Why I left Costa Rica? (The Good, Bad & Ugly)

welcome back everyone I have lived in a variety of different countries around the world on different continents different cultures Etc and clearly you know I've gradually left a bunch of those places and one of the things I think is one of the most interesting pieces of information to consider when looking at where you might like to move is who stays in certain places so I mentioned before that for instance I've had many clients who moved to Panama and on the surface there seemed to be a lot of great things about Panama but very very few people end up staying there long term and I tend to view where people stay as a sort of massive data aggregation and compression algorithm meaning it Aggregates all the people's experiences into one really high value data point to tell you whether it's an interesting place now the reality is places are available for all different people in different shapes and sizes but today I'm going to talk to you about one of the places that I lived for a period of time and why I left there and that is Costa Rica so I will talk to a bit about what Costa Rica was like when I was there a little bit about how it has changed some of the things that you should be aware of if you're going to move there and the types of people who it might work for so let's dive in before we do if you haven't already thank you for being here please hit the Subscribe button hit the little notification Bell really appreciate your support please go check out some of our other videos if you have interest in the subjects that we deal with here which are helping you to relocate to other countries figuring out the best residency permits the best citizenships to get how to optimize your business how to optimize your life your tax your freedom your banking Etc all the global revocation and business strategies please reach out to us you can book a call with me calendly.com forward slash Michael Dash oh or you can send a message through offshorescitizen.net so Costa Rica I think coming from Canada it was a warm Tropical Paradise to some extent I'd obviously heard about it once before I'd had friends who had visited for quite a period of time in fact I ended up going down there specifically because I had some friends who had moved down there and so I figured great time to go and visit some people you know there check out the country and so that's what I did and certainly there are some great things to love about Costa Rica such as the weather so coming from Canada I relocated to down I guess at first I was just visiting during the winter but then I ended up living for three Winters down there and cool great I mean hard to argue with the weather except for the rainy season of course but during the general uh kind of winter fall or winter spring period I guess it is I would say there's very few places on Earth that have better weather just really really extraordinary weather on top of that one of the things you might love is the ecotourism the jungles great it has probably the most wildlife in Latin America and sorry Central America and so that's really cool you can see all kinds of monkeys snakes if that's good for you or maybe that's bad for you I remember being out on the coast one time and we were walking out behind the place we were staying somebody was like yeah you know it'd be cautious about walking in here there could be snakes and so you know that's that's another you see scorpions you see all kinds of birds you can see all different types of Wildlife and so that's really cool there is great surfing there and so that was actually one of the first places that I attempted to Surf failure complete failure but that being said good experience uh the ocean can be night or I guess well your Pacific Ocean or the Caribbean can be nice and warm so it can be great for kind of swimming and engaging in water sports that's excellent and you know then the people I find tend to be pretty uh pretty nice so the question then becomes well if there's all those good things why leave and I would say that for me it came down principally to a combination of two things that you might summarize by saying Costa Rica is a third world country with First World prices Costa Rica is not a cheap place now if you're hiring staff yes staff are relatively inexpensive but when you're talking about you would go to a store to buy clothing more expensive groceries often more expensive depending uh Vehicles had really high import duties so we had some Vehicles we brought down from other places there imported and very expensive so that wasn't so good it was just in general a pretty expensive place to live for what you got so I'm not saying it was expensive compared to Switzerland or Australia or something like that that would be kind of outrageous but for what you're getting you really are getting sort of second slash third world living there is not a wide range of conveniences the same way that you might get in the U.S or Canada or Australia or a lot of parts of Europe where you can go on Amazon and easily order everything and have access to it yeah there's different systems you can use like we had a Miami address and things could get shipped to the Miami address then from there forwarded down to Costa Rica but just in general this was a fairly significant issue that just decreased the quality of life I would say like I'm a convenience this guy now everybody has their own preferences some people for them it might be the best thing in the world to run through the jungle Barefoot or something like that and certainly if I'm just going exploring I can enjoy going out to a waterfall and going under it and feeling it like a shower is kind of one of the first places that I had that experience was in Costa Rica it was kind of an iconic cool thing to do you know there's lots of those things that are great but for my day-to-day living I want my life to be fairly friction free and so Costa Rica just doesn't offer that plethora of conveniences and things that work really well really easily it takes a lot more just more friction in order to engage and this is you know we had at one point in time I think six house staff so we're talking about we had security we had drivers we had Cooks we had Maids like you know we had a fairly optimized life as you could do it in Costa Rica right you're not talking about just saying okay I'm going nowhere now we were based in San Jose in all three of those years that I was there San Jose is not a great City like I don't hear anybody who's like San Jose my favorite city in the world no nobody says this it's really not that great of a city we had different places that we lived in I'll talk in a second about that and how that affected the quality of infrastructure Etc but in general this was something that uh it just isn't top-notch I think for me the times that I most enjoyed Costa Rica were times when we went to the coast when we were in on the beach you know you go to Puerto Viejo where you go to Manuel Antonio or you go to Flamingo or you go to you know all these different areas that you can go and explore and check out and there's many of them but for cities I just don't really recommend it uh the driving they have these terrifying drops you can drive along these roads and it's basically basically when it rains they're kind of controlling the water and so it actually works quite well in that regard but you have these big drop-offs I remember we drove out to the coast one time and we're literally driving along this I don't know what is I guess a highway whatever you want to call it and we come to this point where there's just like a shallow River that's going through the highway and so you know we kind of made a joke of it I have some video of a person pulling around the corner turning on the signal lights and driving through as though nothing's going on that's fun right but on the other hand it's not really it's what I want when I want to go on some sort of a tropical Adventure not necessarily what I want in my day-to-day life and this brings me to the subject of infrastructure so unsurprisingly I'm in a position where we do lots of work remotely with people and so I do a lot of the business that I do for all my companies is on the phone over Zoom at the time we weren't using Zoom it was kind of precursor to zoom but we were trying to use VoIP of many different types we were trying to go and have calls with people we would obviously be doing things on the computer Etc I remember for a period of time when we lived sort of so San Jose is in a valley and we were in a reasonably nice house on the hill overlooking the valley which is you know kind of cool but it meant that basically once a week the power went out and once a month the water went out be like you woke up once a month or so and you're like okay you know the way to shower today is to rub soap all over yourself and jump into the pool which is you know maybe kind of I don't know cute or something like that but just not what I really want day to day and it was really disruptive to have either poor quality like the internet signal was just not that good and as a result if we're trying to do VoIP calls Etc you'd have interbend signal and then if the power goes out and you have a scheduled call and all of a sudden you can't do the call that doesn't look professional you know there's like friction like that that I just thought was tiresome and annoying and then when I stacked on you know I'd go to the grocery store and I was really into having different smoothies at the time so I wanted to go and get all these different types of fruits to make my smoothies and they just didn't have some of the things that I wanted in fact there was relatively poor selection of say frozen fruits now yeah you get some local things but in general I found a lot of the food there are some quite good places to have food and I had some quite good meals but I would say the quality of the food broadly was like so there's a lot of it was easy to find places that weren't very good let's put it that way and I found for some reason it was like people thought that boiling chicken and having it with rice was a good idea with no sense of spices and we I remember trying to train people to cook in a way that was different it was just frustrating and that kind of adds to the next part which is there was a lot of friction due to language now I was fortunately or unfortunately so I don't speak Spanish I was surrounded by people who did and so they could communicate for me so my process was basically to have somebody else arrange things or to talk to them or whatever and you would try and work through things talking to people in cases where uh you know they didn't speak English and you didn't speak Spanish and you know you try and communicate as best you can and that's fine that's I mean it's just normal friction and if I decided that was like my forever place I for sure would have gone and learned Spanish and integrated and all that sort of thing but I just didn't like it enough to be willing to put in that level of commitment to be fair the internet has improved a lot in Costa Rica since then so I certainly know much people who live there and have pretty good setups that are organized in high speed Etc there was some weird nuances in terms of bureaucracy like to this day if you try to get a residency permit there it is quite difficult Unfortunately they have the digital Nomad Visa they're bringing in so okay that makes things a little bit easier we're talking about like two years to apply to get residency pretty pretty lengthy process you would find that banking if you started doing any volume of business it became challenging so that was kind of a downside it wasn't easy for foreigners to be able to open bank accounts that kind of had its own set of consequences Etc so yeah these were some of the things I think if I look at just the concept of third world country with First World prices makes it tough for somebody with my particular set of preferences and again I don't want to project on anybody else their preferences because some people go there and they love it right perfectly good for those people for me not exactly what I'm looking for usually I would rather go to Southeast Asia where you know maybe you have some grit on the life but on the other hand you also have low cost of living and you know there's kind of some trade-offs there that I would personally prefer I like to go there and visit I like to take other people there and go into around I brought my parents down at one point in time and we toured around and that was really fun we had some fun little road trips to different parts of the country great memories great times but for me to live there no not uh not not to my taste so I would love to hear from you guys what do you think would you live in some place like Costa Rica have you been there what do you think about it have you tried living there what do you think about living there and I will look forward to seeing your comments below we can check and kind of have discussion and hopefully invite people on some other perspectives aside from just buying because it is deeply personal and go and check out some of our other videos comparing different parts of the world to visit and I will see you on the next video

Channel: Offshore Citizen

Views: 88,443

Keywords: Costa Rica, Costa Rica residency, move to Costa Rica, why I left Costa Rica, San Jose, life in Costa Rica, Central America, Tax havens, Panama, Mexico, Residency, second residency, Canada, Canadian in Costa Rica

Id: EWdqEQmxUo8

Length: 12min 41sec (761 seconds)

Published: Mon May 22 2023