Investments in Costa Rica?... is not that an island?...somewhere in the Caribbean?
My partner and I transferred to Costa Rica six years ago from the cold climate of Minnesota where we'd held a publishing business for 15 years. For so long as we will remember we'd labored 12 time days and used most of our time figuring out how to costa rica tours even...getting ahead was not even yet in the cards.
Then 9/11 happened. And for all of us it absolutely was an epiphany. Living was also small to invest the total amount of our lives on a treadmill that went nowhere. We accelerated our pension options by almost five years.
And around the next year we bought everything we owned and eventually found ourselves in Costa Rica (which, mind you, we had only visited after previously...and on holiday at that !).
Foolish? In retrospect, sure. To proceed to a international place wherever we knew no body, didn't know the language and our just exposure was the web? Needless to say, it was stupid.
But...we loved it, even notwithstanding the fact that life here was totally different compared to books portrayed or the net showed. We rented a tiny home about an hour outside San Jose in a residential district that has been rural, espresso place and yet still big enough to have a hospital and within 45 minutes of the main airport.
And we acquired land...and we created a house. And luckily, Rhonda had the personality to cope with the area builders, although we didn't understand much Spanish. I however remained a type A and the manana attitude went me crazy.
And much of the real house and structure business was not at all in virtually any "how to..." book that individuals actually found. And we absolutely created mistakes. But thankfully they didn't harm people TOO much financially. And we requested a lot of questions and we discovered, little by little, how the true house market performed in Costa Rica.
And we determined that people wanted to allow the others know what we had to learn the hard way. We started a property organization whose main purpose was to present homes which reflected prices that residents paid...because there's a two tier real estate industry in Costa Rica...one for "gringos" and one for Ticos (locals, as Costa Ricans call themselves).
Since there are very few rules or rules for real-estate here, our "exposure" of the market didn't produce people really popular with other property people. (remember, Costa Rica is really a VERY small country...about how big is West Virginia or Houston). Therefore our website did not exactly endear people to local brokers have been applied to receiving whatsoever prices and commissions that they believed the traffic might bear.
And slowly we started to acquire a reputation...admittedly, some was excellent, some bad...depending upon who you talked to. And we began to get publicity...unsolicited press from publications like Newsweek and Investors Organization Daily. And our business grew. And became some more.
As our organization became we began to meet more folks from Costa Rica...some important, some not... some quality, some not. And we became subjected to many more types of opportunities which were absolutely foreign to us. And we learned who actually "controls" the country and which people get a grip on investment money and have the effect to make policy. To show how much of our training was "coincidence" (and Personally, i do not rely on coincidences... I believe which they happen for a reason) our third attorney was presented to people simply used at a local collecting; "coincidentally" his partner was from Minnesota...Rhonda was then invited to a weekly gathering of "gringas", which married Ticos 35-40 years back and who have now ALL become really powerful ; e.g., Minister of Financing; Minister of Agriculture and two different former cabinet members.
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