American credit cards are accepted here, but people don’t use credit cards as widely here as in the US. In the US, we used to buy nearly everything with a credit card – groceries, coffee, fast food… Here, cash is the preferred medium of exchange, unless you’re purchasing a large item such as an appliance. Even the gas stations remain cash only, and it can easily be 800 pesos ($50) to fill the van. That being the case, we go through a lot of cash fast.

Everything I read in advance suggested that the best way to obtain pesos in Mexico is via your regular debit card at an ATM, and that seems to be holding true for us. Some ATMs will dispense up to 7,000 pesos at a time, about $440, and the exchange rate is pretty favorable. Some of the difficulties we’ve run into:
– many of the ATMs will dispense a maximum of 4,000 pesos ($250);
– one that we used had a surcharge of $6; usually it’s less than $2;
– there’s only one ATM in the town, but they don’t stock it with much cash, so what happens is: you put your card in, enter your PIN, select the amount you want, listen to the machine count through the bills, and then it tells you it “cannot complete your request”. It doesn’t tell you how much money is available, so you have to repeat this process, asking for smaller and smaller amounts, until you hit the right number. The next closest ATM is about 7 miles away, and we’ve only gone to it once, but it was not in service at that time. The next one is 15 miles away from us, in the nearest city (population of 100,000), where there are multiple ATMs available from multiple bank brands, so you can be confident about being able to get cash there. The banks are Mexican brands, not names you would know from the US, although Banamex is affiliated with Citibank. Like with many things here, it takes planning ahead and patience.