For as long as we could remember we'd labored 12 hour times and spent nearly all of our time figuring out how to keep even...getting ahead was not even in the cards.
Then 9/11 happened. And for people it absolutely was an epiphany. Living was also small to invest the balance of our lives on a treadmill that gone nowhere. We accelerated our pension options by almost twenty years.
And over the next year we sold everything we held and ultimately found ourselves in Costa Rica (which, actually, we'd just visited when costa rica tours...and on vacation at that !).
Ridiculous? In hindsight, sure. To go on to a international state wherever we knew no-one, did not know the language and our just exposure was the web? Of course, it had been stupid.
But...we liked it, even notwithstanding the truth that living here was totally different compared to the publications represented or the web showed. We leased a tiny home about one hour outside San Jose in a residential district that was rural, coffee state and yet still big enough to really have a clinic and within 45 minutes of the main airport.
And we bought land...and we developed a house. And fortuitously, Rhonda had the temperament to cope with the neighborhood builders, even though we didn't realize significantly Spanish. I still kept a type A and the manana attitude went me crazy.
And much of the true property and construction business was definitely not in just about any "how to..." guide that people ever found. And we definitely produced mistakes. But thankfully they didn't harm us TOO significantly financially. And we asked a lot of questions and we discovered, over time, how the real property industry performed in Costa Rica.
And we determined that we wished to let others know what we'd to learn the difficult way. We started a property company whose sole purpose was to provide properties which reflected rates that natives paid...because there's a two tier real-estate industry in Costa Rica...one for "gringos" and one for Ticos (locals, as Costa Ricans contact themselves).
Since there are very few rules or regulations for real estate here, our "publicity" of the market did not make people very popular with different property people. (remember, Costa Rica is really a VERY little country...about the size of West Virginia or Houston). So our web site didn't precisely endear people to regional agents have been applied to receiving whatsoever rates and commissions which they believed the traffic would bear.
And slowly we began to acquire a reputation...admittedly, some was great, some bad...depending upon who you talked to. And we started to get publicity...unsolicited coverage from magazines like Newsweek and Investors Company Daily. And our business grew. And grew some more.
As our organization became we started to meet up more folks from Costa Rica...some important, some not... some quality, some not. And we turned confronted with many more types of investments that were totally foreign to us. And we realized who really "controls" the united states and which people get a handle on investment money and have the effect to create policy. To show simply how much of our knowledge was "chance" (and I personally don't rely on coincidences... I believe which they occur for a reason) our next attorney was introduced to us strictly used at a nearby getting; "coincidentally" his partner was from Minnesota...Rhonda was then asked to a regular gathering of "gringas", that committed Ticos 35-40 years ago and who've now ALL become very important ; e.g., Minister of Money; Minister of Agriculture and two different former cabinet members.
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