Americans are spending hundreds to learn how to leave the U.S.
Last weekend, Jesse Derr and his wife, Jess Yeastadt, made the five-hour drive from their home in Phoenix to the Hard Rock Hotel in San Diego.
On the weekend trip agenda: Learning how to move to Mexico.
Derr, 41, and Yeastadt, 45, were among hundreds of Americans dreaming of starting a new life abroad in San Diego last weekend.
A record number of Americans are leaving the United States: There will be a net negative migration of between 10,000 and 295,000 in the United States in 2025. Brookings Institution. The widest estimated range was among people who left voluntarily; Brookings estimates that 210,000 to 405,000 people did so last year.
For the first time in at least 50 years, more people left the country than entered. Restrictive immigration policies and deportation efforts play a role, according to Brookings. Some US citizens They migrate for school, work, starting a family, retirement, and everything in between.
Expatsi, a company that offers relocation tours for Americans, is becoming a sought-after resource for some.
The company, which launched in 2022, held its second annual Move Abroad Con in San Diego on May 9 and 10. Expatsi co-founder Jen Barnett told CNBC Make It that nearly 600 Americans from across the country attended the inaugural event in May 2025, doubling that number.
According to Barnett, in a sample of 218 respondents over the weekend, the majority, 89%, said they wanted to leave the United States for political reasons. Others say they hope to move for adventure and growth (73%) as well as to save money (57%). Nearly two-thirds of survey respondents hope to move within two years, their average monthly budget for work is $3,856, and hopeful movers are split between 44% individuals, 39% couples and 17% families with children.
Derr, like many others who attended the conference, says political reasons are the primary reason his family may leave the United States.
It highlights recent policies affecting reproductive rights, such as the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down the federal constitutional right to abortion. his decisions He thinks weakening the Voting Rights Act signals that the country is “going backwards.” Meanwhile, he says Mexico’s election of the country’s first female president, Claudia Sheinbaum, in 2024 and federally mandated gender equality laws are in line with the values he and Yeastadt seek.
Derr says attending the weekend event and hearing from people who have migrated before made their seemingly “insurmountable” plans feel more attainable.
Derr says speaking to a relocation expert to Mexico is helpful in addressing what the couple can and can’t bring abroad, income requirements to obtain a visa, and other “day-to-day living” considerations. “We left the weekend with literally zero unknowns.”
Derr said the couple’s moving timeline will depend on the results of the 2026 U.S. midterm elections. If the Democratic party gains control of the House and Senate and takes “immediate, measurable action to reverse the destructive decisions this administration has made,” Derr says, “it will impact our timeline and our motivation to act.”
Conference guests paid approximately $500 to $1,000 for tickets to the weekend events, which included two days of programming from more than 50 experts. Guests filtered through dozens of breakout sessions to learn the details of different visas, taxes as a foreigner, expat health insurance, and details on how to move to hot spots like Portugal, Mexico, Canada, and New Zealand.
Von Bradley, 45, is a government employee in San Diego. Last year he was looking for ways to move and work abroad.
Southern Spain is at the top of Bradley’s list of places to move abroad due to its warm and sunny climate. He says his main priorities for living abroad are finding a place with a lower cost of living, a place where his dollars can stretch further in retirement, and a place that encourages a healthy lifestyle, such as access to nutritious foods in a walkable city.
The cost of moving and living abroad varies greatly depending on the destination country and desired lifestyle. The initial move usually involves visa and other paperwork processing fees of a few hundred dollars, as well as shipping and handling costs of up to tens of thousands of dollars. For example, Make It previously reported that a Chicago couple saved more than $20,000 over 10 months to move to Valencia, Spain, in spring 2025.
Bradley says Plan A is to move abroad through a job transfer, but if those opportunities don’t arise, he’ll leverage the resources he’s gathered through the Expatsi network.
“It was interesting to me to see how many people were thinking about this,” Bradley says. The wealth of information “was like drinking from a fire hose, but I took a lot of notes, collected a lot of brochures, so I have information I can refer to.”
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