By Sidney Shank

With a growing number of people relocating to Costa Rica and many waiting to do so, a number of forums have sprouted up on the Internet. A wide range of information is disseminate daily through these groups.

I have lived in Costa Rica many years and occasionally learn something new from the many on-line forums to which I subscribe. Good information about banking, immigration matters, the cost of living, finding good doctors and moving to Costa Rica may be obtained at times from these chat groups. Unfortunately, there are a lot of trivial conversations about meaningless subjects and misinformation discussed.. Consequently, it is imported to separate the wheat from the chaff.

I have witnessed on more than one occasion people talking about such meaningless topics as how to get rid of ants, complaining about the quality of butter in Costa Rica, the fact that there is no good Mexican food in Costa Rica, lack of American products, bashing and praising the Costa Ricans and people wanting Costa Rica to be a clone of the USA etc. What you basically have is people with different opinions on life, many of whom want everything to be perfect here.

More alarming is the fact that you have many amateurs doling out advice about investments, real estate and the economy. Most of these people have only lived in the country for a short time, are still struggling to adjust to the new culture, don’t even speak the language well enough to understand the country in depth and are not economists. I have noticed repeatedly that once these neophytes start to express erroneous information about the local real estate market and the economy they open a whole can of worms. The erroneous information often spreads to other chat groups, websites and the media like wildfire, thus becoming counter productive. Foreigners who live here and chat group members in the States then confuse distorted information with the reality of the situation. This often causes a lot of panic, anxiety, can even effect the stability of the market and above all creates confusion about living and investing here.

The obvious solution is to take a lot of what is written in these forums with a grain of salt and ONLY seek information from time-tested reliable sources and the real experts.