My wife and I transferred to Costa Rica six years back from the freezing climate of Minnesota wherever we had held a publishing company for 15 years. For provided that we're able to recall we had worked 12 hour days and spent nearly all of our time determining how to keep even...getting forward wasn't even yet in the cards.
Then 9/11 happened. And for all of us it was an costa rica tours. Living was also short to spend the total amount of our lives on a treadmill that gone nowhere. We accelerated our retirement ideas by almost twenty years.
And over the following year we distributed every thing we owned and eventually found ourselves in Costa Rica (which, actually, we had just visited once previously...and on vacation at that !).
Foolish? In retrospect, sure. To move to a international state wherever we knew no one, did not know the language and our just publicity was the internet? Obviously, it had been stupid.
But...we loved it, even notwithstanding the fact that life here was different compared to publications represented or the web showed. We rented a small house about an hour or so outside of San Jose in a residential area which was rural, espresso state and though large enough to truly have a hospital and within 45 moments of the key airport.
And we acquired land...and we built a house. And luckily, Rhonda had the character to cope with the local contractors, although we didn't understand significantly Spanish. I however stayed a form A and the manana attitude went me crazy.
And much of the real property and construction organization was not really in just about any "how to..." book that individuals ever found. And we absolutely built mistakes. But thankfully they did not harm us TOO much financially. And we requested a lot of issues and we realized, little by little, how the real estate industry worked in Costa Rica.
And we determined that people wished to let others know the things that we'd to understand the hard way. We started a real-estate organization whose only goal was to provide properties which reflected prices that natives paid...because there's a two level real-estate market in Costa Rica...one for "gringos" and one for Ticos (locals, as Costa Ricans call themselves).
Since there are very few rules or regulations for real estate here, our "publicity" of industry did not produce us very popular with other property people. (remember, Costa Rica is a VERY small country...about the size of West Virginia or Houston). Therefore our internet site didn't just endear us to local agents who have been applied to receiving whatever rates and commissions which they believed the traffic might bear.
And gradually we started to get a reputation...admittedly, some was good, some bad...depending upon who you talked to. And we started to get publicity...unsolicited promotion from magazines like Newsweek and Investors Business Daily. And our business grew. And became some more.
As our business grew we began to meet more people from Costa Rica...some significant, some not... some quality, some not. And we turned exposed to many more kinds of opportunities which were entirely foreign to us. And we learned who really "controls" the united states and which people get a grip on investment capital and have the impact to produce policy. To illustrate how much of our education was "coincidence" (and Personally, i do not believe in coincidences... I think they happen for a reason) our third attorney was introduced to people just used at an area collecting; "coincidentally" his wife was from Minnesota...Rhonda was then asked to a regular gathering of "gringas", that married Ticos 35-40 years ago and who have today ALL become very powerful ; e.g., Minister of Money; Minister of Agriculture and two different former case members.
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