Moving to Colombia from the US: How I Actually Did It

Moving to Colombia from the USA is the best decision I have made, and this is my honest account of it, not a how-to. I left Los Angeles in 2020 after a trip to Colombia I did not want to come home from. Six years later I have lived in five Colombian cities, had one visa application refused, spent a long stretch living in a hotel, and ended up building a business out of the questions people kept asking me. If you want the step-by-step version, that is how to move to Colombia as an American. This is what it was really like.

By Shep · six years in Colombia, five cities · Last reviewed: September 16, 2026

In a hurry? The free Colombia Field Guide is the practical version of everything below.

At the Pereira sign, in the coffee region. The fourth of the five Colombian cities I have lived in.

Why I Left the USA for Colombia

Before the pandemic I took a trip here. Colombia was the twenty-second country I had visited and the first one I did not want to leave. I felt at home in Cali and in Barranquilla, and I found beachfront property I could actually afford, which after years of Los Angeles prices was its own kind of shock. I moved in 2020.

The year my health made the decision for me

By 2022 I was finally earning $134,000 at a start-up, with unlimited personal time and hybrid remote days, the job I had spent twenty-three years in IT working toward. Then my health went sideways. I was laid off, and I had two surgeries back to back.

Recovering stressed was not the plan. What I wanted was somewhere calm, where seeing a doctor every ninety days was not a fight with an insurance company. What followed was a few years of simply living: off savings, moving around the country, seeing the parts of Colombia that never show up on anybody's list.

What I did in the months before I flew

Deciding was the easy part. The logistics of moving to Colombia from the USA were not, and they were less about Colombia than about closing down an American life cleanly.

Closing down an American life

The car went. So did almost everything else I owned, which sounds dramatic and mostly felt like a relief once it was done. Then came the things that do not move themselves:

• Prescriptions, and a route to refill them. Not just the pills, the plan for the next refill once I was no longer in the same country as my pharmacy.
• The phone plan. Sorted before I left rather than from an airport.
• International health insurance. Which turned out to be a visa requirement as well as a sensible idea, see how healthcare works here for Americans.
• A mail-scanning service, so mail still reached me after there was no longer an address to send it to.
• Final medical and dental visits, on the insurance I still had.
• The State Department's STEP program. Free, five minutes, and it means the embassy knows where you are.

I think of all of this as one upfront moving cost, the US side and the Colombia side together, rather than as two separate budgets. Most people only price the Colombia half.

My visa was refused the first time I applied

This is the part of moving to Colombia from the USA that does not make it into the YouTube videos, so I will say it plainly: my first application was refused. I lived out of two suitcases and a backpack for longer than I would like to admit, and stayed with my sister while I got the paperwork right.

Here is what I have learned since, watching it happen to other people: a refusal is almost never a judgment about you. It is a missing document, a translation that did not meet the standard, or an apostille that was not done the way they wanted it. You fix the document problem and you can apply again straight away. What it costs you is the study fee, which is not refunded, and time you had probably already committed to.

What my first year here really looked like

I lived in a hotel, and I loved it

For a long stretch I lived in a hotel rather than an apartment, and I would recommend it to almost anybody arriving. Somebody cleaned the room if I wanted it cleaned. There was a restaurant downstairs. Reception was always there and always willing to help with the thing I could not yet do myself. No lease, no fiador, no deposit, no year-long commitment to a neighborhood I had known for four days.

Cartagena, on the Caribbean coast. One of the five cities I have lived in rather than visited.

The hard part was not the paperwork

Errands were fine. The two hard things were switching off the money worry, and finding people. For a while I had solved neither.

What changed it was talking. To every Uber driver, every front-desk clerk, and the two women who run the bakery on my corner, every morning, badly, in Spanish. Colombia is a friendly country the moment you open your mouth, and what could have been a hard landing turned into a soft one because people here will meet you more than halfway.

The people I met in that hotel, somebody recovering from surgery, somebody scouting an investment, somebody a year behind me on the same decision, are the reason GeoGringo exists at all. I was answering the same five questions over and over on the terrace. Eventually it made more sense to write them down.

What I spend, and what it buys

Not a survey, not a listing site, my own life, this year. After twenty-three years in IT my current job is not in tech, and that is fine; you have to stay open to new things. The base salary on its own pays for a life I could not buy in California. With commission and a couple of online businesses on top, I have a level of personal freedom I have never had before.

My costs, against what the same things cost me at home

Dinner on Rappi, under $5. This is the part the videos never show, what food costs once you are living here rather than on vacation.

What happened to the dollar, in the only math you need

This is how I explain it on a call. Two or three years ago, to work out what a Colombian price cost you in dollars, you took the peso figure and divided by four. Today you divide by three.

That sounds like nothing until you run one number through it. An apartment listed at COP 4,000,000 a month cost you $1,000 when you divided by four, the 2022 average was 4,255.44 COP/USD. That same apartment, same lease, same landlord, now costs about $1,312 at 3,048.12 on August 22, 2026.

Nothing changed about the apartment. Your dollar dropped.

Three things pushing prices up at once

The currency is only one of them:

• The minimum wage here rose 23 percent in January. Businesses raised prices to cover it, so that is a Colombian price increase, in pesos, before any exchange rate is involved (El Colombiano).
• More Americans arrived. In the neighborhoods we concentrate in, landlords have pushed rents to levels I have not seen in six years here.
• The US dollar lost value against the peso. That is the four-to-three shift above.

So when you read a budget from a post written in 2023, know what you are looking at. It is not only out of date by inflation. The US dollar budget behind it no longer buys the quality of life it bought then. Colombia is still cheaper than the United States, commonly half or less. It is simply no longer the near-free place the old posts describe, and any figure that does not name the exchange rate it used is worth nothing to you.

What I would do differently

Not regrets, six years in, I would make the same move again. These are the things I tell friends who ask about moving to Colombia from the USA.

I would have my documents reviewed before filing, not after

One refusal costs a study fee and months. An hour of somebody's attention on the package beforehand costs far less than either.

I would spend a full week in each city, not a weekend

A weekend tells you what a place looks like. A week tells you what it sounds like at 6am, how far the good bakery really is, and whether the noise you found charming on Saturday is still charming on Tuesday.

I would treat the first months as a people problem, not a logistics problem

I over-planned the errands and under-planned the loneliness. The paperwork sorts itself out in weeks. The other thing takes longer and matters more, and the only method I found was talking to everyone.

Barranquilla, on the Magdalena. Five cities lived in and more than twenty-six traveled through, I moved through the country on purpose, because seeing all of it was the point.

Is Moving to Colombia From the USA Worth It? My Answer After Six Years

Yes, and I would do it again. Moving to Colombia from the USA bought me more freedom, less stress, a slower pace, more fun, and memories that money does not buy. I am on track to retire early if I decide to, and I have the flexibility and the funds to keep traveling. That is the part most Americans considering this from the US do not believe until they are living it.

The honest other half: this is the wrong move for some people, and working out which you are will save you more than it costs you. The biggest disqualifier is not money or Spanish or distance, it is not being able to accept that life here is different in ways you do not choose. Everything runs at a slower rhythm, and the mindset, the values, the music and the food are not what you left. People who arrive expecting the United States with better weather struggle. People who come ready to live a Colombian life do well.

I felt the friction myself early on, the months I could not switch off the money worry, the stretch before I knew anybody. The difference was that I wanted to be here enough to push through it. If you do not, the friction wins.

Questions people ask me about my move