We run a lot of real estate articles on various countries on Luxury Latin America. We’re talking about the thrill of getting much more house for your money in another destination like Ecuador or Costa Rica and the joys of living in a place with a better climate. One of the questions that often comes up from readers though when talking about moving abroad full-time is, “What do I do about local cell service and a US phone number?”
It’s an important question because the answer is rather complicated, with more than one right answer.
The first time I moved to Mexico, almost 15 years ago, my family of three used pre-paid cell phones on a Movistar plan and let our U.S. numbers expire. Then when we went back to the USA for a few years, we got a new plan and new numbers there. These days Mexico is our permanent base but we’ve held onto our T-Mobile plan in the states, even though it costs us more than a comparable Mexican plan would. That’s because now you have to consider the daily texts known as two-factor authentication, or 2FA.
These days, most of your choices fall into two general buckets:
1) You keep your U.S. (or Canadian) plan and use WhatsApp and/or a local land line for communication in your new country. This assumes your old service works in the country where you’re moving to.
2) You get a local phone plan or use a pre-paid system and use Wi-Fi calling, VoIP, or video platforms to communicate with people back where you came from. Then when you return, you get some kind of eSIM USA plan to take care of all the local communication with friends, relatives, and businesses. These are $14 to $37 for a whole month depending on how much data you need and they use your current phone, nothing physical to install.
How to Go Local and Still Deal With 2FA
Most of the world has cheaper connectivity than the USA does and most countries have cell plans that are a lot cheaper than Canada’s, with more connectivity and perks. In Mexico, for example, the plans include free calling to the USA and Canada, while that’s rarely the case in reverse except for with T-Mobile.
So unless you do have T-Mobile, you’re probably going to have better prices, service, and coverage if you get a local plan after moving, rather than sticking with the plan you have in your home country. The only problem with that is, most two-factor authorization systems aren’t smart enough to deal with foreign phone numbers, so you can’t log into your online banking without having a number in your home country.
There are several ways to get around this, from clunky to clean. The clunky way is to keep your old phone number and port it over to a pre-paid plan in your home country. You get 2FA calls to your old phone, on your old number, but those are the only calls you are paying for so you won’t have to top off very often.
The other option is to get some kind of virtual phone number from your home country that you will only use for cases where one is required, like 2FA or credit applications. The most common choice for this is free Google Voice or Google Fi, but unfortunately we’ve had a lot of readers tell us that they got cut off when they used it a lot internationally. So it’s more secure to pay a little money to be sure you’ll keep the same number and not have to change it.
Examples of companies that provide this service include Numberbarn, Surfshack, Ring Central, and Call Hippo, though there are probably 20 more if you start digging around. They’re typically just a few dollars a month or might even be tossed in as a promotional offer when you sign up with a VPN company. Then you use this number for your 2FA needs.
Unfortunately, Skype won’t work for 2FA: you can’t get texts with them for some reason.
How to Stay With a USA Phone Number Plan
In most cases it’s not going to make sense to hold onto your home plan since you’ll be making all of your calls and using data outside the country where the plan is. Verizon and AT&T make it costly to add international roaming, although they don’t charge the exorbitant rates they did last decade, but really their international roaming is not meant to be an everyday thing.
T-Mobile is more forgiving, though I have heard of people being cut off when they were never in the USA and 100% of their activities were abroad. It helps if you have a family plan with a child still on it back home, even if that child is an adult now, because then at least someone on the family plan is still making calls and sending texts in the home country.
The good thing about T-Mobile is you can roam around the world with it almost anywhere, with no extra charges for web data or texts. It may not be as fast as the local system, but it’s always there. That company also treats Canada, Mexico, and the USA as one market: you can call between any of them and not be charged extra.
Otherwise, you may want to move your US phone number to a pre-paid plan on that carrier and use a back-up phone (or a cheap new one) to keep topping up and keep your number, as mentioned in the previous section.
Use Wi-Fi and Internet Options
Some who have looked at the history of digital nomads trace the real modern start of it back to Skype. Once we had e-mail from wherever we were in the world it helped tremendously with communication. But to keep doing business, however, you really need to talk to people sometimes. Phone call costs were prohibitively expensive before Skype came along and other Voice Over IP services followed in Skype’s footsteps.
That company is still around, of course, and I still use it now and then to make international calls. More often these days we’re doing video calls, however, and the most common services for that are Zoom, Google Meet, and the proprietary Apple system Facetime. For those you don’t have to worry about what kind of phone plan you’re on because it’s all internet based. Assuming you have a fast connection at home, you’re all set.
So if you’re in the home office, whatever cell connection you have is probably meaningless. You’re only using it as a backup if your home internet goes down. You still need it for two-factor authorization when logging into websites though, especially financial ones, and it’s not uncommon for me to get 15 to 20 texts a day now. Facebook often requires it to keep you from getting hacked and many other services require it whether there would be any consequence to unauthorized access or not.
Until we get to a point where we log into everything with fingerprints, eye scanners, and facial recognition, you’re still going to need to deal with cell phone plans and a US phone number (or Canadian one) when we split our time between countries. A little planning ahead will take care of this though so it’ll all be smooth sailing instead of a headache.
