Comment by scarface_74

I work remotely at a cloud consulting company for company context.

First time zone and proximity to the US and more specifically for me, short flights from cities we consider “home” - Orlando where I live and Atlanta where we are from and where many of our friends and adult sons live.

Second it’s safe, they don’t even have a military,they have a good public health system, it’s relatively easy to become a permanent resident and have access to both their public health care system (caja) and private health care.

Nice apartments and AirBnbs in San Jose are really affordable - $1500-$2500 a month.

You aren’t going to find that combination anywhere else in US time zones besides Panama City Panama and from what I read, it is much more urban, crowded and less tranquil than San Jose Costa Rica.

We went to Costa Rica this year on vacation (Manuel Antonio). Next year we are going back twice - once for a week to get a local “relocation” guide to take us around the different neighborhoods and then going back for a month once we know the lay of the land.

For more context on our current life

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44159562

So it’s really not lifting and shifting for us. We pack everything we own and put them in suitcases and put our condotel unit in the rental pool to offset our mortgage and HOA fees when we are gone for months. We did that domestically for almost a year between late 2022-late 2023