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Good Morning all,
My wife and I are planning to move to CR in about a year and I hope to pick your knowledge about different area of concern over the coming year. Let me tell you about our plans and see if it makes sense to you. We are both over 65 in good health; I think we would like to live about a half hour to an hour from San Jose. A place with a good clinic or hospital just in case would be good. We have visited CR a few time and really like the country but we realize visiting and living in a place are two distinct items. The first year we plan to use public transportation and I think we would like to live in a mixed Costa Rican expat area. Now for the first of many questions; we are newbie at living abroad and we would like to hear your suggestion about how to transfer monies from the US to CR. Of course maintaining the integrity of the transaction is very important to us. Second questions I am aware that there are several language schools in CR., is there a school that specializes in classes for older language and learning challenge folk?
Thank you for your input’
(If you have location thought I would love to hear them)
JohnFirst, let me recommend that you investigate Grecia, Palmares and San Ramon as locations in which to settle. All those have decent medical facilities and they’re all an hour or so from San Jose and also from both Alajuela and Escazu both of which have “U.S.-like” shopping venues that you may not find everywhere.
Second, there are several ways to move U.S. funds to Costa Rica. . .
You can have your U.S. bank initiate an international wire transfer. There’ll be a cost for that at each end.
You can withdraw cash from your U.S. bank at any of the the many ATMs here and either spend it or deposit it in a Costa Rican bank account to withdraw later. Your bank may apply ATM and foreign funds fees.
You can write a check against your U.S. account, deposit that into your Costa Rican bank account, wait for the processing delay (anywhere from ten to maybe forty-five business days) and withdraw the funds once they are credited. To the best of my knowledge, none of the banks charge for accepting and processing your U.S. check.
Some folks are able to get a bank teller here to do a cash advance from their U.S. bank account (or maybe a credit card account) and either take the cash or deposit it. We bank at [i]Banco HSBC[/i] and they insist that they cannot do this.
If you are receiving U.S. Social Security, once you have established a dollar account at [i]Banco Nacional de Costa Rica[/i] or [i]Banco de Costa Rica[/i], you can arrange to have your monthly check deposited there. It’s routed through Irwin Trust Company of New York and arrives each month on the third or earlier if the third isn’t a business day. There’s a $6.00 monthly fee for this service (per recipient) and the funds must be deposited to an individual account, not a joint one. It works really well.
It’s my understanding that U.S. governmental pensions generally cannot be electronically deposited outside the country, so if you have a pension from (say) a state or local government, etc you should investigate just what you can do in that regard.
Do I understand you to say that my husband and I have t o have separate accounts for our social securing checks? We are moving to CR in April, and I have never read this anywhere else.
“If you are receiving U.S. Social Security, once you have established a dollar account at Banco Nacional de Costa Rica or Banco de Costa Rica, you can arrange to have your monthly check deposited there. It’s routed through Irwin Trust Company of New York and arrives each month on the third or earlier if the third isn’t a business day. There’s a $6.00 monthly fee for this service (per recipient) and the funds must be deposited to an individual account, not a joint one. It works really well. “
Here is another suggestion: Before we left the U.S., we purchased and downloaded a program called “Identity Cloaker”. What this company does is “cloak” your location, so for instance, you choose the server you want such as one in the U.S. to show that your computer (and you) are still located in the States (or elsewhere). This adds an extra layer of security while you are doing banking and has the benefit of allowing you to stream movies, etc. as if you were still in your homeplace.
Never and I mean NEVER use a free WIFI space to do your banking. This is true anywhere and should be observed in CR. Some folks I know buy little, cheap netbooks and ONLY do their banking and secure computing on this device. They NEVER get on the net for anything else and this provides amazing security for your banking. No games, no chat, no Facebook…nothing whatsoever but secure, password protected financial transactions.
No bad guys can download anything onto this netbook because you NEVER use it for anything else. Think of this as a sort of inexpensive, electronic checkbook.
[quote=”IHX”]Do I understand you to say that my husband and I have t o have separate accounts for our social securing checks? We are moving to CR in April, and I have never read this anywhere else.
Yup, that’s exactly correct. Each Social Security recipient must have his or her own individual account. I suspect that this has to do with Social Security retrieving money should the recipient die and they not be informed promptly (but I don’t know that for a fact).
At [i]Banco Nacional[/i], at least, it’s easy enough to set up the second person’s account once the first one is established. And each of your can have both a dollar account and a colon account. And you can have the bank “link” the accounts so that you can transfer money between them.
Each month when our SS payments arrive, I set aside some money for month-end expenses in Marcia’s dollar account and then transfer the balance of her money to my own colon account. That, plus my SS (also transferred to my colon account) is what we live on. This is easily set up by the bank’s service platform folks. After that, it’s all done via online banking.
Would beg to differ about Grecia. We were there last year. Small downtown area is very crowded, small unmarked roads and streets that don’t show up on GPS, insane drivers, kids begging for money, and if it IS the cleanist city in Central America I would hate to see the dirtiest, Don’t believe all the hype. Don’t believe the lovely pictures you see in travel guides or on the internet. For example the lovely park is a dump. It may have been a nice little place at one time but don’t be fooled, times have changed. You will not understand this until you go there.
gee, i thought grecia was a great little town, just like a lot of other little towns in costa rica. if those things about which you complain are so horrible, you had best stay in clean, pristine USA because what you describe is most of costa rica.
[quote=”agarcia”]Never argue with the WLCR forum bullies.[/quote]
I’m beginning to see your point. If you disagree with one’s opinion you get blasted. My point is to visit any town like Grecia before believing all the hype. Mr. Murray must live there and or have property that won’t sell. I’ll also bet you he doesn’t live in town but way out on one if the undermaintained very dangerous roads with a few acres away from the town he seems to promote. I’m trying to just inform newcomers not to take anyone’s opinion and spend a little time there. BTW San Ramon and La Fortuna MUCH nicer.
Mr. Murray is entitled to his opinion but so is anyone else here.What this post shows, is that [i]you must visit all areas[/i] you are considering to live in [i]before you buy an advertised property[/i] or relocate to the area, sight unseen.
What may be acceptable to one, may not be acceptable to another.Sr. Davis2 is correct on several points. To be sure, each of us has a right to his or her own opinion.
It’s also true that we live on a couple of [i]manzanas[/i] outside Grecia which we access via a road that, right now, could use some attention but which could hardly be characterized fairly as “dangerous” by any reasonable definition of the term. A challenge in spots? Yup. “Dangerous”? Not really.
And, by the way, we do not have any property for sale. Nor will we. We’re not in the real estate business. Nor will we be. The next time our property comes on the market will be after the med school has finished with our earthly remains and we will have little interest in how long it takes to sell or at what price. We’ll be occupied with other matters like getting that harp plucking down.
Like San Ramon (reputed to have a few warts of its own by a reliable source we all know and love), Grecia is imperfect. It has that in common with everywhere else on the face of the earth. But the streets are tolerably clean. The drivers are typical for the genre. The sidewalks bustle with activity. The newly renovated central park is clean and habitable by normal standards. There are good places to eat. The weekly [i]feria[/i] is a joy. Basic medical care is readily available. The new Grecia Mall will satisfy a gringo’s yearning for English language movies, American fast food, and an uncrowded shopping experience reminiscent of the U.S. And the people (save for a few expats and visitors) are congenial.
One wonders just how much time Sr. Davis2 has actually spent here.
“To each his own”, said the old lady as she kissed the cow.
what you said about Grecia pretty much applies to San Ramon — they have been on a beautifying kick here and redid the central park with new pathways and wider sidewalks. generally, san ramon is pretty clean by latin american standards. the homeless dogs are a sad picture, but most are fat and happy living on the streets — unlike the dogs of say, mexico, who are flaco and full of mange. but we have crazy drivers, and some annoying individuals, but hey that’s everywhere. for me, san ramon has everything one needs, but it is NOT the United States, so it isn’t going to be just like back home.
San Ramon and Palmares are the two larger towns that I know well enough. As long as the economy does not crash to horrid levels of desperation, I see no big “warts” in either place. Both towns are quite nice by Latin American standards.
Let me add that I do not walk about anywhere, including the United States, well after hours. I am a homebody. I socialize, travel and do activities in daylight. I do home chores and sleep at night. Short of total societal breakdown and war, life style is the biggest factor in any assessment of quality of life as pertains to geography and culture. I suspect that with a proper life style, one could even do tolerably well in a more fascist United States, as it is quickly becoming, as long as one is far removed from cities.
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