Moving To Costa Rica: The Story Of A Family From the US

If you had told me 10 years ago that my toddler would be attending 7th grade in Costa Rica, I would have looked at you cross-eyed, yet here we are, living in Samara, Costa Rica! How'd we get here? Let me share the story...it starts with a dream, includes a wedding (not ours), and ends with our family moving to Costa Rica.

The Dream of Moving To Costa Rica

We started visiting Costa Rica in 2009. We did the typical "we're only coming once tour" cramming in as much as we could in those 10 days. Not only did we see some of Costa Rica's crown jewels, but we caught a glimpse of something else. We kept coming back and coming back and coming back and coming back again. There is something magical about the land of pura vida. The people are friendly, the country is beautiful and the Ticos live life in a very different way than we do in the States. 

An idea was born, a crazy idea to some, that idea? Moving to Costa Rica.

We spent hours and hours (and hours and hours and hours) talking about it. We talked about it on the beach of Costa Rica, we talked about it in the mountains of Colorado, we talked about it everywhere. Looking back, we spent hours (and hours and hours and hours) manifesting the idea.

And eventually, we bought a house in Samara in 2017 with the goal of someday moving to Costa Rica for a year - the details to be figured out when the time came.

Testing the Water

Then came the opportunity. I negotiated a deal with my boss and we moved our family to Costa Rica for two months. And we loved every minute of it. But we had to return to the States and despite our vow to incorporate more pura vida into our lives, we fell right back into our harried routine.

But the dream lived on. We kept dreaming about moving to Costa Rica, but we're not independently wealthy and while we had squirreled some money away, it wasn't money we could spend (or wanted to). So that was the question, a big question, how exactly would we pay for our life if we moved to Costa Rica? 

So our dream of moving to Costa Rica remained just that...a dream.

The Universe Intevenes

And then the universe intervened. Our dear friends' wedding invitation. The perfect excuse to return to our happy place. Little did we know how our lives would change with that trip.

The bride and groom knew about our dream, after all, we'd spent nearly every day of the preceding summer talking about it. In some ways, it became their dream as well as ours. I guess we shouldn't have been surprised when the groom mentioned a friend's business was for sale. 

Long story short, that one comment snowballed, and the next thing we knew we had bought a business! Looking back, we did it on a whim. And it's probably good that we did because I'm not sure we would have done it otherwise.

Less than 6 weeks after our friends' wedding, we became the proud owners of Coldwell Banker Samara, the largest real estate agency in Samara, Costa Rica. Needless to say, overnight our lives got crazy. Our youngest was in 5th grade, the last year of elementary school and we weren't sure we wanted to rip him from that special year of his life. So, we figured we'd find a way to make it work even if it meant traveling to and from Costa Rica and trading off parenting duty.

And then he shocked us...when given the choice, he decided he wanted to move as soon as possible. Overnight life got even crazier! Do you have any idea how much is involved in an international move? The thought was completely overwhelming.

But we dug in and made it happen. Was it perfect? Nope! We didn't bring things we needed, we brought things we didn’t, and I'm pretty sure our dog didn't enter the country 100% legally. But no matter, here we are. We actually did it, we moved our family to Costa Rica.

And we haven't regretted it for one minute.