Humourous Reasons Why Travelers Should Not Come To Costa Rica

My wife and I moved to Costa Rica six years back from the freezing weather of Minnesota wherever we had held a publishing organization for 15 years. For so long as we're able to remember we had worked 12 hour days and used most of our time finding out how to keep even...getting ahead was not even in the cards.

Then 9/11 happened. And for people it had been an epiphany. Life was also short to spend the balance of our lives on a treadmill that gone nowhere. We accelerated our retirement plans by nearly twenty years.
And around the next year we offered every thing we owned and eventually discovered ourselves in Costa Rica (which, mind you, we had just visited once previously...and on vacation at that !).

Ridiculous? In retrospect, sure. costa rica tours go on to a foreign state wherever we realized no one, didn't know the language and our only exposure was the web? Obviously, it was stupid.

But...we liked it, also in spite of the truth that living here was completely different compared to the publications shown or the net showed. We hired a tiny house about an hour or so beyond San Jose in a community that was rural, espresso country and though large enough to really have a clinic and within 45 moments of the key airport.

And we obtained land...and we built a house. And luckily, Rhonda had the personality to manage the local contractors, although we did not realize significantly Spanish. I however remained a form A and the manana attitude went me crazy.

And a lot of the actual estate and construction company was not really in any "how to..." guide that individuals ever found. And we positively produced mistakes. But thankfully they didn't damage us TOO significantly financially. And we asked a lot of questions and we discovered, over time, how the real property market performed in Costa Rica.

And we decided that we wanted to let others know the things that we had to master the hard way. We started a real estate business whose only goal was to provide attributes which reflected prices that natives paid...because there is a two rate real-estate market in Costa Rica...one for "gringos" and one for Ticos (locals, as Costa Ricans contact themselves).

Because there are hardly any principles or rules for real-estate here, our "exposure" of the marketplace did not make people really favored by other real-estate people. (remember, Costa Rica is a VERY small country...about the size of West Virginia or Houston). Therefore our website did not exactly endear us to local agents who have been used to charging whatever rates and commissions that they thought the traffic might bear.

And slowly we started to get a reputation...admittedly, some was great, some bad...depending upon who you talked to. And we started to obtain publicity...unsolicited coverage from publications like Newsweek and Investors Company Daily. And our company grew. And became some more.

As our business became we began to meet up more folks from Costa Rica...some significant, some not... some quality, some not. And we became confronted with many more types of investments that have been absolutely foreign to us. And we discovered who actually "regulates" the united states and which persons control investment money and have the influence to make policy. To show how much of our knowledge was "chance" (and I personally don't believe in coincidences... I think that they occur for a reason) our third lawyer was presented to people strictly used at an area gathering; "coincidentally" his partner was from Minnesota...Rhonda was then invited to a weekly collecting of "gringas", all of which married Ticos 35-40 years ago and who have today ALL become really important ; e.g., Minister of Money; Minister of Agriculture and two other former case members.