CR Mail service & any Expats living in Atenas

[jughead]

We hope to move to Atena,CR this Summer.

Questions ref getting mail from US:

Do most Expats use regular CR mail system or use the services out of FL,USA?

What are the differences in time of delivery?

I assume that upom arrival of a parcel from the US, it would have to go through CR customs. Where do you have to go to pick it up? All the way into San Jose, or to the airport or what?

I also assume that regular letters and magazines, no matter how they get to CR, will still enter the CR mail system.

Any comments?

Any info will be vert much appreciated.

Ref Atenas,CR

Any Expats out there living in or around Atenas, We’d love to hear from you and correspond about the lifestle for Expats there. We’re not into living in a gated-up community, but rather renting a 2-3 BR furnished home in Atenas. We’ve been told that there are some available and are quite nice.

Thanks in advance for any help you can give us.

Ben & Carol Jackson
Concan, TX (yeah, there’s really such a place!)

[DavidCMurray]

You can choose to rely on the Costa Rican mail service. Then you have two options: first, you can get a post office box in your nearest town; or you can opt for home delivery using the typical Costa Rican descriptive address.

The other option, which has some advantages, is to use a mail forwarding service out of Miami. That looks to U.S. shippers and mailers like a domestic address, so you can shop on the Internet with retailers who do not ship internationally. We can also continue to deal with our financial manager, who is not licensed in Costa Rica, because we have a U.S. address.

If you opt for the mail forwarding service, there are a couple of routes to consider. First, there are some “commercial” forwarders who give you (typically) 2 kilos of mail per month for a set fee and then additional fees for the rest. We have found them to be very expensive and the service is not daily.

The other choice is to join the Association of Residents of Costa Rica and use their mail forwarding service. Non-resident membership is $110 per year; residents pay $60. ARCR’s mail forwarding service is daily and costs $.65 per letter. Packages are much cheaper than the commercial services.

[Author]

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