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Now that the Canadian dollar has dropped to it’s lowest level in almost 3 years I think we can fully expect that the Canuck investment market will be dropping out of sight in locales like Costa Rica. Even though there are good real estate deals to be had down there. Even at $250k there is no way any sane Canadian is going to drop 55k to pay in a US dollar that should by all rights be worth less than ours.
As the Financial Times noted:
“On the heels of its 17.5% surge last year, when it rose above the U.S. dollar for the first time in more than 30 years, the Canadian dollar is now down 21% this year.”
I for one cannot fathom how the US dollar can be holding the global currency to ransom after dragging us into a recession of their own making. Perhaps Scott, with your financial background you can make some sense of this to the long suffering Canadians who are having a hard time making any headway within one of the worlds most taxed countries. Yet we stand in awe of our neighbors to the South as abhorrent business practices like Enron and the financial bailouts occur on a more frequent basis. A once great country that has no moral accountability to anything or anyone.
Now as we watch the presidential mud slinging in yet another round of power monopoly. Who knows where this roller coaster is going to crash.
As an American, I can empathize with your disgust and anger. But please direct it specifically at the proper target; conservative republican, pro business, laissez faire capitalists….and any American citizen who voted his unsubstantiated fear and put Bush in office twice.
And try to work up a little empathy for the blameless progressive Americans who had nothing to do with the current mess. You are still better off than most Americans in your highly taxed country. You have health care and a substantial social net to fall back on in the very hard times coming. We here to the south of you have absolutely nothing to fall back upon. Nothing. Americans have been brainwashed into believing socialism is a dirty word and they have been paying a heavy price for their ignorance. They will now pay even more dearly.
Edited on Oct 29, 2008 01:58
Edited on Oct 29, 2008 01:59
Edited on Oct 29, 2008 02:00
The US dollar rises as demand for it around the world increases. The well heeled have to put there “money” somewhere and the US dollar and economy seem to be the safe haven of choice. Will we collapse under our own weight or live to fight another day?
“The times they are a changing…”
Canadians are indeed very fortunate compared to many peoples but you’re probably right about seeing less Canadians buying Costa Rica real estate.
Venezuela and other natural resource rich LatAm countries are also suffering now due to plummeting oil prices and many other commodity prices.
We are also now seeing less Venezuelans who made up a significant portion of Costa Rica real estate buyers last years. Their own political environment is ‘muy complicado’ and we know a surprising number of wealthy Venezuelans who had managed to move millions to the USA over the years and build/buy beautiful homes – primarily in Miami – who have recently had their US bank accounts frozen by the US authorities.
Why? I do not know… Why they didn’t listen to me years ago and move their money to the bank I work with in Switzerland? I don’t know. I do know that they wish they had listened to me now.
And “socialism may be a dirty word” but the measures implemented in the USA to try and prevent this Wall Street caused global financial crisis are very socialist aren’t they?
It’s grotesquely hilarious that after prancing around the world preaching about ‘free markets’ and the benefits of the US styled capitalism (on steroids), now that is has completely crashed and burned, the very people responsible for this mess are left in charge to supposedly rectify the situation and implement drastic socialistic measures that they have been telling everybody else NOT to do for years.
Once again it’s a case of privatizing the profits and socializing the losses.
Lastly, in the face of what’s going on I am frankly amazed at how resilient real estate prices have been in Costa Rica. Raw land prices on the Pacific have certainly come down quite dramatically but we have yet to see major across-the-board price declines for actual property.
Scott Oliver – Founder
WeLoveCostaRica.comThat’s pretty good news regarding land prices in CR. You would assume if it was going to get really bad down there that would have happened by now?
Scott certainly the world is a mess including the U.S.. However I cannot agree with social medicine as in costa rica or canada..How long does it take to receive major medical care..Of course I also dont agree with the bailout or nationalizing the banks or the mortgage system..I guess I am a little left of center…
If you do not agree with socialized medicine, then you must be one of the fortunate citizens who can either afford health care on your own or have an employer who helps with that expense. Waiting for treatment is not an issue for many Americans because they get no care at all.
And every Canadian I have spoken with about their health care system approve of it.
Socialism’s primary aim is direct care of the citizenry, not corporations. What the U.S. is doing right now is not a turn to wards socialism. It issimply more robbing of the working people.So, you’d rather do without than wait a while for your care? How can that possibly be better? Isn’t doing without implicitly the same as waiting but with a worse outcome?
Remember that in the current U.S. health care non-system (a) one in six Americans has no coverage whatsoever, (b) many, many who are in a covered status are enrolled in health maintenance organizations and other plans which have severe restrictions on approval which also serve to delay and deny care, and (c) still others are grossly underinsured. That is what you think is better than Canada or Costa Rica???
Interesting aside time: I read on one of the on-line news pages a couple of weeks ago that a Bush Administration staffer has proposed that the way to resolve the matter of the uninsured is for Bush to issue an executive order prohibiting the Bureau of Labor Statistics from publishing that information in the future.
I started this thread to gripe about how badly the Canadian dollar was performing and that this would have a direct impact on how or if I could possibly invest in real estate in CR. But I see now it has morphed into a discussion on the state of health care?
Let me just clarify what appears to be some confusion about what kind of health care we are actually receiving in the great white north. Yes, it is publicly funded and available to all residents of Canada.
But it is also true that because of political interference and large scale budget cuts it is a poor imitation of what it used to be. Here in Alberta there is a chronic shortage of hospitals (in Calgary we demolished one and replaced it with high end condos – sound familiar). We have not built another since ( excepting the new childrens hospital). This at a time when Calgary’s growth is off the scale.
The result of this. Not enough health care workers and not enough beds to put the sick in. It is the norm now in this city to expect waits in any hospital emergency room of over 8 hours before you will be admitted. Then you can expect to lie in a gurney in some hallway while they wait for some space to become available.
I had the misfortune of having my appendix rupture this year and while I sat in the emergency waiting room for over 4 hours to be admitted I had more than enough time to reflect on this wonderful health care that Americans think we have.
This is an illusion. The political tinkering has left us with inadequate care facilities and a mass exodus of care workers heading to places where they are better compensated and do not have to put in double or triple shifts because noone else is available.
I think if you ask anybody within Alberta you will not receive one vote of confidence in regards to the state of our health care. I guess you can always say something is better than nothing. But the mothers who have had miscarriages in the emergency rooms and the sons who have died with something as treatable as appendicitis while they were shuffled from one hospital to another because noone was available to treat them might tend to strongly disagree with this.These things happen in the States, too. There’s always some story on the news about so and so who died waiting for treatment in the emergency room, or the insurance company that refused to authorize this or that treatment and caused either death or permanent injury to the insured. For those who think the medical care system in the States is so great, think again — we rank 35th or something like that — either just above or below the healthcare system of Costa Rica. Get into the clutches of a doctor who is on the take from Big Pharma and you may be one of the 100,000 who die from taking bad/improperly test drugs. Go to the hospital and your will likely contract some virulent bacteria that may kill you. I read a stat some years ago that basically said almost one million people a year die JUST from getting medical treatment, or something that passes for that, in the States. Many years ago I had to take my insurance company to court to force them to provide the shoulder surgery my doctors said I needed; I actually had to get a court order to get the treatment I needed. That took nearly 5 years of legal wrangling, so there you go.
I will echo what David said, something is better than nothing. I can tell you here in NYC if you walk into an emergency room at the wrong time of the day or night you can easily wait 3-6 hours and then spend time on a gurney in some hallway. Seems like both systems have there flaws, my argument has always been let’s get it right! If America really is “the greatest” country on the planet lets get health care for all our citizens. We pay taxes to support programs to make our country and our lives better…doesn’t affordable, quality health care have a place in there? In NYC it’s about $800 dollars a month for a family plan that is just decent.
As my article on the front page of this web site states, there is still an off-set to that Canadian Dollar devaluation for those Canadians who enjoy the “non-resident tax status” with Canada Customs and Revenue. Investing in property in Costa Rica by Canadians who enjoy this tax status could still prove to be a viable option in the long-term.
Note from Scott: ‘WatchDog’ is the username for my friend and attorney Richard (Rick) Philps who is a Canadian citizen, naturalized as a citizen of Costa Rica. Rick practiced law in Canada as a member of the Law Society of British Columbia, for fourteen years, prior to moving to Costa Rica in 1998. Mr. Philps the earned his Bachelor of Laws and Licensing Degrees (Civil Law), and a Post-Graduate Degree in Notary and Registry Law, from the Escuela Libre de Derecho University, in San Jose, is a member of the Costa Rica College of Lawyers, and has practiced law in Costa Rica for six years. Mr. Philps practices law in the areas of real estate and development, corporate, commercial, contract, immigration, and banking. To contact attorney Rick Philps and his associate attorney Roger Petersen, please use the Contact Form at the bottom of [ https://www.welovecostarica.com/members/417.cfm ]
compare that to the 24 hour emergency wait plus an additional 45 minutes to discover the dead body here in NYC! a similar thing happened again in new hampshire but that one was only 22 hrs so it barely made the news…I GUESS THATS WHY WE’RE ALL LIVING OR HEADING FOR COSTA RICA…I KNOW THAT’S OUR REASON
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