One Year On - Reflections of a Returning Expat
As we approach our 1 year anniversary of repatriating back to the US, some friends of ours recently asked us how we have adjusted to living back in the US and if living in Costa Rica had changed us. Would we do it again knowing what we do now? So here are my answers and observations.
To begin with, our move there was a calculated, but still wild jump into the unknown. We had reached a point in our lives in the US where we could not sustain the lifestyle we had been living. Employment, income, and many other circumstances pretty much forced us to make a change. It was like being in quicksand – if you stay still, you die. For these and other reasons we decided to swing-for-the-fences, so to speak, and try something truly adventurous. We had done our due diligence homework so we felt that we at least had enough information to make an informed decision about moving there. After three years, we are back. The reasons we repatriated as I have discussed in another blog article were “complicated”. Now a year later, let me try to reflect on the things I miss and the things that I’m glad to have returned to.
Ah, the comforts of Home
While everyone says “Oh, I want to live a much simpler lifestyle”, it goes to say that there a lot of degrees to this. On the plus side I no longer feel the need to go shopping at the warehouse store or malls every weekend, and my purchases much more focused. Have suffered through the agonies of downsizing once, I am not that quick to up-size so much. Freedom from stuff gives you freedom of mobility. I have re-evaluated what is important to me and what is not. Experience is much better than stuff.
That said, I really enjoy going into a grocery store now and finding the stuff to make whatever I so desire – in triplicate. While many people say “Oh! I’m going to eat healthier cheaper and simpler in CR”, that often comes with eating more monotonous cuisine, or pay a very high premium for foods you love and longed for, or organic and gluten free ingredients. Some things were just impossible to get ( Real Lemons) or very very expensive (turkey). I really missed the comfort foods of back home, and especially going for Real Chinese food, or Indian Food, or even Mexican food. Getting things I really do need now no longer involves a trip back to the USA, waiting for a “mule” to bring them in, or a 5 hour trip into San Jose.
Immediacy
We do get spoiled here by immediacy. Even when it seems not so immediate. When things go wrong or we need something, we know where to get a part, who to call, can connect with someone who speaks English, and can at least set in motion a service repairman road service, or doctor's appointment. If we need something shipped to us, we could easily use amazon or have it "overnighted to us" with only a modest premium. In Costa Rica, immediacy is just not an option. It's not to say that everything takes forever, but delays and difficulty are more the norm than the exception. It might be a matter of hours, or it might be a matter of months or sometimes even years. Getting your residency approved - average wait 1 year, getting into a CAJA doctor - maybe a week to a month unless it was an emergency. Repairman? Who knows? - And then getting a part for something broken - 3 days to "who knows?" Getting things shipped to you from the US was in many cases a total fiasco. To start with, the lack of addresses made it far more difficult. Imagine the operator's surprise when you tell them to ship your new credit card to "100 meters off the main road to wherever, turn right at the large oak tree, and then down the dirt road 100 meters on the left just past the old tailors shed, (pause), What's the zipcode you ask??????!!" While amazon might ship things, it did not necessarily mean that they would get to you in any reasonable time frame, and then there was the dreaded duty tax…..
So a return to immediacy and reliability is an adjustment that I really like.
Security
Let me start by saying that there were very very few times when I ever feared for my personal security the entire time I spent in Costa Rica. Far fewer than driving through some areas of Miami. I also never had any fear that my fine Tico neighbors and housekeeper, even though they had very little, would break into my house and rob me when I was gone. But there was petty crime there – a lot of it. It was almost a right-of-passage that you would be burglarized sometime. It was not that most Tico’s lacked any moral fiber, but a few did – and those were the ones that were often the cause of these burglaries, and not just to gringos. The problem was that their legal system made it very difficult for law enforcement to do much about it, even if they cared. We did learn to religiously lock our doors and windows, and turn on our alarm, but alarms were always going off for any number of reasons day and night and nobody paid any attention to them. So we diligently tried to keep valuable things out of plain sight, and hoped for the best when we went away for extended periods of time.
The other aspect of this is the security of driving. In the US, we take it for granted that roads will be in pretty good shape, or at least we know in advance when we will be “off-roading” it. We have GPS’s, and Waze, and AAA to rescue us if we breakdown or get lost.
In Costa Rica, although some GPS’s will work, they are not always reliable or accurate. You can’t count on signs either, since they are very often few and far between – and as I said before there are no addresses to plug into your GPS, or sometime even marked street names. Having said that, we did manage to overcome these obstacles and learn to ropes of driving in Costa Rica. The point I am making though, is that I never felt really secure – especially going to places I was not familiar with, and especially into a large city with a lot of traffic and unmarked one way streets like San Jose. It was always a white knuckled experience. Should the worst happen, even though I spoke Spanish fairly well, there was always an uncertainty if I’d be able to figure out my way through this.
Familiarity
There is something about the familiar that makes everything in the world better. While you may crave the exotic vacation to the far flung regions of the world, it is always great to come “back home”. Home meant more than just a shelter. It was a community of friends, family and acquaintances; knowing where to find comfortable underwear; knowing the local customs; even knowing how to cross the street. It is listening to conversations and understanding what was said, and answering the telephone and not having to struggle to figure out what the person on the other end of the line was saying.
While I adapted well the living in Costa Rica, it was not without effort; and while many wonderful things offset having to put forth this effort, it was none the less an effort. I have always said that “you know you are home, when you come back from your travels and you feel that surge of relief knowing ‘I’m home!’“ For some expats, this was possible; for me it just never was. While I loved the 3 years I spent in Costa Rica, by the end of those, the exotic adventure of living there was wearing thin. I confess that as age caught up with me, I longed for the familiar.
A Wider Community
One of the things I did love about being an expat in Costa Rica was the fact that not everyone was American. Even the expat community was made up of Canadians, British, Dutch, French, and Italians. It gave a much wider view of the world and the ability to distance myself from all the petty stuff that was filling the airwaves in the USA. In many respects living there made you “family”. We did watch out for each other, and grew as a community. In many cases we also learned to become part of the Tico community as well by becoming involved in their community projects, teaching English classes, and more. We became truly International citizens and not just US ones. There was very much a live-and-let-live mentality that was far-and-away removed from the very judgmental ones I’ve found coming back to the USA.
The down side was that it was a small and very fluid and transient community. In the three years we spent there we saw friends move away, business come and go, and petty grievances come between people. What initially bound us together as close knit group of friends with common needs, dissipated as we adapted. Sometimes open groups became closed cliques, or people just developed interests or preferences that did not include you. One thing that I never really felt comfortable with was the “ladies group stuff” and the “men’s group stuff”. It was not taken lightly. Also distances were such that it was not always easy to extend your reach of friends outside of your local area.
While moving back to the USA did not completely solve this, but I am in a much larger pool. Living in a retirement community has its own pluses and minuses, but I am learning to adapt to this as well. No longer being in an international community, I now find some of my fellow American’s view of the world and opinions much more insular and colloquial.
Reliable Quality Health Care (Maybe)
To start with one of the main reasons we moved to Costa Rica was the lack of affordable insurance in the US. Please note this was BEFORE Obamacare went onto effect! My Insurance alone was costing $650 a month and that was with a $7500 deductible. It was only available through a State Managed Insurance Plan because of a Pre-Existing condition. My wife was on a similar type plan with very high deductible. We dropped both plans when we moved to Costa Rica and went “bare” so-to-speak, paying only for the care we needed out-of-pocket. It did work great! I had cataract surgery done in San Jose by an excellent English speaking doctor and the cost was half or less than I’d have paid before I met my deductible in the USA. Other times we used local doctors and just paid out of pocket. I loved the fact that I just needed to walk into a pharmacy in Costa Rica and tell them what I needed and they’d fill it. Rarely did I even need an RX. Since I was taking insulin, I was able to get the type I needed at the local pharmacy for about $100 for a set of 5 pens vs. $650 in the US without insurance (go figure!). After a close friend over-turned his 4-wheeler and had to be airlifted to San Jose, we decided we needed some type of catastrophic coverage. We ended up with a policy for expats that covered basically that. No frills or pre-existing stuff. It would however cover us during our travels anywhere except (guess!) back to the USA! It cost us for the two of us about $250 per year. Luckily we never had to use it. Whether it would have worked as advertised is anybody’s guess.
One of the reasons we did decide to return to the US (prior to the 2017 election), was that I could qualify for Medicare Plans and my wife could qualify for Obamacare with a generous subsidy since we had very little declarable income. I had also switched to an insulin pump that I purchased out-of-pocket in Costa Rica and also had to pay out-of-pocket for supplies. That changed our equation for Healthcare costs. Also as a diabetic the typical Costa Rican diet is extremely heavy on carbs and sugar – so much for the “healthy” Costa Rican diet for me.
Getting set up with a Medicare plan in the USA seemed easy until I found a lot of gotcha’s. Like the fact that the exact same insulin was covered under Part B as Durable Medical Equipment and not as a prescription drug under part D. Downside it cost me nearly double until I switched plans.
I do not like the opacity of the Insurance controlled health care system in the USA, but I do like the quality of the care I get and once I got things straightened out with my new plan, able to get my supplies for my pump and insulin covered at much less cost than in Costa Rica. My wife was able to get onto a good plan here very inexpensively thanks to Obamacare. Right now we are very uncertain how long this will last and what will happen if they go back to “the new-old way” of doing things with high unsubsidized premiums and pre-existing condition clauses.
More to Do
While you would think that living right next to the beach would offer endless entertainment, and it did for a while. But after a time, the charm of it started to wear thin. It’s one thing to go on holiday and spend all day sitting on the beach for a week drinking beer or rum, after two weeks – well it’s just sitting all day sitting on the beach. I did love snorkeling and the occasional high surf days to go bogey boarding, but mostly I did my morning beach walk and swim, and then headed for home. We did travel about to the surrounding areas, and went to festivals and ferrias regularly. We went to Hot Springs, and Nature preserves, and in truth got as much of the “low hanging fruit” as we could. Going further-a-field often meant traveling on the dreaded Pan Am Hwy 1, or on unmarked back roads. Night time driving was not something I relished so trips outside our “zone” would mean staying overnight somewhere. Hobbies such as Sailing and Deep Sea fishing were indeed great there, but still relatively expensive, and saved for more special occasions and not a regular daily thing. Women there tended to bond and form their own groups. For men, it just was not the case. Life there pretty much revolved around a couple hours of recreation and then just running errands, and doing chores.
So now living in a retirement community, I have an abundance of activities and lots of people to do them with. I also have learned to find solace in doing things by myself. I enjoy going out on trails or bike riding by myself here – something I found a bit too daring to do in Costa Rica. There are also movie theaters and theater in Enlgish that I enjoy here as well, and the comfort of my native holidays to celbratre and share with others.
The Cost of Living
Yes, living in the USA costs more. Luckily, our financial situation changed so that the additional expenses were not a burden. We have purchased our new home now and don't worry about mortgages or landlords, or need to move because or new owners. Since we left the USA, the cost of food had risen quite a bit - so yes food for the most part was less expensive in Costa Rica. There was just a lot less variety. Organic stuff and gluten free stuff is much more ubiquitous in the USA and a lot cheaper than what limited selections there were in Costa Rica. I do miss the local ferias, but there are several good "farmers'" markets nearby us here. Gas here in the USA now is a lot cheaper, but car repair and services (house keeper, vet care....) a lot more expensive in the USA than in Costa Rica.
So there you have it. One year on and I am again adapting to a new life here, with bonds to my older familiar life in the USA. I still miss the sunsets, warm tropical breezes, Latin music and drinks, the start of the rainy season, un-crowded beach walks just a short walk from my house, swimming in a literal live aquarium of tropical fish, and many many more things too numerous to mention. As to the question “Would I do it again?” The answer is absolutely YES! But thinking now one year on, I am also happy with our decision to leave. I am also very grateful for the fact that we did not go out immediately and buy property, so our life savings were not tied up in Costa Rican real estate and we could exit cleanly.
Everyone who embarks on the “Journey of an Expat” will have their own experiences to add. No one can ever fully prepare for how they will adapt to this new life or how long they will want to live it. Some will end up making it their home until they die, while others will leave within 5 years as many do. Life is a journey, enjoy the ride.
To begin with, our move there was a calculated, but still wild jump into the unknown. We had reached a point in our lives in the US where we could not sustain the lifestyle we had been living. Employment, income, and many other circumstances pretty much forced us to make a change. It was like being in quicksand – if you stay still, you die. For these and other reasons we decided to swing-for-the-fences, so to speak, and try something truly adventurous. We had done our due diligence homework so we felt that we at least had enough information to make an informed decision about moving there. After three years, we are back. The reasons we repatriated as I have discussed in another blog article were “complicated”. Now a year later, let me try to reflect on the things I miss and the things that I’m glad to have returned to.
Ah, the comforts of Home
While everyone says “Oh, I want to live a much simpler lifestyle”, it goes to say that there a lot of degrees to this. On the plus side I no longer feel the need to go shopping at the warehouse store or malls every weekend, and my purchases much more focused. Have suffered through the agonies of downsizing once, I am not that quick to up-size so much. Freedom from stuff gives you freedom of mobility. I have re-evaluated what is important to me and what is not. Experience is much better than stuff.
That said, I really enjoy going into a grocery store now and finding the stuff to make whatever I so desire – in triplicate. While many people say “Oh! I’m going to eat healthier cheaper and simpler in CR”, that often comes with eating more monotonous cuisine, or pay a very high premium for foods you love and longed for, or organic and gluten free ingredients. Some things were just impossible to get ( Real Lemons) or very very expensive (turkey). I really missed the comfort foods of back home, and especially going for Real Chinese food, or Indian Food, or even Mexican food. Getting things I really do need now no longer involves a trip back to the USA, waiting for a “mule” to bring them in, or a 5 hour trip into San Jose.
Immediacy
We do get spoiled here by immediacy. Even when it seems not so immediate. When things go wrong or we need something, we know where to get a part, who to call, can connect with someone who speaks English, and can at least set in motion a service repairman road service, or doctor's appointment. If we need something shipped to us, we could easily use amazon or have it "overnighted to us" with only a modest premium. In Costa Rica, immediacy is just not an option. It's not to say that everything takes forever, but delays and difficulty are more the norm than the exception. It might be a matter of hours, or it might be a matter of months or sometimes even years. Getting your residency approved - average wait 1 year, getting into a CAJA doctor - maybe a week to a month unless it was an emergency. Repairman? Who knows? - And then getting a part for something broken - 3 days to "who knows?" Getting things shipped to you from the US was in many cases a total fiasco. To start with, the lack of addresses made it far more difficult. Imagine the operator's surprise when you tell them to ship your new credit card to "100 meters off the main road to wherever, turn right at the large oak tree, and then down the dirt road 100 meters on the left just past the old tailors shed, (pause), What's the zipcode you ask??????!!" While amazon might ship things, it did not necessarily mean that they would get to you in any reasonable time frame, and then there was the dreaded duty tax…..
So a return to immediacy and reliability is an adjustment that I really like.
Security
Let me start by saying that there were very very few times when I ever feared for my personal security the entire time I spent in Costa Rica. Far fewer than driving through some areas of Miami. I also never had any fear that my fine Tico neighbors and housekeeper, even though they had very little, would break into my house and rob me when I was gone. But there was petty crime there – a lot of it. It was almost a right-of-passage that you would be burglarized sometime. It was not that most Tico’s lacked any moral fiber, but a few did – and those were the ones that were often the cause of these burglaries, and not just to gringos. The problem was that their legal system made it very difficult for law enforcement to do much about it, even if they cared. We did learn to religiously lock our doors and windows, and turn on our alarm, but alarms were always going off for any number of reasons day and night and nobody paid any attention to them. So we diligently tried to keep valuable things out of plain sight, and hoped for the best when we went away for extended periods of time.
The other aspect of this is the security of driving. In the US, we take it for granted that roads will be in pretty good shape, or at least we know in advance when we will be “off-roading” it. We have GPS’s, and Waze, and AAA to rescue us if we breakdown or get lost.
In Costa Rica, although some GPS’s will work, they are not always reliable or accurate. You can’t count on signs either, since they are very often few and far between – and as I said before there are no addresses to plug into your GPS, or sometime even marked street names. Having said that, we did manage to overcome these obstacles and learn to ropes of driving in Costa Rica. The point I am making though, is that I never felt really secure – especially going to places I was not familiar with, and especially into a large city with a lot of traffic and unmarked one way streets like San Jose. It was always a white knuckled experience. Should the worst happen, even though I spoke Spanish fairly well, there was always an uncertainty if I’d be able to figure out my way through this.
Familiarity
There is something about the familiar that makes everything in the world better. While you may crave the exotic vacation to the far flung regions of the world, it is always great to come “back home”. Home meant more than just a shelter. It was a community of friends, family and acquaintances; knowing where to find comfortable underwear; knowing the local customs; even knowing how to cross the street. It is listening to conversations and understanding what was said, and answering the telephone and not having to struggle to figure out what the person on the other end of the line was saying.
While I adapted well the living in Costa Rica, it was not without effort; and while many wonderful things offset having to put forth this effort, it was none the less an effort. I have always said that “you know you are home, when you come back from your travels and you feel that surge of relief knowing ‘I’m home!’“ For some expats, this was possible; for me it just never was. While I loved the 3 years I spent in Costa Rica, by the end of those, the exotic adventure of living there was wearing thin. I confess that as age caught up with me, I longed for the familiar.
A Wider Community
One of the things I did love about being an expat in Costa Rica was the fact that not everyone was American. Even the expat community was made up of Canadians, British, Dutch, French, and Italians. It gave a much wider view of the world and the ability to distance myself from all the petty stuff that was filling the airwaves in the USA. In many respects living there made you “family”. We did watch out for each other, and grew as a community. In many cases we also learned to become part of the Tico community as well by becoming involved in their community projects, teaching English classes, and more. We became truly International citizens and not just US ones. There was very much a live-and-let-live mentality that was far-and-away removed from the very judgmental ones I’ve found coming back to the USA.
The down side was that it was a small and very fluid and transient community. In the three years we spent there we saw friends move away, business come and go, and petty grievances come between people. What initially bound us together as close knit group of friends with common needs, dissipated as we adapted. Sometimes open groups became closed cliques, or people just developed interests or preferences that did not include you. One thing that I never really felt comfortable with was the “ladies group stuff” and the “men’s group stuff”. It was not taken lightly. Also distances were such that it was not always easy to extend your reach of friends outside of your local area.
While moving back to the USA did not completely solve this, but I am in a much larger pool. Living in a retirement community has its own pluses and minuses, but I am learning to adapt to this as well. No longer being in an international community, I now find some of my fellow American’s view of the world and opinions much more insular and colloquial.
Reliable Quality Health Care (Maybe)
To start with one of the main reasons we moved to Costa Rica was the lack of affordable insurance in the US. Please note this was BEFORE Obamacare went onto effect! My Insurance alone was costing $650 a month and that was with a $7500 deductible. It was only available through a State Managed Insurance Plan because of a Pre-Existing condition. My wife was on a similar type plan with very high deductible. We dropped both plans when we moved to Costa Rica and went “bare” so-to-speak, paying only for the care we needed out-of-pocket. It did work great! I had cataract surgery done in San Jose by an excellent English speaking doctor and the cost was half or less than I’d have paid before I met my deductible in the USA. Other times we used local doctors and just paid out of pocket. I loved the fact that I just needed to walk into a pharmacy in Costa Rica and tell them what I needed and they’d fill it. Rarely did I even need an RX. Since I was taking insulin, I was able to get the type I needed at the local pharmacy for about $100 for a set of 5 pens vs. $650 in the US without insurance (go figure!). After a close friend over-turned his 4-wheeler and had to be airlifted to San Jose, we decided we needed some type of catastrophic coverage. We ended up with a policy for expats that covered basically that. No frills or pre-existing stuff. It would however cover us during our travels anywhere except (guess!) back to the USA! It cost us for the two of us about $250 per year. Luckily we never had to use it. Whether it would have worked as advertised is anybody’s guess.
One of the reasons we did decide to return to the US (prior to the 2017 election), was that I could qualify for Medicare Plans and my wife could qualify for Obamacare with a generous subsidy since we had very little declarable income. I had also switched to an insulin pump that I purchased out-of-pocket in Costa Rica and also had to pay out-of-pocket for supplies. That changed our equation for Healthcare costs. Also as a diabetic the typical Costa Rican diet is extremely heavy on carbs and sugar – so much for the “healthy” Costa Rican diet for me.
Getting set up with a Medicare plan in the USA seemed easy until I found a lot of gotcha’s. Like the fact that the exact same insulin was covered under Part B as Durable Medical Equipment and not as a prescription drug under part D. Downside it cost me nearly double until I switched plans.
I do not like the opacity of the Insurance controlled health care system in the USA, but I do like the quality of the care I get and once I got things straightened out with my new plan, able to get my supplies for my pump and insulin covered at much less cost than in Costa Rica. My wife was able to get onto a good plan here very inexpensively thanks to Obamacare. Right now we are very uncertain how long this will last and what will happen if they go back to “the new-old way” of doing things with high unsubsidized premiums and pre-existing condition clauses.
More to Do
While you would think that living right next to the beach would offer endless entertainment, and it did for a while. But after a time, the charm of it started to wear thin. It’s one thing to go on holiday and spend all day sitting on the beach for a week drinking beer or rum, after two weeks – well it’s just sitting all day sitting on the beach. I did love snorkeling and the occasional high surf days to go bogey boarding, but mostly I did my morning beach walk and swim, and then headed for home. We did travel about to the surrounding areas, and went to festivals and ferrias regularly. We went to Hot Springs, and Nature preserves, and in truth got as much of the “low hanging fruit” as we could. Going further-a-field often meant traveling on the dreaded Pan Am Hwy 1, or on unmarked back roads. Night time driving was not something I relished so trips outside our “zone” would mean staying overnight somewhere. Hobbies such as Sailing and Deep Sea fishing were indeed great there, but still relatively expensive, and saved for more special occasions and not a regular daily thing. Women there tended to bond and form their own groups. For men, it just was not the case. Life there pretty much revolved around a couple hours of recreation and then just running errands, and doing chores.
So now living in a retirement community, I have an abundance of activities and lots of people to do them with. I also have learned to find solace in doing things by myself. I enjoy going out on trails or bike riding by myself here – something I found a bit too daring to do in Costa Rica. There are also movie theaters and theater in Enlgish that I enjoy here as well, and the comfort of my native holidays to celbratre and share with others.
The Cost of Living
Yes, living in the USA costs more. Luckily, our financial situation changed so that the additional expenses were not a burden. We have purchased our new home now and don't worry about mortgages or landlords, or need to move because or new owners. Since we left the USA, the cost of food had risen quite a bit - so yes food for the most part was less expensive in Costa Rica. There was just a lot less variety. Organic stuff and gluten free stuff is much more ubiquitous in the USA and a lot cheaper than what limited selections there were in Costa Rica. I do miss the local ferias, but there are several good "farmers'" markets nearby us here. Gas here in the USA now is a lot cheaper, but car repair and services (house keeper, vet care....) a lot more expensive in the USA than in Costa Rica.
So there you have it. One year on and I am again adapting to a new life here, with bonds to my older familiar life in the USA. I still miss the sunsets, warm tropical breezes, Latin music and drinks, the start of the rainy season, un-crowded beach walks just a short walk from my house, swimming in a literal live aquarium of tropical fish, and many many more things too numerous to mention. As to the question “Would I do it again?” The answer is absolutely YES! But thinking now one year on, I am also happy with our decision to leave. I am also very grateful for the fact that we did not go out immediately and buy property, so our life savings were not tied up in Costa Rican real estate and we could exit cleanly.
Everyone who embarks on the “Journey of an Expat” will have their own experiences to add. No one can ever fully prepare for how they will adapt to this new life or how long they will want to live it. Some will end up making it their home until they die, while others will leave within 5 years as many do. Life is a journey, enjoy the ride.