Be a Sovereign Individual
Freedom is an inside job
Last night I was in the photos application on my phone, and came across a photo I love. This led me down a rabbit hole of retracing our steps over the past four years, and how we eventually made the leap to relocate to Mexico.
September 21st, 2021: Happy Freedom Fighters
It was September 2021, and our son was six months old. We were in Port Burwell, Ontario, at a People’s Party of Canada event. It had been a year and six months since Covid lockdowns and other restrictions began, and despite living in an increasingly authoritarian Canada, we were young and hopeful new parents. We believed that voting in the right political party could change things, and end the assaults on our liberty.
We did not realize then that we would not only be wrong, but would end up selling our dream house in rural Ontario, renting tiny apartments, seeking residency abroad, failing at achieving that three times, traveling around like nomads, buying a second house, and eventually selling that house and everything else, and moving to Mexico.
January 28th, 2022: Heading to the Trucker’s Convoy, Day One, Ottawa, Ontario
“Canadians are polite— but they are fed up.”
We were on the road to Ottawa with our little fringe baby and our ‘unacceptable views’, to enact a basic right in a so-called ‘free’ country: peaceful protest. We had no idea of what to expect; we had just caught wind of the truckers’ now famous movement from Western Canada to Ottawa, and decided we should be there.
We did not expect the overwhelming amounts of people who would be flooding the streets, nor the constant song of large trucks honking their horns all day long. It was the most beautiful sound and sight to us then; it showed us that the silent majority had come out and decided they had had enough. Canadians were protesting not only vaccine mandates, but trade interruptions, the inability to leave our country, the loss of our jobs, businesses and communities, to a collectivist movement that had gone on for far too long.
We had real hope that this truly peaceful demonstration, which came not from the organization of any group, but from the aggregate actions of many thousands of individual Canadians, would send a strong enough message to the federal government to start a conversation. As you all know, that didn’t happen.
Instead, the solid black boot of the state came crashing down. Trudeau sat in his ivory tower, unwilling to come out and speak with the plebs. After weeks of the convoy continuing without flinching and without a word of negotiation, Trudeau infamously enacted the Emergencies Act for the first time in Canadian history, allowing a militarization of the police against its citizens. By this time, we were long gone from Ottawa.
And so was our hope.
Bank accounts of convoy supporters were frozen in a draconian move. Truckers needed food and fuel to keep their trucks and temporary abodes running, but the Go-Fund me was shut down. Towing companies were ordered to remove the truckers, and most of them refused, until their arms were twisted. Bitcoin addresses were set up that allowed the convoy to carry on for a moment, but eventually everyone packed up and went home.
State coercion was naked, for all to see. You cannot defy the state; we will not let you. We will physically assault you, batter you, remove access to your private property, arrest you, and apply heavy force until you submit.
We fell into a post-convoy depression. There was no escaping the darkness that had enveloped Canada.
August 25th, 2022: Back to Ottawa
By now, we had sold our house and were living in a tiny apartment which was actually meant to be an office, above our friend’s shop. We had applied for Mexican residency with the Toronto consulate, organized all our paperwork and sent it to them, but mid-process our appointment was cancelled indefinitely. A few months later, we drove three hours to Ottawa, this time for an appointment at the Mexican consulate there.
When we showed up, the bureaucrat on duty gave us a contemptuous look, and told us we had made the wrong appointment. The appointment we had made was for Mexican nationals, and we had done it wrong, and had to turn around and go home. And no, they were not accepting any residency applications at this time, or in the foreseeable future.
December 28th, 2022: The Land of the Free
By December of 2022, we were living in a tiny house at a trailer park on Lake Ontario. Yes, we lived in a trailer park— something I never imagined would happen, but it was really actually quite neat. It was a cute little cottage with beautiful views, but when the cold weather came, it blew straight through the walls. We were freezing cold.
We were invited to our company Christmas party in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and even though we did not have the ‘vaccine passports’ to cross the border, we decided to take a risk and attempt to cross over, leaving our badly insulated cottage behind. When the border agent didn’t ask for our papers, we rejoiced. As soon as we crossed the border, we yelled, “Freeeeeedooooooom!!!”
We stayed at an idyllic little cottage on AIER’s campus, the same campus which hosted Jay Bhattacharya, Martin Kuldorff, and Sunetra Gupta when they signed the Great Barrington Declaration. We connected with our colleagues, champions of liberty like Phil Magness who uncovered some of Fauci’s misdeeds with a revealing FOIA request.
Being in the USA was like a breath of fresh air. We had managed to escape the Sovietesque greyness of Canada, and wanted to move around a little bit. We bought some plane tickets to Florida, and spent Christmas and New Year’s in the free state.
We should live here, we thought. It was a completely different world. The climate, both weather-wise and political, was enticing. We jumped on a call with an immigration lawyer, forked over 10K USD, drove back home and began to work on our case.
June 1st, 2023: We Bought A House
We had returned to our cottage in March 2023, and began working on our goal of immigration to the US while noting that our lease would be up at the beginning of summer. The more I worked on the dossier, the more I realized that we were missing so many of the requirements for our specific type of visa. I began to have anxiety around the whole thing, as my case worker was urging me to come up with documentation that I simply didn’t have. I told my husband that I thought we might have jumped into the process at a hefty price, but that it would go nowhere— and not only would we lose the ten thousand dollars invested, but have to fork out more. I didn’t have confidence that we had chosen the right legal team or type of visa, so we cut our losses. Our American dream was coming to a close, at least for now.
We were growing tired of living in the trailer park home, and needed somewhere to live. We started to think that if we were stuck in Canada, as all roads out had failed, we should buy a home. But we wanted to be more anti-fragile— we wanted to buy an investment property that would provide us with passive income. Once we found the right realtor, who also specializes in real estate investing, we began our search.
On June first, we bought a home that had the potential for conversion into an income property. There were two floors, with a kitchen and full bathroom on each. We hired an architect and got some sketches drawn up which would convert it into a legal duplex. We got a quote from a construction company.
And then, we didn’t do it.
On the day we bought our home, my husband looked at me and said, buying this house was a mistake. As a nesting type woman with a toddler, I was secretly looking forward to making this our home, and not only an income property which we would convert, rent, and then eventually use the equity for another property purchase.
My husband and I had many conversations about our plans. The real estate game, which had worked so well in the golden era of low interest rates and down payments, was not looking as good for us as we had ideally imagined it. The return on investment, after we would fork out at least 70k for renovations, would take a long time to come to fruition.
We discussed alternatives to investing our money, energy and time. We held off on the renovations while we decided what the right choice would be for us. We wanted to be sovereign individuals, and were beginning to doubt more and more that this was the path to freedom.
Until, we stumbled across a sign.
January 23rd, 2024: We Took A Chance
My husband is a long-term thinker who isn’t afraid to take calculated risks, or pivot when a situation isn’t sustainable. He does not succumb to the sunk-cost fallacy, that you must stay on your current trajectory just because you’ve already invested into it. All the while I was buying ottomans and lamps at Homesense and getting cosy, he warned me: “Why did you buy another pouf? We’re going to have to sell it soon, we aren’t staying here.”
I am less comfortable with the idea of change than he is. Once change is upon me, I embrace it, but in the uncertain times pre-emptive to change, I can become very uneasy. I stick with what I know, with where I am, until my decisive husband nudges me enough to consider the alternative seriously.
One day he told me he was watching a YouTube video on Mexican relocation, something I had spent countless hours doing with him in the previous years, but in my resignation had mostly stopped doing. In the video’s comments section, someone had suggested that the Mexican consulate in Leamington, Ontario, was very efficient and had a good success rate for visa applications.
When my husband excitedly shared this with me, I barely budged.
“Let’s book an appointment and go to Leamington.” he said, “Next week.”
I stretched my legs out on my new ottoman, scanning our house, which I had been slowly making a home of for a mere six months. I looked at the pictures I had mounted on the wall. My cat stared back at me like Mona Lisa.
“Really?” I whined, “I don’t really feel like going anywhere. Leamington is like six hours away.”
“Awway, pantoufle,” he said to me in Quebécois french, “let’s go!”
So he booked an appointment for the three of us and a hotel room, and I begrudgingly packed our bags, fearing another dead end.
Less than two weeks later, residencies miraculously pre-approved (story about that here), we were on a plane to Mexico City.
February 4th, 2024: Beginning the Move to Mexico
Over the years, I had become resigned to living in Orwellian Canada. But having Mexican residency, at least as a plan B, was now becoming a reality. It was kind of unbelievable, after so many years of failed attempts. My thinking at this point was that we could go to Mexico, get our residency finalized, and then see what we wanted to do.
Having residencies in at least one other country is a concept that many liberty and sovereignty-oriented thinkers are familiar with. The idea is that although your country of origin may be decaying; turning towards socialism and other bad ideas, you are not stuck there. The modern world, shaped by the invention of the internet in this age of information, is more open now than it has been in centuries prior. Digital businesses and alternative monies are part of the new economy, and provide us with opportunities to be as nomadic as we’d like.
We can become more sovereign by opening up our residency and citizenship portfolio, taking the best of each nation and leaving the worst behind. Living in another country as a foreigner also sometimes provides better conditions than living in your country as a national. For example, this can be true for Canadians moving to Mexico, Mexicans moving to the USA, or Americans moving to Argentina.
As James Dale Davidson writes in The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age:
“Whatever your current residence or nationality, to optimize your wealth you should primarily reside in a country other than that from which you hold your first passport, while keeping the bulk of your money in yet a third jurisdiction, preferably a tax haven.”
He goes onto say, “The individual will have the ability to transcend traditional boundaries of nation and culture.”
And so, once we got to Mexico, I was finally ready to go all the way, after so many years of consideration and effort. I saw a glimpse of different life than the one we were living, and I knew with certainty that I was now ready for this change.
Residencies approved, we decided that we would go back home, and prepare our house to put it on the market.
March 4th, 2024: Down to the Bones
When we got back from Mexico, we immediately got to work. We took a critical look at the housing market, which had been going sideways since we purchased it 9 months before. We knew this meant we might sell our house at a loss, so we decided to invest in renovations to raise the value of our property.
We spent the next month and a half building ‘sweat equity’, aka, doing our own renovations. We spent 12-14 hours a day stripping things down, and putting them back up again. We had my brother-in-law, a contractor in Quebec, on speed dial. We redid the master kitchen, backsplashes, bathrooms, bedrooms, floors, changed outdated lighting fixtures and trims, and painted the walls in trendy shades. My husband even painted the exterior of the house.
With our relocation goal in sight, we were unstoppable. We moved quickly and decisively. We did things we didn’t know we were capable of. It was hard and rewarding work, and I am so proud that we did it.
We called our realtor— the same real estate investor who helped us buy our house— and asked him to sell it. We moved out a baby grand piano and had our place deep cleaned. We shed some belongings, and had others stacked into closets. Our agent sent over a staging crew, put up a sign, and the house was on the market by the beginning of April.
We were not going to stick around for the showings, and we had more work to do in Mexico. So, we bought some tickets, and got back on a plane, Mexico-bound for the second time.
April 2nd, 2024: Scoping out Mexico
We spent the next six weeks in Mexico, scouting out neighbourhoods in Puebla. We narrowed our search down to a couple of options of where we wanted to live. At the same time that we found an apartment here, we received offers on our house. We simultaneously signed a lease contract here, and signed off on our house sale back in Canada.
And then we hopped back on a plane for the final stretch: emptying the contents of our house, which we would no longer own by June 3rd, 2024— a year and two days after we purchased it.
May 23rd, 2024: Leaving Ontario
It was not easy to say goodbye to Warkworth, Ontario, the charming little rural village we had (mostly) called home since January, 2020. But our path had diverged numerous times, and our dreams had changed. We had to continuously recreate a vision for a new life, as circumstances shifted and shook up our existing plans. And this is bound to happen again, through emergent order.
For us, part of being sovereign means constantly adapting to these shifts, and not getting too attached to any outcome.
We left Ontario and headed to Quebec, the province that both my husband and I come from. We left some of our sentimental belongings at my brother-in-law’s place, but had managed to sell and donate many items too.
We spent almost two months in Quebec, working and spending quality time with our families and old friends. We sold our pick-up truck and traded it in for a Mexican-terrain-friendly SUV with a Thule on top.
And then, on July 10th, 2024 we packed up one last time, and began our eleven day drive to our new home in Mexico.
July 21st, 2024: Home in Mexico
Eleven days, three countries, and 5000 km later, we were finally home. Not for the faint of heart, but a wonderful journey through the soul of America, with landmark stops, was the adventure of a lifetime. We drove through Mexican mountain chains that were absolutely awe-inducing, and got to experience the transition of our lives in a visceral way.
In reality, it wasn’t just eleven days, but a 6 month process of physical relocation, plus a few years of decisions, trials and determination beforehand.
Almost three years since that day in Port Burwell, with our baby in our arms and hope in our hearts for our country to return to what it once was, we have moved onto different pastures. Mexico is not a perfect country— and the current leadership may prove problematic— but that is beyond the point.
There are no utopias. There are only little pockets in the world where you might make a good life for yourself, on the individual level. A place where your family can thrive, where you can create your own little tribe, and build the life you want for yourself.
You are not bound to the place you were born. You are not bound to suffering in the name of saving your nation. You are not bound to the whims of bureaucrats, politicians, or the winner of the next election.
You can choose to be free, in your mind first of all. As for geographical freedom, only you can decide where you want to be, and the kind of life you want to live.
“The trend toward individual sovereignty is the force that will shape the world of the future.” - James Dale Davidson, The Sovereign Individual
October 23rd, 2024
We are at home in Puebla, Mexico, and I am writing the last words of this essay, as I reflect on everything it took to get us to where we are now.
There was a time to fight for our nation. We were vocal and active opponents of covid tyranny and the ongoing decline of the West, and will never regret having spent our energies there. We will continue to voice our opinions when we feel strongly enough to do so. But now, in this new place, our energy is focused on work and projects that bring joy and fulfillment in other ways.
We are building a living travel guide— Real Mexico— which you can subscribe to here. It is made for travellers, expats, nomads, and for those seeking residency in Mexico.
We are also creating video content around our adventures and lives here, for any curious observers.
And finally, we are writing in this newsletter, our Mexico Diaries.
We want to extend a big thank you to all of our readers and viewers, who have been on this journey with us over the years. We hope you will continue to stick around, and be inspired for the ways you can change your own lives, big and small.
You don’t need to relocate to be sovereign, or to be happy. You don’t need to move countries to be free. Freedom, as I have said before, starts in the heart, mind and soul. If you can find inner freedom, you will be a sovereign individual.
Read Next:
We specialize in custom trips to Puebla. As a former flight attendant/pilot duo, we will help you organize your itinerary from flights, buses, Ubers, AirBnbs to local hot spots such as restaurants, cafes, coworking spaces, and more, based on your unique needs.
We can also help answer questions about and facilitate your Mexican visas & residency.
Our living travel guide: realmx.co
Contact us at info@realmx.co
Follow us on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@realmxco
Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kate.wand/
Let us know what topics you would like to read about next, and stay tuned for exclusive insider tips and insights to travelling within central Mexico.
Best resource if you want to obtain Mexican Residency: 👉
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Pay with Bitcoin directly to Mexican bank accounts (very useful) 👉
Proton VPN: 👉 https://go.getproton.me/SHlX
Check out our Mexico Diaries: 👉 https://katewand.substack.com/s/the-mexico-diaries
What a beautiful story of pivot after pivot while never letting go of your dream to live freely. It also highlighted to me how so many twist themselves into knots to live their best life, while enslaved by a fantasy/ideal. Sovereignty is a state of mind and a set of actions that reinforce that you own yourself and are complete control of your choices. Thank you for sharing your hopefilled journey.
Fascinating story. Thanks for sharing!