Investments in Costa Rica?… is not that an island?…someplace in the Caribbean?

My wife and I moved to Costa Rica six years ago from the frigid climate of Minnesota where we had owned a printing business enterprise for 15 years. For as extended as we could don’t forget we had worked 12 hour days and spent most of our time figuring out how to keep even…finding ahead wasn’t even in the cards.

Then 9/11 occurred. And for us it was an epiphany. Life was too brief to commit the balance of our lives on a treadmill that went nowhere. We accelerated our retirement plans by almost ten years.
And more than the next year we sold anything we owned and sooner or later discovered ourselves in Costa Rica (which, mind you, we had only visited once previously…and on vacation at that !).

Stupid? In retrospect, positive. To move to a foreign country where we knew no one particular, didn’t know the language and our only exposure was the online? Of course, it was stupid.

But…we loved it, even in spite of the fact that life here was entirely diverse than the books portrayed or the internet showed. We rented a small residence about an hour outdoors of San Jose in a neighborhood which was rural, coffee country and but nonetheless huge adequate to have a hospital and inside 45 minutes of the principal airport.

And costa rica where to live purchased land…and we constructed a residence. And fortunately, Rhonda had the temperament to deal with the regional builders, even although we didn’t fully grasp a lot Spanish. I nonetheless remained a form A and the manana attitude drove me crazy.

And substantially of the actual estate and building small business was unquestionably not in any “how to…” book that we ever discovered. And we undoubtedly produced blunders. But fortunately they did not hurt us As well significantly financially. And we asked a lot of queries and we learned, small by little, how the real estate marketplace functioned in Costa Rica.

And we decided that we wanted to let others know the things that we had to discover the really hard way. We began a real estate business whose sole aim was to present properties which reflected rates that locals paid…simply because there is a two tier genuine estate market in Costa Rica…1 for “gringos” and a single for Ticos (locals, as Costa Ricans get in touch with themselves).

Mainly because there are extremely couple of guidelines or regulations for genuine estate here, our “exposure” of the market did not make us very well known with other actual estate people today. (don’t forget, Costa Rica is a Incredibly tiny country…about the size of West Virginia or Houston). So our site didn’t exactly endear us to nearby agents who had been made use of to charging what ever prices and commissions that they thought the traffic would bear.

And gradually we began to get a reputation…admittedly, some was excellent, some poor…based upon who you talked to. And we started to get publicity…unsolicited publicity from magazines like Newsweek and Investors Enterprise Every day. And our organization grew. And grew some far more.

As our enterprise grew we started to meet much more folks from Costa Rica…some influential, some not… some high-quality, some not. And we became exposed to numerous a lot more varieties of investments that were completely foreign to us. And we learned who really “controls” the country and which people today control investment capital and have the influence to make policy. To illustrate how substantially of our education was “coincidence” (and I personally do not think in coincidences… I believe that they happen for a explanation) our third attorney was introduced to us purely second hand at a nearby gathering “coincidentally” his wife was from Minnesota…Rhonda was then invited to a weekly gathering of “gringas”, all of which married Ticos 35-40 years ago and who have now ALL turn into incredibly influential e.g., Minister of Finance Minister of Agriculture and two other former cabinet members.