I'm a Black Expat AMA

[Wiseborn]

the Differences in Dominican Cities.

I’ll start with Santo Domingo.

It’s the New York of the Dominican republic.

Really that’s all that needs to be said the second most English speaking Place and the Pretty safe overall.

I never got a good steak here you might be able to get one at the Sheraton on the Malecon but for even a capital city the non US non Dominican or Haitian Options are thin.

That being said second best place for food in the DR.

I said that theres not a lot to do in SD but that’s not entirely true. There’s an excellent chance that you will be hustled if you use a tour guide but you should visit the underground grottoes of SD Literally this shyt is amazing don’t go to SD without seeing it.

Then there’s the nearby Mirador del norte which is like their version of Central Park but better and way safer, I used to live three blocks from here.

They have all the normal big city things like bowling alleys and miniture golf.

The Zoo is meh but you’d be surprised the average Dominican girl hasn’t been there so it’s a good date spot.

The best places to stay is in Zona Colonial and the Malecon ( the sea shore). They even have a little carnival at times on the Malecon.

If you go to Zona Colonial your first stop should be to Paco’s aka Grands. The food is good and that’s where the expats and half pats hang out. You absolutely need to holla at them if only to get rid of the masses of hustlers trying to press you to buy something from them.

Your next stop should be the Cigar Bar ( that’s not the name but it’s what everyone calls it) in Plaza Colon where all the pigeons are. It’s also where they flimed the Banana Daquri scene from The Godfather II.


Other than that I would suggest that you stay inside of Maximo Gomez ( a major highway) Basically you want to be in ZC, Gazcue, Piantini El Million, Buenavista and the Chieftans ( theres an Indian Name for this but I forgot it) Near Avienida Sarasota.

Ave Mexico is one of the main club areas and some of the Clubs you want to hit up is Club Mixxer, The Paris Club, The Dial Bar The Club in the Hotel W&P

The flyest Mall is the Blue Mall and the nearest Beach is Boca Chica but if you don’t want to get super pressed either go with the homies at Paco’s or go to Juan Dolio. The beach isn’t as fly but way less hustlers.

 

[Wiseborn]

Santiago:

To keep it a buck unless you’re an explorer which is different from a vacationer there’s no real reason to go To Santiago

The Upsides is far cheaper and less touristy than SD more of the “Real RD”. clean far better traffic easier to navigate. Far less hustling of Tourists here. People are more genuine, they either like you or they don’t. There’s also a lot of white dominicans here. When they say that Santiago has “beautiful women” This is what they mean. There’s a gang of Haitians here too but fairly few Afro Dominicans.. People are more prideful and if you experience any racism it will likely be here.

Lovera I and II are the main clubs and the Monument area is the main hang out for gringos and Tourists.

There’s at least two people in this thread who spend a lot of time of time in Santiago they can add on.

One other positive is that there’s less getting hit on by hoes here. There’s plenty of the national tricking by extra steps and being presented with a bill for services you didn’t agree too but fewer actual hoes.

 

[Wiseborn]

Punta Cana:

The hands down flyest place on the Island.

There’s resorts and a limited number of Airbnb's

Downside very expensive a perfect place to bring the fam or a romantic vacation with your girl.

Also a decent nightlife club scene. A decent amount of Male and female expats. There’s international clubs and hoe spots. The flyest girls on the Island come to party here on weekends

Easy to navigate and the roads are pretty good except when it floods.

Excellent place to raise a family or have a second home

Decent amount to see and do great beaches very little tourist hustling You can take part in some of the many resort activities without being a guest.

English spoken all over the place. One of the lowest crime & corruption spots you can go to.

Hands down great restaurants the best on the Island.

They have a Blue Mall here too and the shopping is on par with or better than in Santo Domingo


One other downside the most expensive place to trick on the Island

Really one of the best places you can go hands down. If you wanted to take an international Trip this is a good place to start.

 

[Wiseborn]

Sosua.

what can be said that hasn’t been said? I wouldn’t go unless I was on a extended visit to the DR unless you wanted to do some hardcore tricking.

Really the only thing you can say is that the beaches are nice and if you wanted to take your first trickaction I’d do that in Santo Domingo and only go to Sosua if the sexpats of SD wanted to go.

The wild thing is some of the hardest sexpats of Santo Domingo almost never go to Sosua because there’s no real need if you know the basics of the language and culture.

That being said the overall easiest and safest place to trick in possibly the world.

Even if you wanted to hit up Sosua to Trick I’d suggest staying in Puerta Plata city or Caberete.

Some of the flyer villas are in or nearer Caberete than Sosua proper.

There’s some non hoeing things to do there’s a decent basketball court that is rarely used they have plenty of american style restaurants.

There’s a wealth of Information about Sosua but if you wanted to take a break from the hoes and see some regular girls hit up Puerta Plata Malecon especially on Sundays it’s super lit in the Bachata clubs out there.

Seriously learn to dance Bachata it’s not that hard way easier than learning Salsa

 

[Wiseborn]

Credit Card Advice:

Getting the right credit card helps save money in a lot of ways

Granted for serious business travelers you need airline cards Hotel cards and standard business cards to save money. I used to do corporate travel believe me I know this.

But for the breh with less than a month of weekend hoilday sick and vacation time making a couple of trips a year the best starter all around card for most people is the Amazon Prime card

 

[Wiseborn]

More investing advice.

This is part of my strategy for sinking funds meaning money set aside for a big purchase not emergency money. That I may need immediately.

Actually for my emergency funds I put one quarter in account that has my ATM ( overseas you’re gonna get about 600 bucks in cash daily) 70% in an online High yield account ( I use Goldman/Sachs for this) and a Credit card One with No international fees and another credit Union card that I can switch the balance to that card if I had to use a big purchase.

I used Money MarkeT funds Money Market funds are different than Money Market accounts

A money Market account is basically I High yield savings account that you usually have to keep a certain amount of money in to maintain the interest rates or they start charging you

a Money Market Fund is basically you buying pieces of debt.
It's important to know that there is a difference between money market accounts (MMA) and money market funds (MMF)

(MMA) also referred to as high yield savings (HYSA) are to Banks as (MMF) are to Brokerages.

They both have similar liquidity & yields. Interest paid on both is taxed as ordinary income but MMF can be partially to almost fully exempt from state and local taxes (SALT).

Insurance differs MMA = FDIC MMF = SIPC

There are three types of MMF's

1 "Treasury" 60 to 90% SALT exempt.

2 "Government" hold all manner of government and agency bonds. Can be 0 to 50% SALT exempt.

3 "Prime" government and corporate bonds. Little to No tax exemptions.

The quoted yields on MMF are net of expenses. So the fund with the lower expense ratio will tend to have a higher yield but will also tend to be subject to higher SALT.

For example in 2023: VUSXX yields 5.27 80% SALT free FDLXX yields 4.94 90% SALT free.

If you don’t understand this the expense is what the Fund charges you to buy the debt and the Yield is what they give you back when you sell it.

The downsides is for schwab is that basically they pay dividends on the fund generally on the 15th of the month and when you sell the money posts in your account the next business day not immediately


But the yield is higher and making your money make money while you make more money is the name of the game.

 

[Wiseborn]

This explains Vanguard’s federal Money market fund better than I can:

 

[Wiseborn]

To the brehs who asked about walking around money that’s a broad question but for an Expat not a tourist. I’d budget about 100 dollars a week is “walking around money”.

Walking around money is money that you use for random expenses on wants not needs i.e. say you wanted to grab lunch with friends or go out drinking with the homies. In Colombia especially that’s enough to spend on random stuff during a week.

You want to have some money on hand for incidentals yet not too much money so a 100 USD in local currency is sufficient

If you wanted to know how cheap shyt is in Colombia that will tell you.

 

[Wiseborn]

The Expat Checklist:

As I said a failure to plan is a Plan to fail. This will be a deep dive but I’m gonna assume that you already picked a country and did a Deep recon and have everything set up for you as you land.

I didn’t do everything on this checklist this is what I wish I knew when I decided to dip.

First thing getting your finances in order number 1 deciding what you will sell, keep or give away. Once you do that you need to automate your savings as you go make your budget have your emergency fund, and your sinking funds and your general expenses set up now you need to direct your bank to automate your investements so you don’t have to do it yourself.

You will save a ton of money while overseas don’t have it sitting in a no interest baring checking account make that money work for you.

Make sure you have a way to contact your financial institutions If you use Two factor authentication through your phone remember that won’t work on phones overseas so have a way to authenticate your accounts before you go. You don’t want to be locked out of your accounts actually Google Voice will allow two factor aunthentication for some banks.

See if your bank is willing to send back up cards overseas. Call your bank let them know where you are.

Get a schwab, Fidelity, Wise, or Revolut card to save on foreign ATM charges most foreign ATM’s only let you take around 300 to 600 a day out of your account the fees can add up.

Consider getting a Western Union account to wire yourself money cash is king in the 3rd world.

Get a Credit card with points and no international fees tell that card where you are and see if they will send you a replacement overseas you don’t want to not have access to your funds overseas.

Google Voice, Skype, and What’s app is good for keeping in touch with fam back home too.


Find out what you’re gonna do with your mail from back home. are you gonna get a forwarding system or do you have a trusted friend or relative willing to send your mail to you.

Make it easy on them and your self but going paperless, Opting out of all credit offers by locking your accounts with the credit agencies. so that scammers don’t open accounts in your name. Have spend alerts of all cards so you know if someone’s stealing from your accounts. Consider putting limits on your cards if you can.

Consider using a company like Abine to wipe yourself from dark websites and use it for credit monitoring. Again if you don’t have a good credit score one of the benefits of travel is that your score will dramatically improve this will lead to tons of junk mail Wiping your data will slow down the deluge of junk mail.

Obviously have all the information for your visas accessible as well as back up copies.


I’ll add on later.

 

[Wiseborn]

Phone pro tip:

when buying phones for international use or putting custom operating systems on them Buy from Ebay not Amazon.

Most if not all Amazon phones are American Unlocked meaning you can put any American sim card in them but it’s not unlocked for foriegn Sim cards or Custom OS’s.

 

[Wiseborn]

cell Phone safety Pro Tip:

One way dudes in Colombia are getting got is because once a thief who knows what they're doing ( and there's a lot of gangs in Medellin that knows what they're doing) they can clean out your bank accounts.

If you're on a short trip consider taking off your banking and credit card apps.

If you don't want to do that bring a throwaway travel phone with no financial apps on it. Keep the other phone with your banking info separate and guard it the same way you guard your passport.

Personally I use a reccomend Google pixel phones with Graphene OS
You need a privacy screen on your phone a good drop case and a Pin and Fingerprint face ID. You need both because you can be forced to open your phone with Face ID or a Fingerprint but you can lock your phone by constantly messing up the Pin.

If you use only a Pin then someone can watch your patterns and figure out your Pin and passowrds.

Speaking of Passowrds again I would use a Yubikey NFC 5 or a Nitrokey. or use a free password generator and storage like Bitwarden.

This could be a liversaver if you're locked out of one of your devices you can gain access to your accounts even if you lose the phone or laptop.

Additionally go to Network and Internet settings to Sim Card options and Turn off the 2G option Criminals and downgrade your phone to 2G which is much easier to hack into.

Set a SIM Card Pin and keep it in Bitwarden this makes it harder to spoof your phone.

Cell Phone Pro Tips

If I were gonna get a VPN my recommendations are Mullvad VPN and Proton VPN

 

[Memorial Stadium Piru]

To the brehs going overseas low key fukked up and needing money I have one piece of advice:

DON’T.

But if you’re stuck and ain’t trying to go home there’s some online jobs you can get.

This will be way long so I’ll break it up over several posts.


One job you can do is to be a Medical Transcriber. Basically you have to write down the shyt Doctors say when operatining. Doctors in the states are so scared of lawsuits that they literally have to describe what they’re doing as well as flim it. You go online and you see people getting operated on someone had to write down what the Doctor said and did.

You can also be a Medical Biller and coder. You basically charge people 600 bucks for an aspirin and dirty job but someone has to do it. extremely nasty work literally

Online claims adjuster assistant. More nasty work you look at pictures and call people trying to get the Insurance company out of paying for what they charge people for.

Data entry it is what the title is nuff said.

Mortgage Underwriter. basically you find ways to deny people home loans

Corparate Travel Manager basically a travel agent for Companies.


Corparate Meeting troubleshooter ( I know 4 people who do this job with different titles but you basically set up remote meeting for teams and handle slight IT support and post speadsheets and Powerpoint slides). You know the basics of Excel and Power Point and you can do this job.

Then there’s the old stand by Teaching English online.

And when all else fails Be a Travel Trick bum content creator and e beg.

Lot of clowns are funding their vacations this way. If you’re about to lose your cold water flat in the ghetto of some 9th world country desparate times call for desparate measures.


Then there’s review writing on Fiver and Upwork.

Your boy Auston could use this info right now lol

 

[Wiseborn]

Your boy Auston could use this info right now lol

Why is he down bad now? I told him to save his money.

He spends money like water ( That’s something expats have to concern theirselves with). But he does get plenty of superchats.

He ebeggs like the best of the rest of them.

 

[Wiseborn]

answering more questions

If you gonna check luggage Go with softshelled luggage over hard shelled. The softshell expands more and is signficantly lighter also you can stuff it more easily in small spaces.

Finally you get more space for your luggage especially if you do more shopping in the country.

 

[Wiseborn]

Credit card hacks If your credit is good and you have a low interest card and a Premium card you’re likely leaving money on the table.

You should try to get either the Chase suite of cards or the AMEX suite You can combine points and book through the credit cards portal and either get a free return and or a free upgrade.

If you have a loyalty card for an airline you can stack points for that there’s an app for that called Award Wallet.

Track your rewards and travel plans in a convenient, secure place

AwardWallet helps you track frequent flyer miles and hotel points as well as book reward tickets

awardwallet.com

It keeps track of all the points that you accumulate over time.

Pay your credit cards off on time and you’ll either get a free meal or a free flight.