Megan and I took a 2 week trip to Nicaragua in late June / early July and we had a great time. We visited Granada, Volcáns Mombacho and Masaya, Isla Ometepe & the Corn Islands. It’s taken us a while, but we’ve finally sorted through the photos and got them posted in a gallery.
Back in early March I posted about what I thought the peso was going to do against the dollar and I was worried that we were heading towards $20 pesos per US $. I’m happy to say that I was specularly wrong. Turns out I was looking at the peso at the it’s lowest value and in the last couple months the peso has recovered quite a bit. As of today the peso stands at $13.16 pesos to the US $, which is about $4 pesos lower than I expected. Here is a graph1 of the most recent monthly average exchange rates.
I still wouldn’t call this stable, but it is much more so than a couple months ago and at this point, it is what the most that can be asked for.
It hasn’t been a good time to be paid in Mexican Pesos if you are thinking in US Dollars. This isn’t really the most helpful way to think about the situation, but it is almost inevitable when you have bills to pay in the US and you live and work in Mexico. It is probably best to ignore this if you are saving Pesos and planning to spend those savings upon your return to the US. That hasn’t stopped me from thinking about it.
Since August 4th of last year the cost of a US Dollar has gone from costing $9.87 Pesos to $15.24 Pesos (as of March 4th). This is an increase of over 60% in about 7 months and is the largest increase in recent history. The other day I was looking at the graph on Google Finance and realized that the progression from August was nearly linear. So I graphed out the trend in Excel and sure enough it was close to linear (with the exception of a peak in November and December).
Click for larger version
So back to the title of the post; I’m not a financial analyst (but I play one on the web) and my prediction is as likely to be completely wrong as it is to be even slightly right, but if you push the trend line out a few months in the future, where is the peso going? As you can see from the graph to the left, it looks like we are heading towards $20 pesos to the dollar by September. That’s a 100% increase in a bit more than a year. That’s probably good news if you live in the US (as goods and services from Mexico are cheaper) and also good if you are planning to travel to Mexico anytime soon. For expats living in Mexico with US funds, this is also good news, although getting your favorite US made products from the local Walmart is going to get pricy. For expats, like me, who earn their living in Pesos, this is very bad news. The average Mexican is going to feel the pinch as well, since imported consumer goods are going to cost a lot more.
Hopefully my projection is wrong (and like I said, it probably is), but so far the peso doesn’t seem to be going anywhere but down.
We recently took a trip to Cuba and have just uploaded a gallery of photos for your viewing pleasure.
Megan and I have finally added some photos to our Living in Mexico – Year Two gallery. We’ve begun the process of transitioning our galleries to Picassa Web Albums from Google.
I like the application, but not as much as the custom solution that we had built to host our galleries on my own server. The big issue right now is that we can’t find a tool to upload our photos to a self-hosted gallery software. I had used a iPhoto plugin called Photon (no longer being supported or developed) which allowed me to upload photos to our old galleries that were in a Movable Type blog, but unfortunately I can’t get Photon to install on my new computer’s version of iPhoto. We looked at moving to a dedicated gallery software, but the iPhoto pluggin that would be allow us to upload to that software is also not being developed. The obvious advantage of hosting our own photos is that there is no meaningful space limitations on my webhost (I currently have over 250 GB of available diskspace). Picassa Web Albums only gives you 1GB of space for photos. The other advantage is being able to customize the look and feel of our galleries.
Anybody have a killer self-hosted gallery solution that works well with iPhoto?
