With the success of our English Language Blog Roll, we’ve been looking more and more at extending the linking capability that Livtopia.com offers.
If you’ve got a favorite Panama blog or Mexico newsgroup that does not appear in the BlogRoll, please let us know in the comments below.
1 comment March 12th, 2008
FYI, I’ve actually written already a wee bit about the housing bubble and the sub-prime crisis. Yes, even here in the land of all things sunny in real estate, where we are more interested in discussing the difference between gorditas and fried tacos than in mortgage rates, we do try to keep our eye on the bigger picture.
For that, I will recommend that even those of you who despise economics read “Panic on Wall Street” by Andrew Leonard in Salon. So you don’t get the impression I think this is the sine qua non in the current conversation, there is a healthy conversation taking place after the article with every metaphor aggressively pulled apart and chewed over.
But what’s this got to do with buying your house in Costa Rica or Panama or Mexico? Are mortgage rates in the US going to look just as expensive as they do south of the border where old fashioned competition is actually starting to bring them down?
Well, Leonard does explain succinctly why everything has a ripple effect that affects everything else.
Try reading an SEC filing from a New York investment bank - it is one of the most difficult-to-comprehend documents ever created by the human mind.
It is not, in a word, transparent. It serves the opposite purpose: It is an instrument of obfuscation. Because of failures of regulatory oversight, we have very little idea who owns what, or what risks hedge funds and pension funds and municipalities and mutual funds are really exposed to. This is all fine and dandy if your goal is to prevent your competitors from understanding what kinds of bets you are making. But it becomes a much more severe problem when you’re trying to figure what is going wrong when the trains start derailing.[…]
Speculators in the world’s financial markets also like leverage; but they don’t use crowbars to move objects — they use borrowed money to make bigger bets. This is fine as long as your bets pay off. But when your bets go bad, the people whose money you borrowed want it back.
Right now, a great many people want their money back.
We’re on the front row of people cashing out of their assets in the US housing market. Many of them aren’t cashing in every single chip, thank god, but we are confident that people see the value in riding out the storm in a different place where the quality of life is such that some ups and downs don’t ruin every day. And a long term commitment is sometimes the very best medicine for everyday woes like short-term returns.
Add comment August 17th, 2007
I mentioned in yesterday’s newsletter, that pretty much the whole Livtopia crew is working 12 hour days to soft-launch our new site in the next week. A big part of that work is in announcing and preparing our new totally FREE on the ground events. The events page is coming alive. We’ve got reservations coming in for Puerto Vallarta, which includes a boat tour of the bay and more PV than you could think of in just three days. And and we’re planning to announce events, again, totally free, in Campeche and Panama City in just the next few days.
We’re planning on hosting the FREE events in all four countries by the end of this year and in at least a dozen of our current crop of 28 featured locations in Mexico by early next year. And you can expect that list of 28 Featured Locations to grow too:
We’ll almost certainly be hosting a free 3-day vacation weekends for people interested in Costa Rica and Dominican Republic and probably soon in Acapulco, too. Mazatlan is not far down the road and neither is San Miguel. Everything in time, but the good part is we’ve worked out a way to make them totally free, meals included, 3 days with tours and learning and mouch much more!!
Of course, i keep saying we are also re-launching Livtopia’s MexRetire.com, Livtopia’s Concierge, and a new site just for Mexico City to coincide with Livtopia’s NEW corporate re-location site, MexLiving.com. You think you got stuff to do?
Add comment August 3rd, 2007
Be sure to see the updated communications page at Mexperience for the full run down on telephones and calling and options available in Mexico. It’s been a long time coming, but with the internet and some helpful changes to the law, the market in communications is, slowly but certainly, improving. Their guide is comprehensive including good stuff on internet calling and even down to faxes and the postal system. But remember, just because getting a land-line might take a little longer, and some costs, like cell-phones are a bit more, the savings and improvements to life in so many other ways will make just dealing with things well worth the hassle.
Add comment February 20th, 2007
Some of you will remember my previous tip on using Firefox to make reading and surfing the internet a lot easier. Well, the programmers working on revamping the pages of MexRetire.com and the other Livtopia sites took my cue and are integrating the same kind of technology into all the sites they’re currently working on. On each of the new pages you’re now able to bump up the text size using those two little letter “A”s in the upper-right hand corner. They’re building a new home for MexLiving.com that should be up and running in the next few days, with the same little feature. Luckily, this though, is just the beginning of good things we are rolling out.
Add comment January 28th, 2007
How many blogs do I read that have some problem either with spam in the comments or with the various solutions we use to try to fend it off. I’ve heard of difficulties from a couple of readers now… so I’ve removed the offending spamware and lets hope that some of you who have tried to comment in the past will return. I get a big kick out of hearing from people, as does perhaps any blogger. Is it that I am so used to having commerce mixed in as such a natural friendly part of life here that I just don’t understand the spam mentality?
Anyway, here’s hoping we see more of you around in the near future.
Add comment January 26th, 2007
Your editor’s mom is about 5 years from retiring, and yes, she is considering moving to Mexico. I’m thinking of bringing the experience of talking to her and the advice we end up sharing a little closer into the fold here and with that in mind, I want to pass on the most useful thing that both of us have started doing.
We both LOVE Mozilla Firefox and what follows is one of the big reasons why. This is really a post on customizing Firefox in a very simple way that really helps out older readers, and all of us with less than stellar eyesite. Suffice it to say though, you’ve got to have Firefox installed on your computer to be able to use it. The process is simple from the Mozilla pages, you just click on the download link and install the program. It won’t replace Internet Explorer, but there will be very little reason to use IE after you use Firefox and many people do un-install IE after using Mozilla Firefox for a few weeks.
On to customizing, and this is really as simple a tip as we can pass on, so don’t think you need to be a programmer to do it. Because Mozilla is open-source software, thousands of people around the world are writing mini add-on programs to make the main program easier and better for each individual user. We’ll be referring to some of these add-on mini-programs again in the future, but the simplest and best one we want to recommend for people who are constantly fighting to make the text big enough to see is called simply FireFoxMenuButtons. It allows you a whole range of new buttons for your main Firefox toolbar and is available to download here. Just click on the green “install now” button and follow the directions.
Once its installed, you’ll just need to restart Firefox.When you’ve done that, you can right-click anywhere on the main tool bar, and select “customize.” That will bring you to a much more extensive menu than was previously available. There are now tons of interesting buttons you can play with, but we want to show you two (maybe three) that are particularly uselful for those of us who are always reaching for glasses, or looking under or over our glasses.
The two buttons we end up using are those marked in the picture above, but more we wanted to illustrate the over all menu. If that picture is a little blurry here they are again, pictured as they look installed on the tool bar. 
“Enlarge text” is so we can read easier and the other one is so we can see what the page is supposed to look like before we magnify the copy so much that the page is distorted. We don’t use the also available “reduce text” button, but maybe you’ll want to. Just drag them from that choices menu to the tool bar where ever you want them. I put them right in the upper left of my tool bar so I am not EVER squinting at the computer.
Add comment January 7th, 2007
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