Although gasoline prices has risen here as in the rest of the world public transportation is still affordable. A trip by bus to furthest destination in the country  is around $10 dollars. A trip from San José to the suburbs is less than a dollar. An hour ride to some of the outlying towns in the Central Valley like Grecia is less than $2 dollars.

With such low prices you don’t really need the expenses of owning a an automobile here. There are buses going to almost every city and  town in the country. The government  has to provide this service and keep it affordable for the vast majority of the Costa Rican people who can’t afford cars.

Indeed this is another benefit of living in Costa Rica.

On my last tour I had a couple who just wanted to move to Costa Rica for a couple of years to reduce their out of the pocket medical expenses until they became eligible for Medicare.

Their plan was to live here and then move back to the states  when their insurance took effect there. They knew that if they remained in the States until that time they could become destitute.

Not everyone’s situation is the same but there a 1000s of people who choose to live in Costa Rica to reduce the cost of health care and take advantage of the high quality low-cost care available in here.

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.

Many people are.

It was recently predicted in Newswire Today that approximately ten percent of the 76 million members of the baby boomer generation show a great interest in retiring outside of the United States . Most of them have their eyes set on time-tested retirement havens like Costa Rica.

As Costa Rica’s popularity has increased as both a tourist destination and retirement haven so has the amount of press the country has received. Scores of articles have appeared in magazines, guidebooks, newsgroups and websites about the country. The amount of chatter and material is mind boggling.

To see an example of this just enter th terms “Costa Rica retirement” or “Costa Rica real estate” in any search engine. Thousands of websites will come up in both categories. You’ll be hard pressed to know where to start. Most people will become more confused than when they started to do research, given the voluminous amounts of information available. To make matters worse people will also read a lot of self-serving rhetoric which will confuse them even more.

The solution to all of this is to contact professionals with a proven track record to get an idea of what’s really going on here. Don’t try to take shortcuts without doing this or you will wind up chasing your tail and wasting your valuable time, energy and money.

If you want to be successful here, take this advise.

Here is what Oscar Arias has accomplished recently with Regard to China

(1) The first Central American country to establish official relations with China

(2) First Central American president to visit the country

(3) China donated $48 million for disaster relief, to finish the highway Ciudad Quesada and rebuild the National Stadium.

(4) The possibility of Central America’s largest refinery to be built in Costa Rica

(5) The possibility of Chinese telecommunications companies