You will have to decide if you are shipping anything down to Costa Rica or if if you will pay to take it with you on the airplane, or if you will forgo bringing much of anything with you at all. If you decide to ship items, you will want to get a jump on contacting the shipper and finding out details you will need for him and from him. It is very good to write down questions for your shipper as you think of them and be sure to …

It is not imperative but it is important to know the Costa Rican currency and how to calculate it in your head (or at least on paper) to US Dollars before you get here. Because the current exchange rate is about 500colones to an American Dollar, it is pretty easy to do, even to teach your school-age children.
The CR currency is a colon(co-LONE). The exchange rate between the American Dollar and the colon fluxuates, though, for the past several months, it has stayed just under 500c/$1.00. As of 4-1-11, the …

You have to have a valid return plane ticket and can only stay for 3 months at a time, how do you handle that? Do you just keep renewing your plane tickets?
The law in Costa Rica is to leave the country to get a new visa stamp every 90 days. Note that that is not 3 months. We were not returning to the United States, so we let our first plane tickets go, because we are not returning to the States. Since then, every 90 days, we go to …

Of course, everyone will have their own opinions of what is good or not to bring to Costa Rica, and these are from our own experiences and those of our friends.
Finally, we are going to talk about what to bring, what not to bring, what you might as well buy here, and what to forget about. Keep in mind that we do not have a vehicle, and we do a lot of walking and taking the buses here.
What to bring is one of the hardest things to decide, but one …

I will have to admit that the way we chose to come to Costa Rica wasn’t because we did a lot of research of all the world’s foreign countries or because we particularly loved the country. We had done enough research of the country (via this great site: http://therealcostarica.com), and had looked a t a few other ones. We looked into going to Israel, called the Embassy, and though we believe one day we will be going there, now is not that time.
Costa Rica has a lot of good qualities …

One thing you should always check out before visiting or moving to a foreign country is the food they eat and have available. If you are going on vacation, you are likely to find an American restaurant in this day and age in almost every country there is, but if you are moving there, you will need to know just what will be available to you. Moving to a foreign country is such a drastic change that making sure of the one comfort of home, food, is pretty important.
When we …

[I am getting a lot more questions now about moving to CR, so I hope you will bear with me as I post more often than I usually do. Of course, by reading some of it, you will get an idea of some of how we live here too. Thanks!]
You will find all posts related to Moving to Costa Rica HERE.
There are certain things you will need to do first when you are preparing to move. Here are a few of them.
Passports, ID: One of them is that if you …

We get a lot of questions about moving here to Costa Rica from the States.  While there is an excellent website that we used and still refer to, we want to address questions here also.
First things first:
If you are planning to come here, get a job, and live out the rest of your life in Paradise, you have a few things coming. The first thing is that you are not allowed to work here unless you have a Work Visa. And even that is …