Category: Costa Rica Blogs by Expats

Premium Costa Rica Home Purchase Advice by BuyerArtboard 2

Premium Costa Rica Home Purchase Advice by Buyer

Estimated Reading Time: 6 Minutes I have some home purchase advice that I’m sure you’ll like. My wife and I learned a lot when we bought our home in Costa Rica, and I’d like to share this advice with you. I am TicoNuevo and moved to Costa Rica in 2013. This is one of the…

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Checkin’ Out Costa Rica on Suicide Showers and other things to avoid

Estimated Reading Time: 5 Minutes Suicide Showers, Surfer Hotels, and Other Things to Avoid on Your First Trip to Costa Rica. Unless you want to go native and adapt to your new home country. In this blog, I’m trying to cover things you may not hear or read before you visit Costa Rica for the…

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Checkin’ Out Costa Rica | Getting Around

Estimated Reading Time: 7 Minutes Getting around this relatively small nation is pretty straightforward, but you should know a few things. Costa Rica has more than its share of national parks, outdoor activities, beaches, wildlife, laidback lifestyles, and many cultural activities. You should be aware that driving times and speed limits are slower than you…

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A Former Expat about Life in Costa Rica in the 90’s

Estimated Reading Time: 6 Minutes I have thought about writing to you to say how much our life in Costa Rica meant to us. First of all, I want to tell you about another special experience we had there.  When we moved down to Costa Rica, I purchased two Isuzu Troopers to take with us. …

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Strange habits – Stories by a Former Expat in Costa Rica

Estimated Reading Time: 5 Minutes In Costa Rica, people have sometimes strange habits. They do a lot of things differently.  When people ask me about Costa Rica, I talk all day, especially about strange habits. I just thought about a few more interesting things about living there and the house. We always thought the home…

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Articles about Costa Rica – A Writing Gig during Corona Virus?

Estimated Reading Time: 6 Minutes   The Covid-19 outbreak obliges some of us to re-invent ourselves and writing articles can be an option. Do you enjoy writing and do you have lots of interesting information about Costa Rica to share with others? Maybe this is the time to get started. Why? Link building is an…

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10 Most Read Live in Costa Rica blogs 2019

It’s amazing how many people have enjoyed our bi-weekly Live in Costa Rica blogs 2019. What’s even more important is that blogs written 6 years ago get so much attention. Imagine that #10 was written in 2012. The #1 blog even had 32 views per day during 2019! I still enjoy writing Ivo’s blog and…

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6 More tips to turn your home into a successful vacation rental

I published the first 3 tips on how to turn your Costa Rica house into a successful vacation rental last week. My wife and I purchased a house in Costa Rica before we were ready to retire. Now we are trying to cover the cost of the maintenance of the property by renting the property…

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3 Tips to Turn your house into a successful vacation rental

In this blog, and another one next week, I will provide some tips to turn your house into a successful vacation rental. These tips may assist you to increase your success rate if your intent is to purchase a property to rent out part or all of the time. This is based on my own…

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Free Que Pasa Website Serving Grecia and Sarchi Communities

Estimated Reading Time: 3 Minutes Que Pasa, the free-membership Grecia & Sarchi community information website started in 2014. This incredibly informative website serves the English-speaking residents and ex-pats who plan to live in Grecia and Sarchi. Debi Gedling, former Que Pasa editor, and co-founder said: “We felt that as a no-cost community information website serving…

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Renting our Home as a Costa Rica Vacation Rental Property

We decided to use our home as a Costa Rica vacation rental property. It has been some time since I reported on my experience with buying property in Costa Rica and living there. I thought it would be useful to give you an update. My wife and I are not yet at the point of…

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Pablo’s decision making process to purchase Atenas property

Estimated Reading Time: 7 Minutes I’d like to tell you about the decision making process before we purchased an Atenas property. Walt Disney said that “dreams really do come true.”  Now we believe it – or at least we are starting to. Ten years ago, Katya and I first visited Costa Rica.  We stayed on…

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Why is MacGyvering a must in Costa Rica?

Estimated Reading Time: 7 Minutes Why must MacGyvering be used in Costa Rica quite often? In this blog, I’d like to recount an experience I had recently that is indicative of the way you’ll find product availability in this country. Learn more about MacGyver in Costa Rica now. My story is about buying lumber. It…

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How to obtain your Costa Rican drivers license

Estimated Driving Time: 6 Minutes Did you know that you need a Costa Rican drivers license when you have been in the country for more than 3 months? Nearly all obstacles to our residency in Costa Rica are in the rear-view mirror except for the matter of getting our Costa Rican drivers license. If you…

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Low cost skilled labor makes it affordable in Costa Rica

Pretty much every inexpensive good or service mentioned in this blog is a result of low-cost labor. In the States, we always wished that we could afford a housekeeper. We just never could find a way to fit it into our budget, even if only twice a month. We are now retired in Costa Rica…

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Used and New Clothing Shopping in Costa Rica

Estimated Reading Time: 4 Minutes   In this blog, I will cover used and new clothing shopping as well as leather. When clothing shopping, you’ll learn that some of those are inexpensive comparing Costa Rica and North America. Costa Rica has quite a low labor cost. The result is inexpensive goods and services. Many more…

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