How Much Does It Really Cost to Live in Merida is the question Kayla answers directly in this episode of The Hive, and her story starts long before she ever heard of the city. At 23, she was deep in the 9 to 5 grind and already certain she could not do it for another 40 years. She and her husband tried a different path first, living on a bus for three years and attempting to grow their own food, before realizing that off-grid homesteading was not fulfilling them the way they had hoped.

A video of Merida changed everything. Her husband recognized it as the place their friends had vacationed years earlier, and once they looked it up, the decision moved fast. For Kayla and her family, when an idea arrives, they act on it, so a city neither of them had considered became a move rather than a vacation. Her two children, now 10 and 11, adjusted almost instantly, already used to their parents' unconventional decisions, and quickly found community through weekly Thursday meetups at the park.

Kayla now serves as TBME's Concierge Director, and her own path to financial flexibility took twelve years to build, starting with a remote customer service job and growing from there into full control over her time. She is direct about the real numbers behind life in Merida. Her family pays roughly 1,200 dollars a month for a larger home in a private community with a pool, security, and a clubhouse. She also breaks down what changes on a tighter budget: 600 to 700 dollars a month is still livable, just with an older home, an older neighborhood, and rougher roads.

What surprised Kayla most was not the cost of living but her own mindset. She describes her first year in Merida as terrible, not because the move was wrong, but because her environment changed while her hustle mentality did not. She could take an afternoon off and would not, convinced she was forgetting something important. She calls this out plainly: a new country cannot fix an old mentality, and if you escape your physical environment without shifting how you think, you stay trapped in the same patterns that made you want to leave.

Her advice to anyone considering the same move is to get their mind right before they get here, to plan their budget realistically rather than assuming low cost of living solves everything, and to actually adopt the slower pace once they arrive instead of feeling guilty for resting. She has since built a life with slow mornings, a running group, and the flexibility to take a call only if she wants to. If your environment changed tomorrow but your mindset stayed exactly the same, would anything in your life actually be different?

See the Real Cost Breakdown