Sarah Elena gives Great Tips on Moving to Costa Rica + How to get settled in Costa Rica once there

hey friends it's jay right thanks for coming back to the channel today we have a special guest and we're talking about moving to costa rica sarah how are you i'm doing very good today great i'm so glad that uh you decided to do this so uh i have a friend who told me first about your facebook a while ago and uh because this friend knew that uh i was going to be moving with my family to costa rica in the near future she said oh i found this uh you know this group on facebook which is yours and then i joined and uh i've you know read some posts in there and then i found your website what what came first like uh we'll get to like like you moving to costa rica and how all of that went but like what came first as far as you like wanting to help people well and i mean i tell people the business kind of started by accident so um years ago i just started a youtube channel just for fun you know i honestly didn't think anyone would ever watch it i wasn't expecting anything from it i just said oh this will just be cool i'm just going to document our lives down here and just put it out there and then you know i started getting comments and you know people showing more interest asking questions about costa rica and i just enjoyed explaining things about costa rica like you know this is what a soda is this is where you can find really amazing food or oh this is how you buy a car i'm doing this right now so i just started kind of explaining how things work down here and i noticed it was really helpful so i kept putting that out there and putting that out there and then it did come to a point where i was getting a lot of emails a lot of questions and um i got to a point where i was like huh i might be onto something here and um i started with charging for like a just like a 75 dollar one hour phone call where someone could just spitball all the questions that they had at me for an hour and um through that i gained a lot of information and insight on the what the people what the questions were and it turns out a lot of them were pretty much the same a lot of people had a lot of the same questions and from that it kind of you know that's how it turned into developing an actual relocation you know program okay so you got to costa rica you decided you wanted to help people you started with youtube and then now it's grown to it's youtube it's a website it's uh facebook of course um what do you feel uh when you say that a lot of people are asking the same kind of questions like what is what maybe the top two questions you would say that you get from people i guess a lot of people really need help narrowing down on what area is going to be a good fit for them okay because it's an entire country so maybe someone's trying to figure out what town do they want to live in in an entire country i know it's not the biggest country it's essentially the size of west virginia but but everything is very spread out so it's it is i know exactly what you're saying it's like you could you could spend the day in the capitol and like that it feels like a city and then you could spend four hours and drive to you know manuel antonio and and you feel like you're in another world it is hard to narrow down yes i would say areas and another big one ah people ask a lot about the medical care you know i think that's a normal concern hey i'm going to be moving to this country if something serious happens like what is the medical care like there right that's a pretty big question that i would get as well and what's your answer to that from your experience to set the table you this is 2022 when we're filming this you've been there since around 2015 is that right so so what has your experience been with uh healthcare there um my experience has been really good with the healthcare here i guess how we in our program we do explain the difference between the public health care system which is known as the caja and the private health care system so i'll let people know that to just to go to a private doctor here you don't need insurance for that like if you have an ear infection i think i even have a video where i talk about medical care i was like well my ears i got an ear infection might as well talk about what this happened what happens when this happens yeah um to go to a private doctor here it's like 60 out of pocket so you don't need an insurance for those types of things or to even go get a dental cleaning 60 out of pocket at a private place and i find the standards to be you know north american standard what i would expect in north american but actually i would say a lot less wait times and a lot more personable so i found the medical care here you know i've had my doctors or dentists what's app numbers um you know like i've just made appointments directly with them or one time my daughter had a fever and i texted the doctor to say hey should i bring her in yeah you know so i found it to be so much more personable um like you can actually form a relationship with your doctor like uh one of the ones that we had a new vita you'd see him out surfing you know and that was so cool you know and it was like so it's like a in a lot of these towns you know you still have that small town feel right where i feel like it's a lot more personalized and also i was pregnant you know i got pregnant a year after moving here and i gave birth i went through the caja the public health care system okay for my prenatal appointments and then i went to a private hospital for the delivery and i it overall was so inexpensive compared without insurance i think it was like two thousand five hundred dollars and i had to have a c-section and everything like okay the hospital is fantastic which hospital did you go to i went to clinic of biblica okay is that in the capitol yeah so it's in san jose i think they have another branch maybe more towards us kazoo but it's in sema is a great one too okay so we did we delivered at sema and so uh so we came down at six months pregnant uh from the states and then yeah coco gave birth at sema and to your point we had already like started building the relationship with our doctor in costa rica you know with the idea that we were coming down and same thing like you said we were on whatsapp with him from america then we get there and we could you know he was responsive all day and night not don't bother me and of course we weren't bothering him but just like general things um we weren't being pests um but it does have such a different feel and like what a welcome shift compared to uh american medicine in my opinion yeah so much more personable so i think that yes you can get great level of care here but we do have a lot of clients that are retiring but we also families people in their 30s 40s 50s maybe aren't quite towards retirement but you know you can get additional i do usually recommend like a lot of our retired clients do get additional insurance that will cover them in a private hospital if something serious comes up and yeah but i think the public also i've heard stories of i think we have one client that broke his shoulder he went and got treated at the caja hospital and he said it was phenomenal the one he went to he said he's very well taken care of he was really pleased with how they treated him yeah i feel like in america the the medicine is so politicized and when people talk about you know countries with socialized medicine or medicine for all it's always demonized somehow but you know you're just another person that's added to what our own experience has been and what i've heard from most people actually haven't i haven't heard one bad thing about the medical system there from people that are there so i mean maybe there's stories out there that i'm missing but that this is exactly what i hear it works it's not nightmares of long lines and you oh if you can't get an operation when you need i i've heard none of that and you you would agree that was your experience as well yeah i would agree i mean i think in any kind of emergency situation the public healthcare system can definitely take care of you it would be good to have like if there was a non-emergency surgery that you needed then i would want to consider going private because then yeah maybe there could be a weight or you'd have to see how long that weight could be sure but it'd probably be affordable still to go private yeah so when you uh when you're referencing and you're saying like uh i have a client that this happened with them or this happened with them so tell me more about again your clients and and how you're uh reaching out with people one of the videos that i watched um i think it was uh in fact i remember it was like from 2019 so it was a while back and at that point you were talking about like doing some mom groups and so i mean i'm sure things have evolved a lot in three years but but tell me you have a whole spectrum of like how you're taking care of people with your services okay yeah things definitely evolved big time so when i first moved down here i definitely never expected that i'd be doing this um i was sustaining myself working online um my friend was a virtual assistant and i said i'm gonna do the same thing great so i started picking up different clients and worked for different business owners or real estate agents and i've always been pretty handy with the computer but i think i learned a lot during those years and like how to run a business and what need what you need to do for it um so then the youtube channel is just a hobby you know just something that was going on i was doing the phone calls throughout all those phone calls i was able to understand a lot of the same questions that people had so then um during covid i thought that's when i came out with the relocation package so and it has really it really has evolved over time as well so because i think it's been like a program that's actually been developed by our clients so we we help people who are moving to costa rica so that was like the kind of number one requirement are you moving to costa rica sure um i saw that on the website it says take the quiz so right it's got to be one of the first questions right yeah that's to help them also uh you know decide where they want to live because if someone doesn't know where they want to live that's one of the first things we work with them so the program has really evolved over a lot of time but this is kind of this is how it works as of now uh what we're in you know end of march of 2022. i'm sure it's going to evolve more within the next year but again like i'm always tweaking it or making it better making changes that i think will be good yeah um so what we do when we work with somebody is uh we have a kickoff call and during the kickoff call i create what i call their uh their roadmap to costa rica so we look at where they're at um when are they trying to move and then what's gonna happen each month leading up to their move so we'll talk through all the major logistics of like areas their rental we do their first long-term rental search so we'll find them their first long-term rental when they move residency entry you know car purchase car rental insurance medical packing shipping bringing pets budgeting banking so we'll talk through all the major logistics and how they relate directly to them and what actions they're going to need to take sure um on that and then um we have an online portal and that's where we have webinars that like deep dive into the topic so that way the kickoff call isn't six hours long you know on their own time they can actually deep dive into those topics and then we have weekly group meetings which are super fun we have like the group meeting today we had one earlier today was super packed i just it's usually open q a but then i just kind of let the conversation flow so our clients are moving and actually we still have clients who have already moved to we'll pop into the meetings and offer their own advice and yeah share their update of what they're up to and what they're learning so that's been a really great space for everyone to get together and focus on the positivity because sometimes in the online space you see a lot of negatives you know we talk about you know positive things and happy things but also realistic challenges or other things that you might go through for the move whether it's your groups or it's just even the facebook page there are so many people like trying to help it's not like a it's not a political discourse it's like there are a lot of people in there for the right reason which is so great and uh knock on wood um somebody who i met through your group uh is actually helping us with the house that we are uh buying so i mean it's just it's so great you know that um i mean literally i mean i just found out about you you know not too long ago so i'm really excited about um our move which is coming and then i you know learn your story so again now you're in 2022 this business you're helping people you've got all these groups going and things like that do you feel in this moment that it's pretty put together like are you proud of like what you've accomplished so far definitely i think we have a good flow to things i mean i'm trying to you know hire more and delegate a bit more so right my schedule's been pretty packed i mean we go through waves where we get a huge influx of people and then it was it was a little quiet during christmas which is what i needed but no i think we have a good little system going and we figure out so i think for a person who's thinking about moving it feels like this big whirlwind of oh my gosh what do we do and when but i'm just like oh no you just do this here put that there put that there and do this done okay now see that's hilarious too right because we're looking today at 2022 but if we rewind sarah's clock to 2015 you didn't do any of that before you went to costa rica right not a darn thing i don't know if i was illegally able to work in the country i didn't do any research i got to do anything i was the worst like and and look and look how it all turned out but but tell us a little bit about that about that just diving in at the very beginning oh gosh so i did have some friends who were down here and they had a retreat center so that's how i like they i was i knew i wanted to move out of the united states so i wasn't totally sure where but i had friends and they'd just come back and they were like costa rica is amazing it's so magical you have to go and i was already really like oh i want to get out of the united states this is in january of 2014. and so like you know not even really half a year after i graduated college i was like all right i'm out of here um was this retreat center uh for ayahuasca or just like meditation or it was actually it was for ayahuasca okay so they had a retreat center and i and i was like could i just like move there and help you guys out or something and they were like yeah sure why not and i was like great sounds good so you know when i first thought about moving out of the country i said okay i'll move in 12 to 18 months but then i made it you know that september 7th was the day i moved so from like january i decided i would leave the country september i was out of there but i think june was when i was like oh it's going to be costa rica that's where i'm going i didn't have a whole lot to prepare i didn't have a whole house to downsize i had an apartment you know i put most of the things you know i gave away a lot of things and put things some some things are still in my parents basement so i try to collect it's okay your parents are still in the states obviously yeah yeah okay so so yeah i just moved and then i was at the retreat center it was really disorganized so two weeks later i was like okay i'm out of here so i just i rolled my stuff down that mountain it was like a 30 minute walk up the mountain oh wow my two suitcases and then it's like close to town and so i started living in a hostel there and then i was like well i'm gonna need some money what do i do so i started teaching english online to chinese people so i'd wake up at like 4 30 in the morning and get on my computer and uh but i think i mean i've said that it was like i made a i met a lot of amazing people so that's what really tied me that community and you know definitely there were times where i was like what am i doing i should go i gotta get out of like what am i doing here this is crazy right but i'm glad i stuck with it and then when i was pregnant i almost considered moving back to the states having the fear of like oh my god how am i going to raise a kid here what am i going to do but then again it was just that sense of community and i was like i just want the power to create my life and my own path forward and if i go back to united states i felt like i would just get stuck in what i didn't want to be in excellent point what would you say to people that might be have that fear of i don't know people there i i you know i for whatever reasons per i want a new start i don't want to be in america anymore or you know but but i don't know anyone in costa rica i'm gonna be all alone or how did you like overcome that well i mean honestly i think it's hard to come here and not make friends so you said you were here right like do you realize how friendly everyone is absolutely freaking and the other like expats who live here like it is really hard to know my time from first visit to falling in love with costa rica to moving is a little more elongated than yours but yes i am with you on that like it's so hard like so we in our group meeting today uh some of our clients are down on their scouting trip right now but they are moving yes and they said that they have they have this woman who's coming to cook for them but then they went over to her house and they met her daughter and now they're all going over to their house for a cookout and their chico their costa rican and they said to them like you know when you are our friend you are a friend for life you know like it is really they are so genuine like the costa ricans are so genuine um so kind and they they really can become true friends but also there's a great expat community too you know yes that's true and i think um i've met a lot of i've been able to very easily connect with people down here just as small i mean i agree with you completely i you know um i've met a lot of people there from tours or you know hospitality or just you know in many visits even when um when we went down and uh when coco was pregnant and we had like you know three months before we delivered we were moving around the country a little bit still working you know on computer back to america but in la fortuna one of our absolute favorite places is amore arenal and when you said that people say like like no you are you know or you are with us for life right like literally we still run into people from the hotel in la fortuna by the church or in a cafe or something like that and they're like please come stop by your family you know like and not even from a business perspective of saying come give us money no it's just like there you really the country is wonderful in that regard i've had that experience and completely agree with you as well yeah very genuine so yeah for someone maybe scared to think so i won't come and know anyone i mean well just go out and start talking to people but if you're shy there are some nice expat groups you know like i have seen for women there's the there's like a single expat ladies group um there's there's some extra groups and i've seen people say hey i'm gonna be coming down a or you know i'd like to meet up with somebody in the area and other people have volunteered oh i'll meet with you for coffee you know so that would also be a start if you really do want to meet someone or maybe talk start talking to somebody before you arrive yeah that you might feel comfortable with that's possible too right what so when people uh uh find you um what do you think is um what do you think is a common mistake people might make in contemplating costa rica or even when they do end up moving there i mean i think the biggest mistakes that you can make are i think the biggest mistakes that people say that they've made is whenever money's involved to be honest so i think a big mistake someone could make could be real like real estate dealing maybe a car purchase yeah other than that i mean i think most mistakes can be fixed you know can easily be i don't know but don't you ever feel like when someone's talking about a big mistake they made it usually has to involve money so i mean i think you're right i mean i was just curious to get a flavor of like what the people you've run into have said because i think in one of your videos you also said uh like one of your biggest mistakes of just diving in and going there was that you didn't research enough obviously if they're getting in touch with you see i can't remember everything i've said on youtube either it's okay okay that does remind me so i think one mistake i do get some people who email and say can i find um what job opportunities are there so i think yeah someone hasn't done some very basic research to understand like i didn't to understand that no you cannot legally work in the country unless you're a permanent resident right maybe i think a mistake could be not thinking about the residency options for the future like what if you really do come and fall in love with being in costa rica and border runs they're not they're not guaranteed who knows don't have to be guaranteed or that's you know for someone who doesn't know what that is that's if you were not to file a residency status you would leave the country and come back in every 90 days and be a perpetual tourist right so that's something i didn't think about when i first moved and that got even weird for people who were okay with that so there are people that aren't interested in like being on permanent record and they do the border runs but it got weird during covet because then some people didn't want to do the border runs and then have to agree with the country's you know vaccination or visiting status which so that was kind of odd as well granted i mean for for us personally like we are you know going the permanent uh residency route um as you know growing a family down there i didn't want to be dealing with border runs personally but some people it could be okay you know for them but so i would say like also so knowing where your income's gonna come from is an important thing i understand like some people are retired they have their pension so i guess knowing your budget like what is your actual cost of living gonna be and i see those questions a lot online what is the cost of living for costa rica it's just such a huge broad question budgeting worksheet where we'll actually work through and i let people know okay your rent is going to be your most expensive if you do get private health insurance that'll be one of the more high dollar items food but you know actually actually getting those quotes for those expenses you know before so then you know that either well is your pension going to cover your the lifestyle that you want in costa rica and depending on where you want to be and knowing or if you don't have a pension like knowing where is your income coming from and making sure that you have a stable income set up before you arrive right and do that again so like these none of these things i did things that i did would have been helpful if i had thought about it right but it didn't but none of it went south i mean there you didn't hit like a brick wall it's not a disaster obviously you've done very well no it was fine but i was also you know 23 years old and then i did get pregnant a year after but at the time i was like whatever i'm happy under a rock you know now it's different now i have a daughter i've built a life i'm more established yeah so i think if there's someone who is a more staff you know at a more established age then yeah making sure that you know where your income is coming from and you do have a good realistic of what the cost of living is in the area that you want to be yeah because you sustain yourself the rest can be figured out you know so true so true uh yeah it's interesting because yeah for even for me in the states it's like it's been my career for years to be the person that buttons everything up to the t and then in going to costa rica i leave things unbuttoned you know i mean there is a plan you know in the big picture of moving to another country but even like people thought we were crazy to go to costa rica to have our baby and i said no we know exactly what we're doing like it's a great medical system like it we had such a wonderful experience and etc etc but you're like you know um in some ways i i actually kind of think it's cool that there are a lot of people that don't understand it or don't agree with it because i'm like well that's fine don't go don't go to costa rica leave it leave it for everybody else right exactly but i do hear of a lot of people saying exactly what you said my family thinks i'm crazy or everyone around me thinks i'm crazy so that's why i guess i like having the weekly meetings too because then it's like you know we can all talk to each other about you know the people that don't think don't think we're crazy right absolutely sarah uh i have so many more questions but i think this was like a great starter i really appreciate you making time um uh let's show everybody too uh where they can get in touch with you so we've got the website we've got the facebook we've got the youtube anything else you want to uh to tell our people um i got the website lost carolina.com um and they on there someone can just book a book a call with me if they'd like you know just it's just the purpose of that call is for me to understand them get to know them i'll take some notes and some logistics if i think i can help i will definitely let them know what that process looks like but if not you know i do make sure to send helpful resources to get somebody started on their own path um so we have the relocation package we have a scouting trip package that's for somebody who's thinking about coming down maybe they're not you know they want to go check out different areas so that kind of came out of demand from clients too i didn't just think of it someone said hey do you help plan these ex these trips and i was like well no but i could so there's that and then yeah there's youtube channel lots of free resources on there um the facebook the moving to costa rica facebook group and then i did start a long term rentals database recently it's called long term rental cr.com so we're uploading long-term rental listings that we've added we've added the owners the locations the homes and that's been good because that's been a need for people too that i've seen people struggle with is finding a long-term rental yeah it is odd because if you're from america uh you're used to the mls you know where every house in the entire country you know is pretty much on record down there it does not exist you're dealing with websites street signs word of mouth yes exactly i'm sure that's a helpful service as well so thank you for having me no thank you so much i really appreciate your time and i know there's going to be more that that comes up but in the meantime best wishes with all your endeavors taking care of people really appreciate it thank you so much have a great day all right you too take care bye well there's just so much great information there from sarah you've got all the ways to contact her uh and you can also contact me for questions about costa rica we've had lots of visits and uh we absolutely are moving our life to be in that country as well it's jri world right here on instagram on youtube thank you so much for following the channel thank you so much for supporting our journey as a family and remember the channel is in many different places now there's jri world there's jright world disney there's jri world music there's jright world costa rica watch all the channels don't be left out we'll see you next time bye

Channel: Jay Ry World Costa Rica

Views: 7,293

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Id: CPd9bXDzVTw

Length: 26min 35sec (1595 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 05 2022