We landed in the Dominican Republic a year ago expecting a short stay. One visa refusal later, we’re still here: three jobs, a real estate agency born out of stubbornness, Carnival in La Vega, pool water like soup, and more time with my wife than any career ever allowed us. This is my honest one-year review of living in the DR, what it costs, what it lacks, and what it quietly gave us.
We’ve hit our 1-year mark since we arrived in the Dominican Republic last August 13th. And while I appreciate the beach, the palm trees and the temperature of the water, both in the ocean and the pool, I can’t fully call it relaxing.
Contrary to many of the people we met that live here, full-time or part-time (yes, it’s a thing people do here. They live in the DR part-time, skip the summer heat and then come back to skip the very refreshing Canadian winters. Well, people are from all over, but still, you get it.), we didn’t expect to stay here such a long time. I, like many Canadians living abroad, made the mistake of falling in love and marrying a non-Canadian citizen, which put us on the beautiful and amazing adventure that is “The PR Track to Canada”. Here I thought that Carney’s call to Canadians living abroad to come back home was addressed to me, and that being a Canadian citizen was going to make it a lot easier to do just that. It isn’t. We trusted the process that said “get your AOR, apply for a visa, move to Canada, work and pay your taxes accordingly”. But an IRCC agent decided otherwise, and once that is done, it’s done. So we are still waiting abroad, a year later. We chose the DR because it felt comfortable and cheap enough to handle a short stay…
So, after arriving here last year, I went again into improvising survivability mode. I worked a bit in real estate (as an expat, it’s the only option to be fair), then worked with a developer as their marketing manager (will skip that gruesome story), and I went right back to rebranding my creative agency in the AI era. Now it’s focused on Quebec and Montreal businesses, in preparation for moving there sometime before the end of the year, I hope.
During my time, I found that it was better to launch my own real estate agency here instead of giving away time and money for free to other agencies. I just wanted a different approach to real estate, one I can be proud of, not selling for the sake of selling. So I built it, with a cool website and very specific and selective projects that you can find here. See, to be a real estate agent here, you don’t need a license. You have to be careful about who you work with, both agencies and developers. I plan on keeping a long-term foot in the DR because there is real opportunity, provided you remain vigilant. With so many shoddy constructions, unclear deposit rules (money you may never see back), incomplete projects, runaway developers, and “paradise locations” where the nearby road will drive you nuts because mufflers in the DR are optional, you need someone with boots on the ground, and I’m playing that role. So, if you plan on getting a holiday home/condo or investment property, be wary, ask questions, don’t jump the gun on due diligence. Or just call me.
Anyway, I wanted to write more about our life in the DR, but I am challenged with the lack of adventure. It’s so calm, too calm. The beach is nearby, the ocean is nice, the palm trees are cute, evenings are the best because of the breeze. But once you’ve done that for two weeks, heck, even a month, it’s hard to find or connect with your sense of adventure, discovery and variety. As much as there’s a lot to see and do, there also isn’t a lot of variety, and I’m having the hardest time explaining it.
And yet, February happens. Carnival season is the one time of year the DR collectively decides that calm is cancelled. We went to the festivities in La Vega and Puerto Plata and it was the full sensory overload: costumes, masks, whips cracking, music and bass that reverberates through your bones, confuses your heart rate, and hits you in the sternum before your ears get a vote, whole families lining the street like it’s a national sport. For one afternoon, nobody was trying to sell me anything. They were just celebrating, and they were better at it than anyone I’ve seen. I took enough photos to fill a separate post, so I’ll let a few of them do the talking.
I think my biggest challenge is that I’m in “remission”, sort of, from pretty serious joint pain issues and limited in the sports that I can do. Surfing? Nope. Kite surfing? Still nope. Scuba diving? Too expensive. Hiking? Your brain starts cooking at 9AM in the heat, so nope nope. Not many coffee shops, libraries, museums or art galleries to check out.
I’m done chain-smoking cigars too (I found some really good ones, but let’s face it. I can only do the train “cho-choing” around for so long before I start having a headache). So I spend most of my days building up and working with new clients, vulgarizing AI and today’s online presence, and waiting for that freaking PR update. It would be nice to get back to our original plan, you know? Connect with our family and friends in Canada, set some roots, build cool businesses and careers, pay taxes…lol
One year in the Dominican Republic ultimately served as self-reflection, personal growth and learnings, becoming an AI wiz kid with all my automation systems, agentic systems, and all (very boring for the average human, exciting and interesting for me. I always wonder, “What’s the next thing I can stop wasting time on?” Like job hunting or contract prospecting…). So while it may feel sometimes (for me) like we lost a year of our lives, I’m trying to focus on the things we got. Which is mainly time and very little distraction besides the stress and anxiety of making it through to the next month financially. But that pain, everyone has it, everywhere, right?
I wish I had more adventures to share with you all. Instead, I’ll share some of my experience living, and I mean REALLY living, in the Dominican Republic.
First, I think people hoping to come live and work in the DR should hold off on that dream. As expats, or Dominicans even, jobs are not widely available, nor contracts, nor opportunities. Your best bet is remote work from the country you are coming from. Everyone has something they want to sell here, nothing they want to buy from you. Internet websites skipped the DR (and most reasonable technology) for WhatsApp groups, messaging and random texts from strangers. Using your foreign credit card here comes with a nice 18% upsell for foreign transactions too, so you need to bring your piggy bank into the country, break it, and live off of it here instead of burning your foreign cash in transfer fees.
As a foreigner or expat, if you have some form of money or remote work, you can enjoy life pretty well here. You could, let’s say, buy 2-3 investment properties (I can tell you the market will keep growing regardless of what people are saying, but in very specific spots). And you could yield a pretty good ROI within 5 years as the country’s development and cash inflow keeps coming in. Think of the older generation looking for retirement away from the cold. That’s the guys buying.
Cost of living is not cheap though, regardless of what everyone else is going to try to convince you of. At a minimum, as an expat, you are looking at 4,000USD in expenses per month if you are renting, without partying and restaurants. If you buy, it might be cheaper, but then again, you just spent 250k USD on a condo or a villa. Comfortable living with restaurants and good life starts at 6,000USD. This is an honest opinion from a person living here for the last year who isn’t trying to sell you on a dream.
The most difficult part is ordering stuff if you are an Amazon person. Temu works great, Amazon is slow. That’s how China is winning over the US. They go where Amazon can’t because of shipping fees.
Finally, you can forget about shoes or most fashionably heavy clothes. The heat will push your toes to scream for breathability, and those piggies do NOT want to go inside cramped sweaty spaces like shoes. My toes haven’t seen the inside of a shoe in months and honestly, I even forgot how to tie one. Such is beach life.
The pool water is always great regardless of where you are at, the ocean as well. The coldest you will hit is 28 degrees. And during summer, the pool water is, as my mom would call it, like soup, and you are just a floating potato in it.
Living location is pretty much the deciding factor of your property or rental price. But I will give you the single most important advice you can get from anyone here that isn’t an asshole. If you can see the main road from your condo, you made a mistake. The main road is the road that runs along the coast from Puerto Plata all the way through to Las Terrenas. There’s only one, mufflers are optional, and there are no secondary options for trucks, tractors, and mopeds. Not to mention the popular “50 speakers on top of the car” trend that will blow your ears out from 3 km away.
There, that’s the best summary of life in the DR you will ever get, and it’s an honest one too. Since I stopped working my previous contract with a local developer, I’ve had the time to slow down. I run at a million miles per hour, I am overly eager and ambitious, and I move fast in terms of work. Those don’t mix well here. I never thought “I work too fast for them” would be a real problem in my life. So, I learned to slow down instead, at the very least, even if just for myself. I’m proud of the kickass new website design for crelong.com and some of the other client websites, content and strategy I built over the year.
Best of all is the sheer amount of time I spend with my wife. We are living what we like to call “Covid 2.0” because it’s 24/7 together. And it’s been fun. We cook, watch movies, take walks, cuddle Milo, live a nice day-to-day life and complain together about the fact our careers are on the back burner. But maybe they are just taking a break before the next chapter, and we are both using this time and experience to enrich ourselves with knowledge and trying new things we didn’t have the time to do before.
I guess that summarizes pretty well our last year without getting into the nitty-gritty details of the other traumas we had to live through this year. Call it my optimistic side that keeps you safe from the bad people out there. For anime fans out there, consider this break as the hot springs episode you find in all of the anime series ever made… Great break before the next big adventure, no matter where it lands us.
