Living in Costa Rica: Cost of Living

¡Hey! Good morning, everyone. We've been asked recently by clients to provide information. Well, not really recently, we've always been asked to provide information about certain things about living in Costa Rica, buying in Costa Rica, and there's a lot of commonly asked questions. So our clients are always wanting more information, of course,, and we do our best to provide accurate information, and a lot of the times the information is pretty relative. So we're going to start doing some short videos to try to answer those questions, give you a general idea about different things when you're living or purchasing in Costa Rica. Today I think we're going to start with the cost of living, and, uh, it's probably one of our most frequently asked questions. What does it cost to live in Costa Rica? What does it cost to live in Atenas? And that is pretty varied. That's— it's all relative because it depends on where you're coming from. Are you coming from the US, Canada, Europe? If you're coming from the US, are you coming from the Southeast? Are you coming from the Northeast? Coming from the Midwest? Are you coming from the West Coast? So it just depends. Now, I'm originally from Florida, and I can say that sometimes I think that things are getting expensive in Costa Rica, and then I go back to Florida to visit friends and family, and I realize, okay, I'm still living probably anywhere between 20 to 30% less expensive than if I were purchasing the same products or similar products in Florida. So it's pretty relative. It depends on how you live. So if we're talking about general day-to-day things, expenses like food, uh, if you're buying products that are imported, and remember the brands you're used to in the United States, they're gonna be imported in Costa Rica. Anything imported, just as it would be back home, is gonna be more expensive than if you bought a local product. Now, how we eat is we buy our groceries, we buy fresh meat, the grocery store, and then we go to the fresh farmers market, the feria, every Thursday, and we purchase our fruits, our vegetables, and things of that nature. So for example, I can go and for a family of 3 can purchase $40 or $50 worth of fresh fruits and vegetables, and that will last us all week and sometimes a little bit longer, maybe 10 or 12 days for things like when buying onions or bell peppers or staples, right? Um, meats, we probably spend an average of, again, probably $50 a week, $60 a week for our meats. That's for general cuts like pork chops, chicken breast, ground beef. And then yeah, we'll buy some specialty things, like there's a nice specialty meat boutique in town where we'll buy a great ribeye steak once in a while. And so You know, depends on how you live, but you can easily purchase your groceries for a family of 3 per month anywhere from say $400 to $600 a month. That would be on average. Gasoline, gasoline generally costs about 20 to 30% more here than it does in the States. But again, that's going to depend on where you're at in the States because we're depending on state taxes, right? So other things such as cost of water, electricity, cable, and internet. Water bills are relatively inexpensive. You'll probably spend anywhere between $10 to $40 a month for your water bill. Electricity is a bit more expensive and depends. Here in the valley, at Tanis especially, we don't really use ACs, but if you were to just have a regular water bill, a regular electric bill, you can probably expect to spend anywhere from $100 to $300 a month depending on your usage. Um, cable and internet, we have great options, several companies that do package deals where you get both together and you on average you will spend $65 to $70 a month and that will give you up to 100 megabytes of internet service. So really affordable compared to what you're used to spending back home. I think in Florida, I have friends and family who easily spend $200, $225 a month for those services. Property tax is another inexpensive, another inexpensive expense in Costa Rica because your millage rate is 0.25% of the recorded value of the property. So for example, If you have a property that's recorded at $200,000, your property taxes are gonna roughly be $500 a year. So very inexpensive. Other things such as your healthcare depends on your recorded monthly income, which you can easily spend with the kaha. You can easily spend between $90 to $200 a month for your health insurance. Insurance, which will cover everything. Some of your other expenses such as gardeners, maid, domestic help, on average you're going to spend $3 to $4 an hour for labor. More skilled labor, $5 or $6 an hour. So these are just some of the general things that you can expect to pay. You know, our household expenses for a family of 3 with electric, electric, water, cable, our fuel bill for our cars, and grocery bills, taxes, you know, we spend less than $2,000 a month. So I often hear colleagues giving quotes of things much cheaper, and possibly it is a fact that they can live less expensively than we do. But I think that living for less than $2,000 a month, I certainly couldn't replicate my lifestyle or our lifestyle in Florida for less than $2,000 a month. I think I would spend probably close to double that. So hope this information will give you a little bit of an insight of what you can expect. We'll do these videos more frequently about things such as closing cost, how to purchase a house, whether you use a corporation or not, and all the little different inuenduos and all the different loopholes, all the different things that are important to know about in Costa Rica. We hope you have a great day. Pura vida.