Quiet and steady, one public accountant tries every approach in the book to guarantee his family’s financial stability.
Since arriving in Colombia in 2020, Marco has held several jobs and even tried to start his own food truck business. His financial acumen has shielded his small family from particularly desperate times, through some of his maneuvers have prioritized short-term cash flow over longer-term wealth accumulation. Marco has used his previous education and knowledge of bureaucratic systems to deftly navigate the Colombian migration system and to validate his Venezuelan diplomas. In theory, this should’ve opened many coveted formal employment opportunities for Marco, yet he continues searching for a fulltime stable position while working side jobs in construction and a restaurant.
As a certified public accountant, 29-year-old Marco has a remarkable leg up in planning his financial strategies. Like all other major life decisions, he carefully considered every possible option before deciding in May 2020 that he and his partner needed to move to Colombia. The tipping point came when hyperinflation of the Venezuelan bolivar made it impossible to buy food or make ends meet on his government salary. Because the border was closed due to COVID, Marco and his girlfriend had to find an alternative route (a trocha) from his hometown of Puerto Píritu through San Antonio del Táchira to Cucutá, then onto Medellín where he has family.
When Marco first arrived, he worked at a restaurant bussing tables, but because he didn’t have his legal residency card (PPT) at that time, they paid him only $9 USD per day, with lunch included. He worked there from May to August 2020 before deciding it was worth trading a steady but meager income from the restaurant for the possibility of making a decent income from his own business. With a no-interest loan from his cousin Betty he was able to buy a used food truck trailer for $366 USD. He poured his heart (and earnings) into fixing up the truck—painting it, replacing the roof, and reinforcing the undercarriage.
Sadly, once again, the lack of the PPT residency card thwarted careful plans. Without the PPT Marco couldn’t get the formal paperwork from the Medellín municipality required to legally sell food on the streets. Agents from the municipality showed up to harass him regularly, forcing him to operate on back streets with fewer customers. When he dared to put his food truck on a busier street, he had to contend with harassment and fines, which ultimately made it impossible to profit from his business. Frustrated and resigned, Marco sold his refurbished food truck trailer in December 2021 for $488 USD when he lucked into finding a good buyer. While this was more than he bought it for originally, he’d invested a lot financially and emotionally revamping the splashy red trailer. In a stroke of cruel irony, his PPT card finally arrived later in the same week he sold his trailer.
After selling his food truck Marco hasn’t found a steady job. Since January 2022 he has worked a few days a week as a construction assistant, earning $12 USD daily. But the hours are 7 a.m. to 5 pm, so he leaves home at 5 am to arrive on time. For a couple months he worked at a laundromat from 7 am to 7 pm, earning 50% commission on what people washed. In drier months, he earns $9 USD per day on average, but once rainy season starts, fewer people wash their clothes at the laundromat; there are many days in which he only brings home $4 USD.
Marco also returned to the same restaurant job as before, now in an on-call role earning $10 USD per day plus lunch. They only call him in a few days a week when they need extra capacity, mostly on the weekends. Of all these temporary gigs, he prefers the restaurant because it’s the closest to his house—only 30 minutes away, compared with the 90-minute commute to the construction job. He’s hedging his bets on his part-time jobs in hopes that if he keeps working at the restaurant, he will get pulled up into a fulltime formal contract. This could happen as soon as someone else leaves, especially now that he has his PPT.
Given how many prospective employers previously told Marco they couldn’t hire him without his PPT, he expected more jobs to materialize once he had it. Sadly, experience has proven otherwise. He has spent the past six months actively applying to as many formal jobs as possible, still with no luck. With the help of a jobs program sponsored by Mercy Corps, he was offered a job as an accounting assistant. He turned the job down because it would have required him to move his family to a higher cost neighborhood in the distant outskirts of Medellín.
Still, Marco has navigated state bureaucracies to increase his employability, leveraging his new PPT status in other ways. One challenge facing many Venezuelan migrants is the inability to formally stamp and validate their diplomas, professional licenses, and other paperwork in Colombia. Without these documents, many children are forced to repeat school grades they’ve already passed. Adults often get turned away from jobs when they can’t formally prove they’ve graduated high school in Venezuela. And many highly skilled professionals—doctors, lawyers, nurses, and accountants like Marco—can’t practice their professions legally within Colombia without the stamped paperwork. Obtaining the proper stamps for the validation process in Venezuela is widely considered impossible, with bureaucrats demanding prohibitively expensive bribes.
Yet, perhaps because of his own former experience working as a government accountant, Marco managed to find a work-around. When he first arrived in Colombia, he had tried to validate his certificates at both the Venezuelan and Colombian embassies but was told that a PPT was required. In February 2022 he learned through social media about new opportunities to validate certain diplomas and professional licenses. PPT in hand, he marched over to the Venezuelan Embassy and successfully got the coveted stamps. He also applied for and received a work competency certificate from the National Training Service (SENA, in Spanish) attesting to his expertise in “Administrative process coordination and management.” He wants other certificates from SENA, as he believes they will open future employment opportunities for him.
As an accountant Marco is naturally risk-averse and doesn’t like to feel financially precarious. With what he’s currently making at the restaurant and construction gig, he can pay for rent, food, and transport costs. But he constantly worries about weeks when they don’t call him in for enough work. A month before the interview, his partner gave birth to a healthy baby boy, adding joy to the household, but also adding to expenses and the weight on Marco’s shoulders as the only breadwinner. When they first arrived in Medellín, they rented a studio apartment for $98 USD per month, though the landlord kept raising the rent. After Marco got his PPT, the family moved to a similarly sized place for $122 USD, then to a bigger place for $135 USD where they currently live.
Medical expenses have also eaten away at Marco’s savings. The government provided health insurance for his girlfriend while she was pregnant, but even so, they had to pay over $146 USD in out-of-pocket expenses for various exams that the insurance didn’t cover. He knows that he should be eligible for SisBen, the comprehensive government health insurance, now that he has his PPT, but he still is working to enroll in it.
Marco thinks about his expenses, income, and financial management strategies in methodical ways.
Savings strategy: He diligently saves a portion of his daily earnings so he can make rent and start securing savings for the future. If he earns $10 USD daily at the restaurant, he spends $1.20 USD on transportation to and from work, saves up $5 for rent, and spends $2.90–3.40 USD on food and diapers. Unlike the majority of other migrants who are unbanked, he saves his money in a bank account at BanColombia. A job he wanted required him to have a bank account, so as soon as he received his PPT, he opened the account and uses it regularly.
Loans: Marco says he would never turn to a loan shark, not because he fears them, but because they aren’t a logical financial tool given the interest rates over 30 percent. He is lucky to have family members in the area who help him if he ever gets into a real bind or goes a long time without work. His cousin, Ignacia, has loaned him money (without interest) four times since they’ve lived in Colombia. The first time was an $195 USD loan when he first arrived. Then in August 2021, she lent him $73 USD to improve his food trailer. The third loan was $73 USD in December 2021 to make rent when his income streams got more complicated, and the fourth was $98 USD in April 2022 to make rent. When he has an outstanding loan from her, he first catches up on food and household expenses, then starts repaying it with the aim of repaying $24 USD monthly.
Reselling assets: Another financial strategy he employs is buying physical assets that he can resell if he runs into cash flow challenges. He has sold his cellphone multiple times for this purpose. In June 2021, he sold it for $61 USD in order to buy a fridge for $56 USD. When he realized how many jobs required a phone to contact him, he bought another one, though he sold that phone only a month later in November 2021 to pay for the prenatal expenses for his pregnant girlfriend’s insurance didn’t cover. Thankfully, he doesn’t lose too much value in these exchanges. For example, most recently he bought a phone for $56 USD and resold it for $49 USD.
Though Marco has yet to find the stable job he has been seeking, he hasn’t stopped working to improve his circumstances in other ways. He continues applying for jobs while simultaneously working to get more documentation of his professional competencies. He’s decided that what he most needs is the Tarjeta Profesional (professional card) certifying him as a public accountant in Colombia, a notoriously difficult endeavor. But, if anyone can navigate the Colombian bureaucracies while supporting a family, it’s Marco.