Costa Rica as a place to move to?

[magicHandPuppet]

Hey everyone!

My kung fu instructor informed us that he is taking steps to by a farm in Costa Rica with 70 acres of mountain rain forest.  He is about ready to get out of this country.  I have just watched a video he has taken of the place, and it is magnificent.  He is offering "home sites" on the farm with open access to plant the fruits and vegetables I want, and the price seems right.  I have never been to Costa Rica but I have only heard good things about it.  As a place to have ready for when SHTF, what are your thoughts?

thanks,
-magic

[offdalip]

Watch out for the poison snakes?!?

[Atash Hagmahani]

Costa Rica is popular with ex-pats. Precisely because of that, it is not particularly cheap. The locals are called Ticos. They seem to be more tolerant of foreigners than in some Central American countries. It has some predatory crime but is not as bad as Mexico or Guatamala.

There are a few issues. One is that it is a tiny country, that gives you your choice of living near an active volcano in a major fault zone, or living on the torrid coast.

Like much of Latin America, it is highly-regulated. I don't know if this is absolutely current news, but for example if you want to hire a maid, you can't just negotiate with a local and pay her directly; you have to go to a government office, fill out the paperwork, and pay them. Her pay and hours are regulated.

One of my concerns is that a lot of foreigners who open businesses there are tourism-oriented. There seems to be far too much overcapacity worldwide for tourism. People used to joke about Americans flipping each other's hamburgers; I wonder how many people can run resorts worldwide.

[Mike]

An El Salvadoran friend's opinion is that El Salvador is better than Mexico because one can plant two crops per year.  And if one buys remote land without road or electricity it is quite cheap. 

There are gangs, but only in the big cities.

Unemployment in the countryside is high.  There has been an exodus for the cities and the US.

'Costa Rica' has been the American Expatriate story for so long that I don't think it has as much opportunity as similar places without the story.  My El Salvadoran friend, Martin, likes Costa Ricans and believes the country has good laws.  He also likes the current El Salvadoran government.

Martin critiques Belize as "Too much rain.  And more mosquitoes than El Salvador."

I like high risk / high reward.  So Paraguay is most interesting.  Then Peru, El Salvador, Belize, Panama, Costa Rica, ???, in that order.
http://www.isteve.com/2002_de_Soto_plan_for_poor.htm

Hernando De Soto is the Peruvian economist who believes that,

the Third World poor tend to possess de facto control over surprisingly large amounts of assets, such as houses, land, and small businesses. Yet, they find it difficult to use their possessions as collateral to borrow money to invest in starting small businesses.

Why? The poor generally lack the airtight legal titles to their holdings that would give lenders the confidence that they could foreclose on the property if they weren't paid back. In most of the countries that de Soto has studied, registering a property or business can take over a year of full-time work, unless one can afford a well-connected law firm.

An intense yet genial gentleman with Old World manners, de Soto held court the day after being one of the keynote panelists at the Milken Institute conference.

"If you ask Peruvians whether the fact that they own a $20,000 or $30,000 house can help them toward liquidity, they'll tell you it doesn't, because they can't leverage it," de Soto said. "And leverage -- obtaining mortgages, issuing shares, issuing bonds -- is essentially a legal tool, but if you don't have a legal home or business, you can't do it."

De Soto, head of Lima's Institute for Liberty & Democracy, estimates that only about one of every eight countries in the world has the kind of secure and straightforward system of defining legal rights to property that Americans take for granted.

De Soto's perspective doesn't fit into standard American ideological categories. He has devoted the past two decades to helping the poor, but he does it by advocating the libertarian-sounding vehicles of property rights and entrepreneurialism.
...
Yet, de Soto only claims successes so far in two countries, Peru and El Salvador, and only partially. Perhaps tellingly, both Peru and El Salvador were wracked in the '80s by civil wars with Marxist guerillas, which may explain why leaders were more willing to shake up their traditional arrangements to benefit the poor.

[Mike]

Comment: The following refined my understanding of DeSoto
http://www.999ideas.com/united-states-wealth.html

United States Wealth

The Secret To The Wealth Of The U.S?

Most people probably think the wealth of the United States, and the strong and growing economy here is due to having free markets. There is some truth in this. However, many other countries have tried free markets and had much less success. Why?

Don't ask a U.S. economist for the answer. In my reading, I have found that few of them can give you any clear answers when it comes to capitalist ideas in practice. You have to look south for that, because the cutting edge research on capitalism is now being done at the Institute for Liberty and Democracy (ILD), located in Lima, Peru.

Peruvian economist and writer Hernando de Soto and his group have traveled the world, looking for the answers as to why free markets work so well for the United States and not for many other countries. One result of that research is De Soto's recent book, The Mystery Of Capital.

His research is deep and the findings are not easy to explain in a few paragraphs, so I will only drop hints here. I highly recommend that anyone who wants to understand what makes this country tick, read this book. The primary difference that is being found over and over, is that most other countries don't have established property law that is as conducive to wealth creation. This, and not free markets, is the crucial distinction.

An example: Did you know that most entrepreneurial activity in this country is financed in part from home equity, either directly or indirectly? Indirectly would be with credit cards, for example, that are rolled into a home mortgage consolidation loan.

This doesn't happen in many other countries. Why? Because of laws that make it hard for a person to lose their property. Yes, you read that right. The ease with which we can be separated from our property here is an economic strength.

If it is easy for a bank to take your house when you don't pay on your mortgage loan, they are willing to make the loan. Titles are much clearer here too. In my wife's native Ecuador, by comparison, titles are not quite as clear yet, and you can try to give your house to a person in your will, only to have your son sue for possession by virtue of familial rights. Would you want to get involved in lending on property if you were never sure you could take your collateral?

In many countries it is very difficult to sell property outside of your family. It is even difficult to get a title in many cases, and you own the property only by virtue of living on it and possessing it. You can never tap into the equity there for business purposes.

In the U.S., by comparison, you can almost always get clear title and do anything you want with your property, including letting the bank take it if you don't pay on your loan.

Easy assignment of property, and our well developed and defended property rights in other areas (patents, trademarks, copyrights, airwaves, mineral rights, etc.) are the crucial elements to our economic success. It isn't just being able to sell things freely that has caused the United State's Wealth.

[opsec]

Stay on the west coast. I have a friend that spends about 3 months out of every year there. He says that the east coast is where all the drug smuggling routes are.

[The Future]

Re: property rights, "past performance is not neccesarily indicative of future results"

[Beeherder]

In May 1997 three of us visited the eastern shore town of Cahuita, my impression was that the country was basicly a gang run drug runners and ex-pat paradise. Not just USA ex-pats but Canadian and Eastern European as well. The tourist town was an absolute dictatorship run by the local drug lord. on the last night of our visit we had dinner with a Canadian ex-pat who was showing us her picture scrapbook. When eye noiticed a face that had not been seen in the one week in this little town and asked who this person was she said: "He was the old "mayor" who used to be their pot connection but two years earlier (or was it three?) a challenger appeared and became the new mayor. Seems that cocaine was the new drug of choice. I asked what had happened and she said he lost the duel. What says eye, you mean a pistol duel? No she says, a machete duel and he was cut in half by the angled blow to the shoulder/neck. Nearly all the ex-pats had very serious cocaine problems or still had outstanding warrants back home. We also made car trips down the coast toward and probably into Panama. Teenagers with full auto weapons demanding we stop to be searched. Yikes!! I think that was the Panama border, we were looking for diving opportunities but found none because it was two weeks after the storm season stirred up the ocean and visibility dropped to less than 10 feet. Not a good environment for initial DAN certification. My impression was that everything on the east coast is run by the gangs of Limon. You better be connected and pay the vig if you want to live on the east side of that volcano. All businesses and homes in the capital city were gated, iron clad barred windows and doors, all signs of a real "wild west" environment. If you look like a south american this could be a good place. Look like a gringo and you better be well heeled and well connected. Had a talk with a mechanic that said he could not complete overhauls because the parts were stolen as soon as they came out of the engine and before he could put it back together. Theft is a way of life for the idigenous peoples.

Caveat Emptor baby!! Visit, drive around, meet some locals before you purchase anything!! What is gun ownership and access like for "foriegners"?

[magicHandPuppet]

I've been out of touch a while but I hope everyone here is well and going to enjoy their holidays!

I am planning a second trip to CR to spend more time there are understand a little more of what the day to day life will be like if I dive into a situation there.  A very good friend of mine bought some acreage in a rain forest about an hour drive to the ocean on the west coast.  My friend is a surfer and the coast nearby is a desirable surfing destination.

The price to buy a home site isn't cheap.  But, it isn't extreme either.  The pros are that it will be in a community of like-minded friends who want a retreat there for surfing trips and eventual retirement.  There will be "common" land allocated for fruit trees and gardens to be managed and enjoyed by all.  There will be six home sites.  Each person is responsible for their own structures.  The site is a 30 minute walk to one of the biggest water falls in the country, and is extremely secluded.

There are plenty of cons.  The biggest is how remote the land it.  This may be desirable when SHTF... but, right now it is just way out and secluded, albeit a beautiful paradise of sorts.

My last trip down I spent a few days with an expat friend of mine that lives outside of San Jose (the capital city).  His house was in a gated community that had two armed guards at the community entrance.  His house has a tall wall around it and the pool in the back yard.  There was an electric gate for access to his driveway.  All of the windows and doors had heavy bars.  He seemed really happy and loved the CR lifestyle, but he commented often on the problems the country had with "crack heads everywhere these days".

When I was in the south west region, it was a totally different vibe.  I did find myself in two different shady spots - one was a surfer party town on the beach and the other was a city.  But, overall, everything in that region seemed very relaxed and laid back.  We did get stopped by some kind of army checkpoint which seemed to be there to intercept or deter drugs coming into CR from Panama.

We didn't have our passports with us (back in the hotel  ) so they yelled at us and lectured us in Spanish but finally let us go after about 10 minutes of what sounded like insults.  They didn't search the car but they did look around through the windows.  We were clearly tourists.  We drove by the same checkpoint three more times and just kept driving upon them recognizing us with annoyed expressions on their faces.  After the first scare, we ended up laughing many times about what had happened.

I hadn't done enough research before going done there the first time, so my biggest shocks were:

1) The prices of everything in tourist restaurants and hotels and such were basically the same as in the US.  It wasn't the haven of cheap prices I thought it would be.  There is not "living like a king" unless you already do here in the US.  But, roadside markets were awesome and very cheap for fresh and local produce.

2) The westernization of the burbs surrounding San Jose had taken complete effect.  Many of the roads looked a lot like roads in the US or any European city.  Citigroup was a big employer there, and I met a few Americans who worked for them.  My friend that lives in that area is well connected and we ate at fancy restaurants and went to fancy nightclubs that were just as nice and pricey as anything near where I live.

3) I saw lots of extremely poor people (who still looked happy) and a lot of extremely rich people (near San Jose).  I spent time with both, and the difference of their lifestyles was remarkable.

Anyhow, as I prepare for my next trip I am going to try to learn more about what will be entailed in having a house built on a home site.  Big projects like that are not something I have done or really wanted.  However, if I go with the invitation I have received, that would be required.  While I was there I did here that sometimes it's not realistic to expect people to show up to work everyday.  I don't know how much truth there is to that, but I will try to explore the issue more when I return.

[offdalip]

Caveat Emptor baby!! Visit, drive around, meet some locals before you purchase anything!! What is gun ownership and access like for "foriegners"?

I can only say that apparently in the 70's when I was a 7 y/o kid and lived in Costa Rica for a little bit that foreigners had access and could own guns. I know cause I found my dad's semi-auto in the dresser...............
won't say what happened next

The site is a 30 minute walk to one of the biggest water falls in the country, and is extremely secluded.

Is that close to "Rio Frio" in the NW area?

that is an awesome ranch and farm country area in the highlands.

yeah, stay on the west coast if you mustgo to CR. Prices are the same,,, except that medical treatment is much much much cheaper,,,, 25% what it costs here

[Beeherder]

Nice to see you around the cracker barrel again MHP. Please tell us about your visit this time and how your changed perspective may have/or not given you a better idea of what it would be like to actually live there full time?

Enjoy the tropical sunshine and heat!