Custom fees on personal belongings

[yann]

Can someone tell me if there is any custom fees on personnal belongings.

I am planning on moving to Costa rica and my local mover company tells me about custom fees applied to declared estimated value of personal belongings.

Thanks for any answer.

Yann.

[DavidCMurray]

You can expect Costa Rican Customs to impose some import duty on anything you bring here. I think I know that books and clothing are exempt but other personal belongings are not. That’s the bad news.

The good news is that the import duties generally aren’t very much. Friends just brought in a container filled with high-end electronics, furniture, kitchen stuff, linens, etc, etc, etc. Their bill from Customs was $1,300.

[yann]

Thank you David for your answer.

Yann.

[costaricabill]

David – can you please get me the name/contact of your friends or the shipping company or customs broker they used? I have a move coming in January, and I am scrambling….
bill knight
casanoche@gmail.com

[mediatica]

We used Charles Zeller with Ship to costa rica. His email is: shiptocostarica@racsa.co.cr I believe. You can also search for him on the ARCR site as well. He has been great to deal with thus far. We paid $6,200 to ship a 40′ container from Tampa, Florida to Playa Conchal, Guanacaste and that includes import taxes of $1,500, door to door service. So the actual shipping charges were $4,700. Pretty reasonable for all the things we shipped. lots of household goods and a car. Hope that helps.

[PS]

We arein the same situation, in regards to moving to CR. Are you saying the TOTAL COST including the car was$6200? I heard insane high prices to bring a car into CR. Please clarify Thanx

[mediatica]

Hi PS:

Yes, total cost was $6,225 to be exact. We paid $2,925 to Alpico Internationl in Tampa (we packed our belongings and they loaded them into the truck since they are much better at that than my husband and I would ever be). The rest of the money, $3300, was paid to Charles Zeller. That includes $1,500 for import duties. ** Please note that I am shipping my car, but have to pick it up in San Jose due to customs being there and you have to be there in person to get your vehicle. I am NOT paying taxes until January on my car to save money because it’s a 2006 model. So, my taxes, which will be around $10,000 will be paid in January/February time frame. That is maybe what you may be referring to the high taxes. It doesn’t cost much to actually ship a car to Costa Rica, but the import duties are sky high. In retrospect I probably should’ve sold and bought down there, but it’s nice to have my car that I’m used to and know it’s only been driven by me and it’s a perfect car 4×4 for Costa Rica. I was actually pleasantly surprised at the quote we got. It would have cost us MUCH more to sell all our things and repurchase those things in Costa Rica. I must say that we did sell probably 1/2 of our house furnishings in order to downsize and not ship so much. It ended up being about 1/2 of the container of household goods, my car, and some charitable donation items. If you have any specific questions, feel free to email me at: mediatica26@yahoo.com Buena suerte!

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