Your first problem is going to be the visa. You have to have a reason to live here if you want to actually be resident and not a perma-tourist. You can be a perma-tourist, but it is going to limit the kinds of work you can look for.
A perma-tourist is someone who lives here without a visa. While technically not "illegal", it is not a legal status in terms of ability to work at least. Some people (used to be me as well) take advantage of lax immigration policies (not laws - those are fairly well-defined) to leave and re-enter the country every 90 days to get a "new visa" (hence perma-tourist - they are thinking that each time they re-enter the country they are receiving a new visa as a tourist, but that's not so). There are a number of threads that beat this subject to death, and an immigration/citizenship attorney (bajo_cero) posted quite a bit of good information about why this is not a good thing to do. Just stay in the country and don't leave is the safest thing to do if you are going to be a perma-tourist.
Some people worry that immigrations may start cracking down on perma-tourists making the crossing to Uruguay, for example, to come back the same day and "renew" the visa. Therefore, doing the perma-tourist visa renewals puts you in the sights of immigrations if problems with this start appearing. The only reason to do it is to avoid the fine, which may not be worth it if you have problems.
If you do overstay your visa, when you eventually leave (even just to go to another country for a side trip), you have to pay a 300 peso fine. There do not seem to be problems (yet) with returning after having paid a fine for overstay.
Search Perma-tourist and spend some time slogging through the threads for details.
I mention all of this, because you will probably not have much of a choice about residency at first. You don't just "get residency" upon arrival. you have to qualify.
There are a number of ways to qualify. I don't remember all of them, but do a search on something like "qualify residency" and you can get the idea pretty easily.
You have to have some sort of investment or retirement income of a certain minimum, or you have to marry an Argentine or member of a Mercosur country who is a permanent resident in Argentina (what I did), start a business, etc. If you have skills that are in demand here, you might be able to find a company to sponsor your visa.
Additionally, you can get Argentine citizenship by staying in the country a certain amount of time, even without residency status. Review this thread for details:
http://baexpats.org/expat-life/1083...p-foreigners.html?highlight=qualify+residency
Getting citizenship may be more than you would want to do, it's a personal decision, but a way to normalize yourself in the country.
Living here is not easy for one without money. Many of us who live here permanently have income from our home countries. Many of us also do what you are contemplating, as in come here, look for work, have a great experience as an expat in a foreign country, learn Spanish, etc.
First, on a limited budget things are VERY expensive here. You can find share apartments where someone needs a roommate or has an extra room to rent, etc. Places here are smaller the cheaper they get, or if not smaller, then probably unsavory.
There are hotels that you can get rooms at for long-term living. Good ones are expensive, crappy ones are relatively cheap.
There are hostels where a lot of people stay.
A lot of people come here to live in temporary apartments. Buenos Aires has one the largest temporary apartment markets in the world it seems to me. But they can be expensive. I doubt you'd find much of anything cheaper than $400 USD a month, and that would probably be a cramped single room (studio) apartment. But I'm not an expert on that, having been out of the temporary market for almost 5 years now, but others can answer that.
You can't just rent a long term apartment here like you can in the States (as much as half the cost of temporary apartments - but you also have the cost of furnishing it. Temporary apartments are furnished), with a deposit and first and last month's rent. You need a guarantee for the contract. The guarantee is usually required to be another property tied to the contract, through which the owner of the apartment can recuperate losses in the event the person renting decides to stay forever and not pay any rent, or tear the apartment to pieces. Tenant laws here favor the tenant extremely and it's difficult to get someone out of an apartment if they decide not to pay rent. It's a serious problem.
Be here a while, make contacts, and you may find that you can rent a place without a guarantee. It may cost you a large chuck of money as a deposit in the best case scenario tough.
As for work - a lot of people come down here and teach English. A lot of people, it seems. There is a pretty big market for English teachers. I'll let others talk about that. But from what I've seen people post, it's a struggle to live here with that as your income source and no other backup, such as savings or some income from outside the country to back it up.
A search on jobs should turn up a ton of information about how people do it here.
The problem is that you cannot get any "good" jobs (good being relative anyway) unless you have a visa. See above on that issue. Therefore, you will be stuck making, probably, about the equivalent of $600 - 800 USD a month?
Things are getting a bit bad in the economy and politics here right now. Argentina tends to have some big cyclic swings and the neo-fascist Peronist government in power here in the Person of Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner (referred to by many as "The Queen" or "Kretina") is getting a bit restrictive. Inflation is running somewhere between 25 and 30 percent per year. Many common things like food and clothes have gotten relatively expensive. The government has put controls on currencies here trying to stave off big economic problems. You can't buy dollars, for example, if you want to save in anything other than what is becoming an unwanted currency (peso).
If you have money you're going to access in terms of savings, bring as much of it with you in cash as you can. The official exchange rate right now is 4.59 pesos to the dollar. On the black market here you can get over 6 pesos to the dollar - it's varying quite a bit in the last couple of weeks. If you use your debit card to get cash out of ATMs here, it will cost you dearly as you get the official conversion rate. You want to find places to change your dollars at the blue market rate (what the "black market" is called for currency) for sure.
The more Spanish you know before you come down here, the better off you are. There seem to be a ton of people that come down here that don't have much more Spanish than "gracias." Personally, I think that's a mistake, but to each their own. There are enough self-learning language options out there that you really should learn something first. You're coming to a foreign country for more than tourism - the more you can interact with them on landing, in their own language, the better off you are.
You should spend a good amount of time doing some serious research before you come, don't just jump off the deep end without knowing what you're getting into. While you're researching and planning, learn some Spanish. it doesn't have to be much, but the better base you have the easier it is to learn once you're immersed.
There is some English spoken here. Many people "learn" English in schools here (as well as other languages). Again, learn is relative. I have a sister-in-law in high school here who's friends have been learning English since they were 8 years old and most of them can't really converse at all. I know very well. Schools here for the most part are not very good, but that's a long story.
You can't depend on people speaking English here. But you can get by. I have a good friend, a multi-millionaire retired gentleman who literally has ten words of Spanish and can't pronounce those well enough to be understood half the time. He certainly has no problems
Most expats I know, unfortunately, are not very good Spanish speakers and don't have much desire to learn. That's just my particular group of acquaintances though.
This is a complicated subject. You're going to have to do a lot of digging to figure it all out properly. You have to decide if Argentina is right for you now, in her current condition, or if some other place would be better.
Whatever you do, make sure you come with a round trip ticket and some savings, just in case...
