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Please advise, those of you who have a property in CR and pay your monthly bills from US or Canada by internet.
Please explain how to set up an utility payments by internet?
Do you receive statements for electricity, water over the internet also? or you have access to your municipal bills somehow. THanks in advance
LavenderWe keep bank accounts both in colones and dollars in Costa Rica to pay the bills. Both Citi Bank (formerly Banco Cuscatlan) and Banco Costa Rica (BCR) have account internet access and bills can be paid online if you have the right account numbers, etc. There may be other Costa Rican banks that offer internet access to your accounts as well. You can also set it up with some of the banks to pay the utilities for you automatically each month. It depends which utility payments each bank offers. If the accounts in Costa Rica, need more money to be deposited into them and we are in the states, we can wire money to the account(s). Again, all you need are the right numbers to do this.
Banco Nacional and HSBC both have online banking through which you can pay utility bills and I’m pretty sure all the other banks here do also. We can deposit dollars to our HSBC dollar account, buy colones online and have them deposited in our colon account, and then pay the bills which are, of course, expressed in colon amounts.
The snag that may arise is with regard to water bills. In some localities, the water system is very, very local and their bills are not accessible online. We have to pay ours in in person, in cash, by the tenth of every month, at the water utility office during its limited hours of operation. And, unlike past years, we cannot prepay our account for (say) a year in advance.
Another potential snag is if you happen to get ‘shut out’ of your online account, you have to go in person to get it corrected…..
Our water bill also requires payment in personTHank you all so much. I hope that since we have a municipal water supply our bill will be accessable by internet???
What do we need to do set up automatic payment from our
Account in Cr?Take each one of your utility bills (telephone, internet, electric, water) to your bank and wait in line for a customer sevice representaive (not at the teller caja). They will be able to tell you which bills they will be able to pay automatically. It will take at least a month for the automatic service to kick in and so you will probably have to still pay the next bill yourself – but then they should be explaining all of this to you at the bank. Once they begin paying the bills automatically, though, you are set unless you physically cancel the service. We recently upgraded our cell phone service from TDMA to 3G and we did not have to change anything with the bank paying the bill automatically because we kept the same phone number. If we had changed the number or added another line, we would have had to wait for the first bill and then repeat the process that I just mentioned. Our electric bill is paid automatically from our CoopeAgri account. CoopeAgri does not offer internet access at this time (this could change in the near or far future) so we just have to put enough colones in our account before we leave the country to pay the bill each month until we return to Costa Rica. It is inconvenient to not have internet access to this particular account but we make it work as well.
Banco National requires a token to do on-line banking. I bought one from the bank before returning to Canada.
It’s an electronic gizmo that gives you a security # to enter when going into your account.
I think that you might be able to do it with a cell phone as well.
Make sure to enter all the correct account numbers (electricity, insurance, water,etc.) into your account as stated above and give it a test before leaving the country.
It’s really easy once you’ve done it a few times and the bank site is ‘translator freindly’ if your spanish is limited.Forgot to mention that you won’t receive any e-mails stating that your bills are due from the banks or utility companies.
It’s up to you to go into your account to see what is due monthly. At least this is my experience.Thank you all so much for prompt responses. We will do all these arrangements as you all advised. Very helpful!!!!
Does CHASE have any branches in CR? I know they took over the Washington Mutual Call center near SJ when they bought them last year. I have accounts with CHASE and when I move to CR, just wonder if I will have to open accts with other banks like HSBC or BCR. Thanks !
[quote=”delkster”]Does CHASE have any branches in CR? I know they took over the Washington Mutual Call center near SJ when they bought them last year. I have accounts with CHASE and when I move to CR, just wonder if I will have to open accts with other banks like HSBC or BCR. Thanks ![/quote]
I don’t believe CHASE have any branches in CR. To my knowledge HSBC, Scotia and Citibank are the only banks from US or Canada.
Here is the link of Banco Central de Costa Rica:
http://indicadoreseconomicos.bccr.fi.cr/IndicadoresEconomicos/Cuadros/frmConsultaTCVentanilla.aspx
Keep in mind that even though the same bank is present in Costa Rica and in the US and they might be owned by the same corporation, there is no “connection” between the two banks. I have both a Citi bank account in the US (online account) and in Costa Rica (formerly Banco Cuscatlan) but I am not able to transfer funds from one to the other. I still must use a wire transfer to send money from one to the other. I have heard of people setting up some kind of debit account in the US to have SS funds deposited into and then using a debit card to get the money in Costa Rica. This won’t help at all, though, if you are in the US and you need to add money to your Costa Rica bank account. You still have to use a wire transfer. Some banks offer free international wire transfers if you have a huge bank account like $500,000. Well, that leaves me out and I expect almost everybody else retiring in Costa Rica. I don’t know if there are any of these debit accounts or any US banks that don’t charge the 3% foreign transaction fee for debits from a US bank while in Costa Rica. If you want to transfer something like $5,000 to your Costa Rican account, that 3% fee makes a $40 or $50 wire transfer fee look cheap. If anyone knows a way around all of the red tape and fees between US and Costa Rican bank accounts, I would like to know about it.
Couple of things . . .
First, you can set up your monthly U.S. Social Security payment to be automatically deposited into a Banco Nacional de Costa Rica account for a $6.00 monthly fee. The service folks at the U.S. Embassy can arrange this. I think there is a delay of a couple of days for the deposit to arrive at Banco Nacional.
Second, if you’re here in Costa Rica, you can deposit a check drawn on your U.S. bank into your Costa Rican bank account. You don’t have to bank at Banco Nacional. We routinely do this at HSBC and I’ve also done it at ScotiaBank. The good news is that such a deposit is free. The bad news is that the banks here make you wait two weeks before actually crediting the deposit to you so that it’s available to you to spend.
In another forum, someone has said that a Charles Schwab money market account comes with free ATM use. If that’s free for Costa Rican ATMs, then you could establish a Schwab account with direct deposit, go to a Costa Rican ATM, withdraw dollars, and then deposit the cash with the teller inside the bank. We have not investigated this.
Thanks for reminding me that writing a check on my US bank and depositing it in my Costa Rica bank account is a free and viable way to transfer money from my US bank to my Costa Rica bank as long as I don’t need to use the money for at least 2 weeks. Everything that has been suggested so far, however, only works if you are in Costa Rica. Paying bills from the US or Canada still requires that you set up automatic bill payments with the bank ahead of time and/or get all of the information that you will need to do it online while you are still in Costa Rica. Once you are back home in the US or Canada, the bills will then be paid automatically or you will be able to perform the task online if you have the correct information and know how to do it correctly. The problem remains that if you are in the US or Canada, I have not found any way to transfer money from my US bank to my bank in Costa Rica except by wire transfer. Having your SS check deposited in a Costa Rica bank works great for those who live full time in Costa Rica but it is not a viable solution for those of us who live in both places. After all, this thread is about paying bills in Costa Rica from the US or Canada.
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