Live. There's been some major changes, so can you hear me? Can you see me? How's everything look? Ay, ay, Dios mio, it's been rough. I'm here in Armenia, Columbia, coming from kind of rain-soaked, rainy season. Any given moment, we got sun, we got rain. Rob, how you doing? Hello, Rob. Mike, hello, Mike. Juca, Juca, thank you, and thank you for last week. Coleman, hello from Oklahoma. See, now you know he's actually in Oklahoma. And Mike Carroll, sound video good. Okay, well, I'll just give you a quick update. You remember the video card and the rain and the deluge on top of my computer and all that. I go away for a week, and I'm in Montezalas, I'm doing different things. I come back and I'm setting up to get ready. I've got the class on Saturday, Coffee Time. I got a whole bunch of video clips from the trip to Montezalas and all kinds of stuff. And they're all on the computer. I go away, get something, and come back. I sit down, I'm working, and next thing I know, I got 4th of July coming out of the back of the computer. Real quick, apparently the power supply succumbed to the deluge. It just took a few weeks to do it. No big deal. Power supplies are really cheap. Got one here in a few days. However, took out the hard drive and took out all that information that I put on it. But it's not lost. It's just lost for this week. It's sufficient enough to take it to local computer guy Lewis, and he'll be able to resurrect it and put it on a thumb drive for me or something like that. And I've got other drives. So I'm up and running with essentially a new computer. It's been a treat. So I've had to download all kinds of software. You forget how much software you have to use to do this. I can't put the comments up on the screen there because that software wasn't working. I need more time. And anyway, here we are. So you can come here to hear me whine about the computer. Well, some of you might have. But stream status, excellent. Stream is healthy. Getting comments so far. Hopefully, everything's going. Okay. First thing I want to do is clarify the visa thing. Thanks to Tom and Manizales, we got to the root of veterans need a mental certificate, which I told you was a bunch of crap. Okay. So I got some clarification on it. I'm going to read this to you. See if I can put it up on the screen. Everything's new. Okay. Number four, retirement visa. I'm going to skip to the second bullet point. New rules add substantial changes to required documentation, including mental, physical fitness certificate. In parentheses, he puts an opinion. We are seeing the Colombian government more focused on ensuring that applicants, particularly veterans, do not suffer from mental health issues such as PSD. And a criminal background certificate. This may need to be issued in both Columbia. All right. Let me get this out of the way. This is from this was put out a while back. And it's from Lang and law firm. They're actually out of the United States. But in Columbia, they're registered to operate in Medellin. There's I think over 13 of them in the office. Okay. Here's the deal. They were full of it. And they should not have put that opinion blurb in there because people read it and ran with it. There is no psychiatric test to check out if you have PTSD or anything special for veterans. I promise you, it's not the case. As a matter of fact, what they're talking about, if you've gotten a driver's license in Columbia, you've had to do that exact same thing, which is little to nothing. And it's, there may have been a question about do you take any medications or something along that line. But there's really nothing about psychiatric in that official government provided test. I took it. I passed. That ought to tell you something. So that's where it began. That's the earliest that we could find. And there's nothing in the official information that says anything of the sort. It was purely opinion. You put it in parentheses, so that's cool. But a lot of people thought it's coming from the law firm, they must know, and therefore it's gospel. It was made up. It was an opinion. It's not true. It's not what the test is. It's not targeting veterans. Everybody has to provide that test or the equivalent, which is nothing more. You ever go into the doctor's office and they have a series of basic questions. Have you ever done this? Have you ever done that? That's what it is. Okay. So there's that. I don't even know why they're requiring it. It's so minimal. And on the second part here, what was it? Criminal background check certificate. You got this kind of wrong too, maybe both countries. No. If you're coming to Colombia and you've been living in the United States, then you need three years of the criminal record. If you've been living in Colombia for those three years, you don't have to provide anything. If you've been living like I was in Ecuador for three years and come here, I would now have to provide for Ecuador. So if I were in Ecuador for two years and came here for a year, well, you'd have to get your visa when you got here. So not even then. There may be a case where there's a crossover, but whatever, if you've been living in Colombia for a period of time, you don't have to provide that because it's in Colombia. You'd only have to provide the time within those three years that you were outside of Colombia. Now, let's say you lived in Ecuador for a year and you lived in Dominican Republic for a year, and you lived in Mexico for a year. Then yes, the last three years you would need police reports from all those three. That's not real common, but that means you've got visas for all three. And it doesn't include vacations. If you went for a vacation for a couple months, it's talking about your place of residence. Hopefully that clarifies that rumor and it's correct. Okay. All right. Some of you are going to like this. Some of you are going to throw things at the screen. No data. YouTube is currently not receiving data for this stream. If you believe this is incorrect, but it says that I'm streaming full blast, big time, no drop frames. Send me a message if you're still getting me. Doc, what is this? Okay. Damn YouTube, I'll tell you. They drive me crazy. All right. Why are you going to throw things at the screen? All right. Speaking of driver's license, I've always advised in all my videos, three basic don'ts if you're moving wherever. Don't buy real estate. Don't buy a car, get a license. Don't open a bank account. Those three things, you come to Columbia and I've hammered home. This time I clarified that because when I'm talking to people about this, I'm talking about when you come to Columbia. In other words, you're new. You're coming to Columbia. Do not do these three things. There's a whole bunch of reasons. I'm not going to go over today, but if you need one of them specifically, we can do it. Write me an email or if you think I need to include it in a video topic again, let me know, but buy real estate. One, lots of reasons, but quickly, if you're relatively new here within the first year, maybe by year two, you don't want to live here. Now, what are you going to do? It's not that easy to sell real estate. Also, you buy real estate. It's great today. You move in. Three months, somebody else moves in and they got dog kennels in the backyard. Laws are different here. You kind of have to deal with it. You want to be real careful about what you get to be sure that you're going to be happy with it. Real estate can be problematic until you know the lay of the land, you know where it is you're contemplating on buying really well. So, it's always been an advisory. I'm just giving you my advice. Do whatever the hell you want to do, but there's reasons behind the advice I give you. Number two, buy a car and license. You should add don't get involved with local women. Yeah. Well, okay. Well, what fun would that be? Okay. So, buying a car, getting a license, talking from somebody who got a car and has a license. Again, when you first get here, a car is an extra expense, considerable extra expense, especially procuring one. You have to keep up with it. You've got all the administrative fees, licensing, things like that. It's problematic in that in town, it's not very practical. In any of the cities, it's not very practical because unless you're going to a mall or some relatively new and large operation, there's probably not going to be any parking when you get there. You're going to spend more time driving around the blocks trying to with lots of one-way streets, trying to figure out where you can park the car than if you just jumped in a taxi and went there. In between cities, like if I want to go to Pricemark to Pareto, for example, it's easy enough. Take a taxi, get on the bus, take the shuttle bus to Pareto and take a taxi to Pricemark. It's real cheap. It's only a couple of dollars. Everything I mentioned, probably six bucks. Why deal with that? Why deal with the traffic? If you get in an accident, it can be sticky. Like I said, laws are different. Lawsuits are different. It can really be problematic. If you come here and you're new here and you spend the first year using the public transportation, you'll figure out if it makes sense for you to get a car. I'm saying don't do it right away because you go in with all that expense. And what happens then when you just sit in your driveway and you never use it? It's just lost. Now, some people have enough money. It's no big deal. But a lot of people on retirement don't really have that money to waste. So I'm telling you, you don't really need a car. It's too easy to get around. And even then, there's lots of people that operate as your driver. Oh, yeah. And pico y placa, it's one day a week, you can't drive your car. Well, you can, it's just you can't drive it in the heart of the city. So for me, I live on the outskirts, it would be okay. But then when you get where you're going, you can't go into that city anyway. It gets complicated. Thanks for mentioning that. There's actually many reasons for these things. So give it some time. Don't dive in. You have people, it's like, well, I want to, I want to do everything all at once. I want to be like the locals. And they, you know, they do all these things. I mean, I got bank accounts. Of course, in Ecuador, you're required to get an account. So I got an account didn't like that bank got a different bank account. All it ever did, because I never used it was suck fees out of me every month. What good is that? In Colombia? There's other reasons. So let's get to the bank. Should you open a bank account? Again, give it some time. Now there's there are particular situations where you need one. For example, if you're here on a business visa, you're going to need one. If you're here on a property visa, where you call it, you know what I'm saying, investment visa, and you bought yourself a condo, you're going to have to have one because of transfers and things like that. So there's situations where you have to have. But if you're here on a retirement visa, excuse me. If you're here on a retirement visa, there's no requirement to have one. And it can bring you complications. Give it some time, let it breathe. It because it's so easy, just use your ATM card, it'll give you everything that you need. However, once you're here for what you figured out your tax situation, you figured out a number of things. At that point, it may very well make sense for you to have a bank account. You can have credit in Columbia. I know there's people that say, you know, you can't get credit in Columbia. Well, actually, you can, even on a schedule. I mean, I got credit. As a matter of fact, I just got a message, they upped my credit limit. I got the card without asking through it was like $1,000. They just upped it to 100 and some dollars. I don't know a lot here, but unsolicited. So you can get credit that was after two years, using the card for about a year and a half. There are the the app, and they just sent it to me. Tom in money's Alice, he got an account, he got an account pretty quick, of course, he had already lived in Costa Rica, in Ecuador, moved here. And then at one point, he decided to get himself an account. And once that account was established for a while, and he was doing direct deposit, they kind of said, Hey, we got a line of credit here if you want it and amounted to like something like $20,000 or something. So pretty significant, because the direct deposits that we have are higher than normal. So there can be a reason to do that, because maybe at some point, you might want to use credit. I'm not a big fan of credit. But the thing is, initially, you don't want to get into it, because as I've always said, it locks you into a reporting system. Now, it's not that the reporting system is necessarily bad for most people. You know, unless you got an accountant that's kind of filling your ear, which some will do that so they can up their fees. There's few to none of you, they're actually going to have to pay tax. And I don't mean off top of my head, I mean, if you go to a legitimate accountant, which can be done through a bank. So for example, if you got Bank Columbia, or Davi Vienda, they have accountants that will handle that for you. And the nice thing is having the bank is all those transactions occurred through that account. And so it's real easy to get that done. So you're going to cost you not even 100 bucks. You do that once a year, of course, once you do it, you're kind of locked in. But contrary to popular opinion, if you're not supposed to pay a tax, you are not obligated to file a return. And that's why there's no penalties on it. I've done a lot of digging on this. And in some things have changed in the last five years. But I will tell you this, if you sign up for a bank account, there is a threshold, and I'm going to give you an approximate, that as long as every month you're below that threshold, there's no taxing that takes place. If you go over that threshold, then there will be a tax on every transaction you make. The good news is that threshold is somewhere north of 13 million pesos. Who knows what that is off the top of your head, 13 million pesos, about $3,000. So if you're not transacting more than $3,000 out of that bank, then they're not putting a tax on that. So that should tell you something right there. And you've got 60 million people basically in Colombia, give or take a few million. But there's only 4 million people in Colombia that are required to file tax returns. And those really amount to pretty wealthy people. So I'm not telling you you don't have to pay taxes. I don't know. But everyone's circumstance is different. There's so much variation in it. There is no way I can tell you, you know, whether you should or shouldn't. But what I am saying is that when you get here on a retirement visa, which is what I pretty much always speak to, because that's most of my audience. When you get here on a retirement visa, stay away from all these things until you've had time to figure out, are you going to remain here? And do you have any tax obligations like that? And I can tell you that I know people 1600 1800 have no tax obligations. They're so security money. So don't be in such a hurry. So I wanted to clarify those basically those three things. Why I say don't do it. And, and I'm not saying don't ever do it. Again, it's it's situational. Don't do it unless you have to, because every one of these things creates complications in your life. So if you don't need it, why add complications? I love my Colombian bank account, pay all my bills online purchases, EPS in a heartbeat, and the monthly fee works out to about $4. So you got Bank of Columbia. Hello from South Florida soon to be in Columbia and you spelled it right. Good work, Jay. Okay, last week, Armenia had its anniversary 133 years. So I'm into our into money's Alice. Oh, and they had all kinds of things. They had parades. They had their annual G Powell, the Jeep parade, where they load up all these things. I got I got some clips and pictures of it. It'll all be kind of late. I'll probably have it all next week. Because it'll be late. I'll probably just put it in an actual video instead of live. But good choice. So Armenia was popping that week. Now money's Alice, I get the money's Alice, and I'm with a couple people. And all the streets are closed, all the main streets are closed off driving crazy. And I'm driving, I rented a car and I'm driving around. And I know how to get around money's Alice, but I don't know how to get around money's Alice and all these side roads. And all the main roads are closed. And it keeps raining. And it's raining. So it was a tree. The people are with they're kind of freaking out because I went up this one went up a number of gates, but this one in particular, was so freaking steep, it felt like the car was going to flip over backwards. I mean, it was really, it was really steep. And this is a peppy little car. But it was I didn't know if I was going to get to the top. I mean, I'm running out of steam. But it got there. It got there. And this car had like 200 miles on his brand new car. So it got there. But things are popping there too. That's why the roads are closed. And its anniversary was 173 years. So I took him to the Founders Park and showed him the monument insert clip here. Oh, wait, I don't have one of these amazing statues. And we're talking about the story of that and the people getting up there and went to Milan, the restaurant district that just I love the place. I took him to one that had the best view is kind of a BBC generic menu. I would have liked to actually go to the French restaurant, but quite a few places not there. You still have a French restaurant, you still have a Japanese restaurant, you still have a Arab restaurant. You got all kinds of international restaurants. And these aren't small. These are these are good size restaurants. Good morning from Colorado. Howdy. So it was something. I was so excited to show some of these clips. I was excited to be back in Manizales. Oh, we went to visit Tom's apartment. Tom, if you're watching. Yeah, those clips are there too. They're not lost. Don't worry. But it's instead of today, it'll be next week. Tom is moving to Bucaramanga. Tom has in a really nice building. It's an older building. Now, depending on where they're located, older buildings can be a real score. I don't mean old, I mean, older. Because when the original high rises went up, they were made with pretty much the best quality. For example, his entrance door is like a door and a half width. It's really big, big old fat wooden door, you know, solid wood door. And all the trimming inside is nice, the flooring is nice. So building's probably 10, 15 years old. Plus, the floor space tends to be much bigger. Now there's some here the same. The Castellana area is like that. So if you're hunting for an apartment, one of these old buildings can be a real score. Don't rule them out. Think new is always the best. Again, it depends on the barrio. So anyway, back to his apartment. He's got a good size three bedroom, two bath. Although he's got an office in one of the bedrooms, he's got this gigantic kind of space age exercise, something or other in the other one that's, I don't know what the hell it is. But he's got it. And then he's got his bedroom, living room, view to kill for. But here's the thing about his apartment. He doesn't own it. So you could turn over the lease, I think he has to be out of there in January. So anytime from now to January, if you're interested, it's in the Palermo barrio, which is real nice. And it's right next to my favorite part of Manizales. And it's pretty close to Milan. There's a shopping mall about two blocks away. And then there's a big one about six or seven blocks away. Great location, kind of on the edge of town. So on one side, it's all this forest area. It's pretty cool. But here's the real thing about his apartment. And no prices today. But he's got it furnished really well. Like his, his sofa. I'll give you a price on that because I remember it. It was around 3 million. That's a lot here. That's like, really high end, because he has a cat. And this is cat proof. Cats can't scratch on it. I slept on that couch, really comfortable. It's got that memory foam stuff. It was really comfortable. So it's got this high end couch, there's a chair, there's a table. He's got a couple 65 inch flat screen TVs, dining room set, real nice bedroom set. Very high end washing machine. I think it's one of those washer slash dryer machines. They run for a couple million. But it may just be a washer. I don't remember. I took a picture so I could just see it. Tons of stuff in the kitchen. Professional grade. A lot of really good pots and pans and all those kinds of things. A really nice high end refrigerator. Place is loaded out. I mean, it really is nice. Got two parking spaces in the basement. He wants to sell all his furniture and stuff just because it's problematic to move it to Bucaramanga. So if you're interested in moving to Manizales and you want kind of a turnkey operation that is sweet, again, I don't know prices. I think it's somewhere up around $7,000 for all his furniture. That's probably about half what it's worth. But you can, you know, you can work out whatever. If you're interested, give me a holler. I'll pass you on to him. And I'll put together something so it's visual. But I can tell you, I'm not over exaggerating this description. Really nice place, of course, 24 hour security guard, all of that. The parking is in the two floors at the bottom of the building. What's it called? The building is La Fontana, I think. Something like that. $7,000 is the number. Okay. How much does he want for the cat? He probably is keeping the cat. Older buildings often large rooms. Exactly. That's one of the good things about it. You see, I have to look to the side because I don't have normally I've got set up here. Well, I got just a blank space there. La Fontana. Okay. And the other one is way over here. So my chats are not very good. And I can't put them on the screen other than what goes in the corner here. What was it? French bakery is very good. Man, I'll tell you, before COVID, they opened a French bakery. The guy had spent something like 20 years in France, returned to Armenia. And it was, oh, my God, it was perfection. It was killer. It was half a block from where I was living back in Provence. And it killed me how much I'd walked by and it's like, I wanted so badly. You can't eat that kind of stuff. But, you know, once or twice a month, man, it was good. And it was genuine. It was might as well have been in France. It was perfect. How much is his rent? Turtle, you still on? I don't recall. 18 maybe 1,800,000, something like that. I think he I think he said it was 300 and something in dollars. Okay. I think covered everything. Kind of rushed through everything. We got questions on that. Give me a holler. But right now, it's Q&A time. It's time to start asking your questions. Remember, question. Okay. Let's pay in 1,800,000. It will go up. By law, they can increase more than they cannot increase more than 10%. If it's you, if you're in it, they can increase more than 10%. I got an increase here, a place that I really was on the fence about even living in. But it was something like 3%. It didn't amount to much. It was 10 bucks or something. Rents are definitely going up in Colombia. Yeah, some places are. Some are still kind of hanging in there. I was shocked. Tom went to Bucaramanga. And he was checking out rental prices there. And they were the same as when I was there a couple years ago. I was just kind of blown away because here, they've been going up some. I would say on any given place, you're probably going to spend maybe $200,000, $60, $70 more than you did a couple years ago. I mean, it's still it's not they're still cheap. And right now, currently, because of the exchange rate, the exchange rate is higher than what those increases are. Exchange rate is amazing now. It is. It's not going to stay forever. I'm guessing it may be close to as high as it's going to get. But I'm guessing. Nobody knows. They say they know they're full of it. Nobody knows. Just historically, we get these spurts and then it kind of stays there maybe falls back a little bit. I was talking about the French bakery in Milan. The French restaurant I know I don't recall a French bakery. Don't doubt it. There's there's all kinds of stuff there. One time I was reading an article on Milan, this was a while this was pre COVID. And it said, this is kind of horseshoe shaped, the road kind of horseshoe shaped. And it goes from Alto Suiso Barrio around to basically Palermo. And it's at the end of 23. If you're on Google, you know what I'm talking about. And this article said that in that area, there was about 200 restaurants. Now, I've always wondered if that's the case. And if they if they mean the Milan area specifically. But I do know that there's a crap ton of international restaurants there. It's pretty cool. Hey, I have an army veteran friend that's living in Columbia due to unforeseen circumstances need to sell land he has in hoping you won't mind me posting his info here. Now you get you can put it there. It's going to be it's going to be real tough selling land because not many people for lots of reasons looking for it, but feel free. I don't mind. It's great news for me, not for them over there. French bakery became a Japanese restaurant, French restaurant moved down the street to the other side. Well, the Japanese restaurant still there. But you may I don't remember I'm sure there was more than one. The big one with the Shogun armor is still there. Watch the video by a young Colombian lady that lives in her in her Venezuela, in her Venezuela. She sold a beautiful home that was newly built. The owner claimed he built it for $30 square foot. Okay, don't don't know. I'm not sure who you're talking about. You mean this one? I really like it. She's not Venezuela. I'm not sure what that is. A new veteran community forming in the San Luis Antigua currently six vets invested only five lots left measuring just over one acre. Lots are 8000 per vacant lot. Okay. It's $30 per square foot possible right now in Oregon. It's probably more like 300. I don't know because I'm not involved in that. But I will tell you that in Oregon, it's 300 then 30 or less wouldn't surprise me. Things are for the most part, quite cheap. Yes, the Japanese restaurant was the French bakery two years ago. So there was a French bakery where the Japanese restaurant is now. I'm so confused. But I remember, well, maybe that Japanese restaurant was some relocated. I remember, of course, you know, your memory gets bad when you go and see now. But I remember there was a red themed Japanese restaurant back when I was living there. And it had a suit armor kicking around. So I thought it was the same one. But yes, Japanese restaurant was the French bakery. Okay. Gotcha. So the French bakery is no longer there, or it's moved. That's another thing. Things move around and it may take you a while being there to catch up to where it is. However, saying that, I'm sure there's other French bakery money's Alice's. Okay. This was brought up. You said one of your videos as many universities in Armenia as there is a money's Alice. That's true. However, there is a difference. The difference is that two of the universities amount is Alice, the Catholic, and they're forgetting the name. The other biggie. They're very popular with European students, particularly from Spain, but not just from Spain from France, and so you'll see walking around on 23, a fair amount of international students. It's not that there's more students, because there's a lot of them here. But it's that as a matter of fact, one of the most famous in Colombia is here in Armenia, University Candia. But there's a lot of international students that you'll find walking around from, I've run into Dutch from Netherlands, French, Belgium and Spain. So just to clarify, and some of you won't know what the hell I'm talking about. But, you know, you do videos for a long time. And, you know, it's like, you kind of rush over something and you're not as detailed. And so somebody will come back and say, ah, but da da da da da. Okay, well, I'm responding to the da da da da da. In the Philippines, you can cheaply ship boxes from the United States. Is there any way to do that to Colombia? No. Some people will say yes. What's cheap? I mean, it's all relative. There's nothing in the United States that you can ship cheap anymore. Everything there within the United States has become quite expensive. But you can arrange mules, people, you know, come in, carry things in their luggage for you, give them a few bucks. You can get things through Pricemart, because they have the shipping company Aeropost. There's oh, God, what's the name of it? I'm drawing a blank, but I'm sure there's more than one. There are companies that you ship your stuff to Florida, and then they ship it out of Florida to Colombia, and then it gets delivered to your door. And they're cheaper than a lot of I don't know what you call it, mainstream, there's businesses designed specifically for it. Although a lot of those businesses are higher than, you know, I think they count on people saying, oh, I'm going to go get that shipping because it will be cheaper and using it without checking around. So you definitely want to check your prices. But yeah, I don't know what, oh, there's a name for it in the Philippines. I know what you're talking about. You get this, you can have all kinds of stuff thrown in that box, and that box comes to you. We don't have anything specifically like that, that I'm aware of. If somebody knows, give a holler. Great around Christmas time, right? All right, we have any other questions? I don't have a bills game to get to today. How about the bills? Huh? Well, that's easy for you to say. Okay, what else? Anything else? Gonna cry about the computer again? I didn't get any sleep last night. Last couple days, when the stuff came in, it's like, man. Anyway, it's going to help me download software today. Because I got another busy week. So I gotta try to finish it today. Well, I think that's it. We've got to recognize last week, Juca. Muchas gracias. This week, Juca. Anonymous. I'll bet that's Jerry. But thank you very much. And Sherry, thank you. How you doing? Are you in Columbia right now? She offered to carry a video card down for me. Which was very, very nice, very kind of her. It would have saved probably about 50 bucks on shipping. But then I got the deal on the one for 100 bucks. So and that still seems to be working fine. All right. Well, we're going to end it here. Thank you all. Thanks for returning. Thanks for being patient through all the nightmare. I swear I'm going to have this up and running back to normal next week. Hope something else doesn't blow. You know how discouraging it was? It literally looked like 4th of July. I mean, sparks just flying out of the back. I didn't want to touch the thing. So I had to pull the cord on it. I didn't want to get zapped. Okay, enough of that. I'll see you next week. Ciao.