8 Reasons Why Americans LEAVE Costa Rica [Why I Left]

why is it that so many people move to costa rica only to leave a few short years later i've been helping people move to costa rica since 2005 and one of the things that i've noticed is that sometimes people spend more time planning their move to costa rica than actually living there so in this video i'm going to explain the top reasons why people leave costa rica and at the end of the video i'm going to tell you why i chose to leave the country after living there for eight years so how many expats live in costa rica anyway the u.s state department estimates that there could be over a hundred and twenty thousand americans living down in costa rica and i would say that's probably the biggest expat population there may be followed by canada maybe a few countries in europe but primarily we're talking u.s citizens there's all sorts of reasons that people choose to retire or live abroad in costa rica but there's also quite a few reasons why they leave so the first thing that people responded about was that the cost of living isn't actually so low so basically they were saying that they moved to costa rica with the impression that they would have a lower cost of living and save money but the reality was that they spent the same amount and so this wasn't very surprising to me because there's been a lot of chatter since the very early days of the internet about how cheap the cost of living is and that's exactly the problem is that a lot of this information was published a really long time ago like probably 10 years ago or more and that narrative that costa rica is a cheap place to live has just continued ever since but in reality the last time i checked costa rica was the second most expensive country to live in in latin america but suffice to say costa rica is more expensive than people think and the reasons for this are multiple the amount of foreigners moving to the country in recent years has really driven up housing prices the construction price per square meter has gone up but that's not the only reason i don't want to blame it all on foreigners it's also because costa rica has really high import taxes on goods so especially electronics cars are expensive specialty food items are really expensive and so when you combine all of these things together the cost of living ends up being higher than people think but you can get a low cost of living in costa rica you just have to be frugal and plan so if you live in a long-term rental or you live outside of the major tourist areas or if you don't own a car and if you shop at local markets rather than the most expensive grocery stores you can get your cost of living down pretty low it also helps if you live in the central valley versus living at the beach because electricity costs in costa rica are really high so if you want to live right there beachfront you're going to be spending probably a few hundred dollars a month just on air conditioning alone not to mention paying peak property prices the other thing of course is that cost of living is relative so if you're moving from a place like manhattan or california down to costa rica your cost of living can probably be lower but if you're moving from somewhere in middle america with an average cost of living it could be the same or actually higher the second thing is probably actually the biggest factor and it's a combination of having unrealistic misaligned expectations of what your life is going to be like and also the inability to adjust to the culture of that country so if you move from a country like the us that is a developed country you know you're living in the rat race and then you move to a place like costa rica that's more laid back you know things are going at a slower pace it's going to be a bigger difference in a bigger culture shock versus if you moved from a neighboring country like panama to costa rica where the culture is quite similar and the biggest mistake that people make with regards to this is really not staying in the country long enough to be able to adapt and adjust to the culture so there's something called the curve of cultural adaptation and it's really similar to what you may have heard people talk about in business or entrepreneurship or learning a new skill this is what seth godin refers to as the dip so anytime you're doing something difficult like studying a new year's resolution for example you're gonna start off with a lot of motivation but eventually that motivation wanes and crashes and you basically lose momentum but if you stick with it then you can usually build that business learn that new skill or in the case of moving to a new country you can learn to adapt to that culture but if you quit at the bottom of the curve so let's say you moved costa rica and the first few months go great you're in the honeymoon phase of your relocation then things change they get bad and you don't know how long you're going to be in that dip so sometimes that dip could last a few months sometimes it could last a few years and it's different for each person so if you give up at any point in that dip where you're not happy you're never going to be able to climb out of that hole and get to the process or the stage of actual adaptation and integration with the culture so basically if you give up too soon you're never going to actually adjust because you haven't given yourself enough time to do that so that is one of the big problems the other big problem kind of relates to the first aspect of cost of living where people have unrealistic expectations so they might have built costa rica into this perfect place that they're going to move to the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow where it's going to solve all of your problems and life is going to be great it's going to be cheaper it's going to be more beautiful it's going to be more fun more adventurous and and then when you get there you realize that it's just another country full of regular people like anywhere else in the world and you're still you and if anything you might have new problems to face that you haven't faced before in life and so when you've built this perception of the country based around internet forums or that time that you went on vacation there or what your friend said who retired there and then that clashes with reality things just going wrong because it's life then that causes people to kind of retract and change their minds and move back home now the fourth thing that people mentioned was health problems and this really surprised me because costa rica is known for having first class medical care it has a very robust medical tourism economy and this is part of the country's brand image and so i was surprised that people cited health problems as the reason why they would move back to the us and then the fifth thing that people mentioned and this kind of made me pretty sad actually was the family aspect this to me indicates that people waited until a certain phase in their life maybe they retired in costa rica and then once they did that they realized that they actually wanted to spend more quality time with their family members people especially mention their grandkids and even though i don't have kids i could really relate to this because this past year was the first year since i was a teenager that i have spent an entire year in the united states and after traveling to 60 plus countries over the past 15 or 20 years i really got to spend a lot of quality time with my family i can definitely relate to that feeling of being outside of the country and being thousands of miles away from your loved ones and then really having to reconcile with like what's more important is it being on this beautiful beach alone or is it being back in kansas with your grandkids and i don't know the answer to that i think each person has to decide for themselves but this was something that came up a lot and then the sixth thing was the crime rate so costa rica is actually ranked 32nd on the global peace index compared to the u.s which is in 121st place so costa rica overall is quite a safe country compared to many countries in the world and quite a peaceful place but that doesn't mean that there's not crime and that there's not problems and what i've noticed from living in latin america for a really long time is that not all crime is reported right so whether it is intentional or not a lot of things have happened in the expat community that i haven't personally seen published in the english language newspaper the teco times or in the largest spanish-language newspaper la nacion there is probably a higher volume of crime that affects expats more than is in the public conversation like i personally know people who have been victims of carjackings of home invasions and so i really can't say that for the u.s like i don't know many people who have been affected by violent crimes at the rate that i have in the expat community and maybe it's because it's a lower population there and it's a smaller more tight-knit community so you know stories travel really quickly through the coconut wire but there are quite a few horror stories and i think that sometimes people get scared by that when they move down or sometimes they have that experience themselves so that is definitely a really serious concern and something that it seems like costa rica is taking seriously because they know that this is bad for their image as an ecotourism destination but also as an expat retiree destination it's very common to have to live in a gated community or live behind bars on your windows or have a security guard who sometimes can be corrupted by criminals and i personally have seen a woman get mugged outside of my front door in romosar i used to drive with a fake wallet in the console of my car i had my car broken into multiple times at the beach i also know a surfer who hid his keys outside of his toyota prado and someone was watching where he hid his keys and they actually stole his car so you just have to be really aware really careful in costa rica don't leave anything out and playing site don't leave anything on the seat of your car lock up valuables in your house and yeah just be careful the next thing that people said was talking about all of the negativity from other expats and also in forums so it made me sad to think that expats that once really wanted to move to costa rica are living in costa rica right now and aren't happy but they're also negative about living there to other expats that want to move to costa rica or who just moved down and so if you confront that kind of negativity just keep it in mind that these people that are being negative probably are still living there and so they might be complaining about something but they have chosen to stay regardless sometimes it is definitely justified but there's always going to be people saying why you can't do this thing whether it's move to another country or start a business or invent something that's going to change the world so definitely keep that in mind the eighth reason is really a collection of small reasons that i have put together as one reason why people leave costa rica because i don't think it's always just one thing i think it is the accumulation and synergy of a lot of little things sprinkled in with some real big problems that causes people to leave so some of the other things that people mentioned include scams and like getting ripped off which of course could happen anywhere but one guy mentioned like he left because his lawyer stole his property i mean that could happen there's actually more properties registered in the costa rica national property registry than there are square kilometers of land available so he kind of has a point but then it also could be that amazing climate that also comes with a rainy season and a dry season there will be extreme dryness extreme heat extreme rain flooding the risk of tsunamis earthquakes hurricanes there's things like that to think about there's bugs there's dengue there's language barriers there's relationship problems there's all the other things that happen in life that can sometimes feel magnified when you are in a new environment so it really could be a combination of things it could be an invasion of bugs on a day that your car got stuck in the river in a week that you got sick with dengue and your power went out that's another thing infrastructure your internet goes out your power goes out your water goes out you're waiting in line at the bank someone tells you for the 100th time that they can't help you or someone gives you the wrong directions to get somewhere like there's really any number of things that can go wrong and sometimes it's a sequence of things that people just get fed up and they're like i'm done i'm out i've had enough and so that's understandable i've been there myself only in costa rica does it take two and a half hours to go 25 miles it can be frustrating coming from a different culture but you have to remember that you are moving to that country that country doesn't have to change for you every country has its problems every country has its pros and cons and so it becomes this decision for you if you want to adjust and adapt to that way of living or if it's too much for you and you just want to leave and that's fine too we have to get this package today we got the cell phone number of the mailman he's going to meet us here at 6pm in the parking lot of the post office because this closes at five so we're doing we're doing a you know parking lot exchange just for some contact lenses and a credit card yeah what do you think our odds are jamie i mean i think it's probably 60 percent he shows up but like thirty percent that it's at six pm right he's definitely gonna be late but i think we're gonna do it we ordered this we ordered this like a month and a half ago we'll just see what happens to be continued so i'm going to tell you why i decided to leave costa rica in just a minute but first it's important to note that even though these are a lot of the bad things that people reported about why they left costa rica there was also a big portion of people who said they didn't leave that they had been there for seven years or 11 or 17 years and that they still loved the country so for every expat that left costa rica there is probably one or two or more people that stayed and really loved it there i'm just bringing up all of these reasons that people leave so that you know what to expect and that you have more context for if you start to face this kind of stuff when you get there and so why did i choose to leave costa rica even though i continue to help people move there well that's because i still think costa rica is a great place to live and most of the reasons why i personally left had to do with me and my life it had nothing to do with costa rica really so i first moved to costa rica in 2002 and 10 years later i decided you know what i either need to buy a house and commit to living here like get permanent residency get on a path to citizenship put down roots here or i need to leave or do something else and it didn't necessarily have to be that polarized but ultimately i decided to leave because i wanted to see more of the world i had spent pretty much the entire decade of my 20s in costa rica and i just wanted to have a different experience and also the technology had advanced to the point to where i could take my business with me so when i moved to costa rica it was working in real estate but when i left costa rica it was as the owner of a remote fully distributed online relocation company where i was helping people move to 35 different countries even though i was living in costa rica so it was actually a benefit to me and a benefit to my business model to go live in other countries so that i could work more effectively there and so that i could get to know the ins and outs of living in these other countries where i was helping people relocate to so it was a combination of just kind of growing into a different phase in my life having the technology to be able to work from anywhere and wanting to travel and see the world more and there was also this day that one day i was down in dominical on a surf trip and i ran into this guy who i hadn't seen since i was 20 years old and i just had this flash and like this moment of i was here 10 years ago on this beach as a study abroad student having a really similar experience and i just felt like i wasn't growing enough and so i just really wanted to see more of the world and i would be lying if i didn't mention the safety factor as well as i mentioned i would drive around with a fake wallet in the console of my car where my house got broken into my car got broken into multiple times and so that was a concern for me as well that wasn't the reason that i left like i said it was more my personal reasons but i'm really glad that i lived in costa rica i think it is a great place for a lot of people it just depends on what you're looking for and what your goals are what phase of life you're in and since living in costa rica i've traveled all throughout europe southeast asia i went back to australia where i used to live previously but living in costa rica opened my eyes to what it would be like to live in a foreign country it's the country that i have spent the most time in other than the u.s and it was a big part of my expat journey so what do you think did any of these things surprise you why or why not let me know in the comments below give this video a thumbs up if you liked it or learned something new and click on one of these thumbnails to watch more videos that help you work online and travel the world all right mr mailman hello thank you all right this is the back end this is two months in the waiting here the moral of the story here is persistence pays off resistance pays off if we also just don't use the mail system and don't use costa rican meal that's a huge success kristen thank you so much for your help i would have obviously never been able to get this back mission accomplished let's go eat

Channel: Traveling with Kristin

Views: 1,094,345

Rating: 4.8295403 out of 5

Keywords: Costa Rica, living in Costa Rica, living abroad, moving to Costa Rica, moving abroad, americans, americans abroad, moving to Costa Rica from United States, pros and cons of living in costa rica, is Costa Rica safe, Costa Rica dangerous, real talk, why I left, retire in Costa Rica, international living, Costa Rica expat living, expat lifestyle, expats, Costa Rica expat life, life in Costa Rica, Costa Rica travel, travel costa rica, digital nomad, travel, traveling with Kristin

Id: cbGMngGx2xk

Length: 19min 20sec (1160 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 31 2021