This post was written by Alexandra Lancaster
of The Wright Group Real Estate.

I, like many folks who live here, get a lot of questions about how much it really costs to live in Costa Rica. A yardstick I use to determine if anyone can live cheaper here is to consider that the average Tico (Costa Rican) takes home $4700 per year and lives on it.   This Tico is clean, attractive, pretty healthy with good skin and bright teeth. If she can do it, so can anyone else!

What we are discussing here is whether or not you want to do it. The $4700 is an accurate statistic, please don’t nitpick give or take a few bucks. We all come down here with our paradigm of what life must be like for us. I submit that most of us do not want to metamorph into a totally different human being. But most of us can adjust.

I like my good food…..this is not beans and rice unless I can gussy it up into New Orleans-style red bean soup with ham hock and andouille sausage. Good food costs more than simple food, in part because excellent spices and herbs are expensive here. Grow em? You can, but then you need a plot and many Americans who buy here buy homes with very small lots. The goat she does not graze on the rooftop. The Tones spices that have more flavour here are not cheap. Restaurants, for sheer value for the money, are more expensive here than in the States. Fast food joints are expensive. How a Tico buys a Big Mac I fail to understand, for sheer OVERPRICE FOR YUCKYUCK.   

Clothes, forget. I mend, I make do, and my adorable American friends send me Care Packages. A Liz Claiborne, should you wish to wear truly dowdy at horrible prices, costs twice as much as the U.S. and the styles appear to be what your Old Aunt Maude rejected in Duluth. Here, that is. I shop Ropa Americana and the other Fashionista Stripolas in Heredia where the used clothing stuff stretches out for miles.  Sorta.

No one here cares if your underpants are Calvin Klein and your bra is Donna Karan. My last bra came from Pequeno Mundo for $2.00.

The rentals I do for our clients would usually run about 50% higher or
more in the U.S.       A hovel on East 96th Street, Manhattan…I am
talking, you walk over the bed to get to the bathroom….would cost
around $2000 per month.  I track rental costs in NY City out of
amusement. Same "modest house" here, from $350 to $600 per month. Our
Casita of the Month at present is $500 furnished in Santa Ana.

The $200,000 townhouses we offer now with owner financing, gorgeous,
views, (this is not an ad, don’t call, I won’t show it to you), are
$1.2 million in Silicon Valley, and I hesitate to estimate in NY
City…probably close to same. Not so in Florida, not so in Houston.   

To live here I have learned to:

Make do, put up, accept less, be happier inside and discard superficiality except when it suits me.

Mend my clothes, prepare homemade pet food, cure myself as Robby
alludes: go to pharmacy, healers…the docs all tell you to take an
aspirina and descansa bien. I can tell myself to use a pharmacist. They
know as much as most doctors in most cases, and they can stick you with
a needle right behind the counter where the cough drops are!

Do your own hair, get a $7 pedicure (Yes!) and a $2. manicure (Yes!).

Catch the wonderful cabs and save a pile on vehicle costs………..use
Goodlights for good used books, get MBags (I once received 21 out of a
total delivery of 28 MBags…the others are sitting in Honduras and the
gasoline guy uses my paperbacks in the public lavoratory).

I work full time, so I cannot grow stuff, or kill a pig (oh, my buddy
the pig! yikes!), and I eat out because I often must. I live, like many
people, because of added business expenses, on at least $3000 a month.
My work requires a larger home, well located, modern. I love shoes and
buy them, love makeup and buy it but judiciously. Like I have found
this joint in Multiplaza that has cheap lipsticks and s____ like that,
for $2 or $3. a pop. I cannot buy: Estee Lauder, or Giorgio, or
designer clothes. A seamstress here once copied four major clothing
items for me, using my cloth, for $10 labor cost total.  All four fit.

My regrets here, budget wise? No good used furniture, except the
vagaries of garage sales, where sometimes its cheap and sometimes the
owners are selling plastic washbasins for the same price as Pequeno
Mundo.  And you gotta hire a truck. And the damn washing machine that
looks so good…..doesn’t work and the owners are now back in
Arkansas.  I buy new appliances to at least know what I am getting, but
this is just me, I believe many people have done well with going used.

Further regrets: not enough affordable books in current releases. No
Thai food restaurant worthy of the name, not enough ethnic restaurants
that are excellent or even good…….no Maybelline products that are
affordable….no public libraries, don’t mention the sad Mark Twain.

All of the above "hardships" are for me, not hard, regrets not
withstanding. I love it here.   I want to live here not for Cheap but
for Love. The Ticos are uniformly wonderful…a safe
generalization……except for the dude that stole my friend’s camera
on the bus to Jaco. The climate is extraordinary, I feel safe as a
single woman, ………..and I know that what I have
here…spiritually………I will never have in any other country, and
that when I share a small pizza at the Trattoria in Multiplaza, no one
with a bomb strapped to her body will be blowing up the cafe. This
comforts me.

I’ve been rich here, I been poor here. They both feel a lot the same. I
am Medium at moment and it feels like “rich” to me. But the poor shall
inherit the earth.

In the meantime I am breaking the piggy bank and getting a corned beef
from Feeley and some sausage from Sharon.  Maybe make me an etoufee
Cajun style with cornbread.    That leads to buying polenta. That leads
to taking a cab. Thus we enter our own reality and live our days here
as we each see fit.

I accessed The World Factbook on Google and found that the U.S. is
third highest in the world…first, Luxembourg……….at $41.800 with
nearly all African countries at the very bottom….and the Gaza Strip
weighs in at $600, which kinda makes you have insights at what is going
on there in light of that kind of poverty. Costa Rica shows up at
$10,000 –although I bet other statistics would show less. Nicaragua
shows $2.800 and might explain why most of the maids in Escazu are from
there.

A poverty level chart on one of these search engines showed that $40K a
year is poverty level in the U.S.A.  Funny, that’s what I spend here
give or take a few pesos and nobody told me I wasn’t rich.  Undoubtedly
taxation and medical care and cost of overall housing affect this
number a great deal. If you eat enough of that atrocious American fast
food, maybe you automatically get sick and then, become poor. I am not
being facetious, it only seems that way.