Learn why REAL ESTATE is so vital to your financial future. Kevin J. Johnston and Mark Savoia talk about buying and selling homes in COSTA RICA and parts of Canada. It's Time to start your new life in a better country!
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WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 20 at 9PM Eastern Time
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Here is the Transcript of the show from WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 10, 2024
Hello everybody, Kevin J. Johnston here.
This is The Real Estate Show, which is absolutely every Wednesday night at 9 p.m.
Eastern time on freedomreport.ca.
You'll also find the show live on Facebook, DLive, Twitch, and a number of other locations.
We're simultaneously live right now on TikTok.
So I'll be taking a lot of questions on
tonight's show.
I'll be checking all the chat rooms tonight in reference to Costa Rica, real estate, and some of the rules and laws wrapped around what Costa Rica is, what it does, and what it allows.
We're already getting a number of questions right here in the chat room on TikTok.
The show goes for about an hour.
We're hoping that Mark Savoia will be joining us shortly.
I know that he is seeing clients tonight.
We have never been busier in this industry.
There's so many people leaving Canada.
To come to Costa Rica.
Now there's other countries that Canadians are going to like El Salvador, which is cheaper, but the infrastructure is nowhere near as complete and thorough as what Costa Rica has.
Panama is another one that Canadians are going to, which is cheaper.
but has a few problems with a little bit of a communist regime there it's not horrible but it still has a lot of things that people don't like in life what i will say here about the costa rican government is that so long as you are not hurting anybody or pestering anybody they leave you alone it is really easy to get your hands on building permits it's really easy to get your hands on a car down here
And, you know, I didn't say this out loud, but if you're on the highways and you're outside of the towns, they don't even care if you're speeding so long as, again, you are not hurting anybody.
So there's a great deal of freedom here.
Sinister Shine is asking me about housing prices in Costa Rica.
That is really dependent on what region of the country you want to be in.
If you're going to be in the northwest of the country, places like Cocoa Beach or Liberia, housing prices are about half the price of what they would be in Yavita.
But that part of the country experiences a very dry, dry season, and it is not popular during the dry season at all.
so it actually properties in that part of the country are a little more difficult to sell should you decide that you are tired of of owning a property in those areas now some people um they do get tired of their property so what they'll do is in costa rica here they will rent them out to others so airbnb them or just rent them out for short or long-term rentals
Houses that are in the southwest, such as in Manuel Antonio, Quepos, or Yavita, they sell a lot easier than they would in the northwest of the country.
Now, I focus all my energy, everybody, on the west coast.
That is the better of the two coasts.
I have not even been to the Atlantic coast yet.
I'm not spending any time on the Atlantic coast for the next couple of months.
I really am going to be mastering my craft on the west coast, so I really won't have any answers for you.
about the East Coast.
But as for San Jose, the capital city, I spent the last three days in the capital city
here in San Jose.
And what I can say is that it's highly populated and it's very, very densely populated.
It's easy to get around if you get a GPS.
Driving in San Jose is a little bit of an adventure because at rush hour, which is 5 p.m., like boom, 5 p.m.,
Everyone's rushing to get home because the sun is going down at about 545.
All right, so rush hour is pretty thick in the way of traffic.
So there's a lot of slowdowns.
Late at night, when I say late at night, I mean after 9 or even after 10 p.m.
the roads are empty.
I mean empty.
You can explore all of San Jose and see everything that you want to see at night.
Now, nothing's open, but you can drive anywhere you want to drive late at night in San Jose.
It is a culmination of
town townships, kind of like, you know, Toronto with its its sections, Etobicoke, New Toronto, Scarborough, North York and so on.
All those areas make up Toronto.
You get the same thing in San Jose, except it's more so that they were originally small towns and they have they've kept their small town
identity and are considered the greater san jose area but they're all very densely populated so um anything you want to buy is here i mean anything laser printers are here cars are here motorcycles are here computers laptops tvs anything you need bleach people think that it's um
uh that costa rica is a third world country no it is a highly developing nation and and san jose is a very highly developed uh city but it is run down in some areas and that that's that goes with any city that's hundreds of years old you're always going to have those sections that are run down
And they are incredibly busy.
So if you wanted to explore San Jose, especially right downtown, it's better to do so on foot.
Now, I personally would not buy a place right downtown.
That's just my own personal take on it.
I find that a lot of the buildings are quite old and would require quite a bit of renovation.
and getting renovators into that area would be difficult because it is so tightly packed.
I mean, there are people on every corner.
So right now, what I can say is the only city that I've been to that's busier during the business day is Hong Kong.
Hong Kong is busier by a lot.
San Jose, to me anyway, is a lot busier than Toronto.
Now, a couple of reasons for that is that people don't have cars.
downtown, so they stay in the downtown core of San Jose, but also the streets are considerably narrower.
You know, some of you who might be used to Manhattan or downtown Montreal, downtown Toronto and so on, the streets are incredibly wide, so you can actually have cars parked on the side of the road and still have two lanes going each way in the downtown core.
Well, in San Jose, if you park a car on the right side, only one car can get by.
So it does jam traffic up.
So it's busier because there's less room on each street to move around.
I got a question here from Ali.
He's asking if food is expensive here in Costa Rica.
Yes, if you go to the wrong place.
Obviously, as soon as you start shopping in any of the tourist areas,
the prices are high.
They're going to be the same as Toronto, New York, Los Angeles, Calgary, Vancouver.
There's no escaping that.
But if you did want to take a bit of extra time and go to the locals or the local shop, you're not going to have as wide a selection, but you're going to be able to pay a considerably lower price.
And that is a dynamite thing to do, paying a lower price because you can also negotiate for prices.
All right.
And I'm getting people here telling me, sorry,
Someone said there is no sound.
Are you actually able to hear me, folks, on Facebook?
Let me know, please, in the chat room if you can hear me on Facebook.
Yes, so food prices are cheap if you go to the right place.
It really, I suppose, depends to you on how much of a variety that you are looking for.
Okay, thanks.
Yeah, thanks, everyone, for letting me know you can hear me.
I appreciate that.
How much the more variety you want in a store, the more expensive that store is going to be.
The less variety, obviously, the lower the price is going to be.
I'm really big into fruit, vegetables, chicken and fish and some beef.
So there are select local places that I go to.
And what I'll do is I will load up on food, like in Evita, for example, on the West Coast.
Recently, I bought eight dozen farmer fresh eggs and I bought five one and a half pound bags of coffee.
It cost me 60 bucks.
Those eggs are going to last me two weeks, I'm sure, because I do eggs a couple times a day.
And the coffee, well, I go through a pound of coffee every third day, I would assume.
So I...
It'll last.
I mean, $60 for eggs and coffee is certainly going to last me long enough that $60 is worth spending on that.
But I'll supplement that with cucumbers, salad fixings, other vegetables, and fruits.
Obviously, pineapple is everywhere here.
Most places that you go to on the West Coast, and even down here in San Jose, pineapples are about 800 colones.
1,000 colognes is $2.50 Canadian.
So if you work that out, I would say take a guess that a big pineapple is about two bucks.
Now you can go in the wild with a machete and you can cut the pineapples yourself.
I've done that.
I've also been covered in ants doing that a few times.
So you really got to know what you're doing.
There are banana trees that grow wild everywhere.
I didn't know this about bananas, but the banana, it only grows the cluster of bananas once.
I didn't know that.
So if you take your machete and just go chop and take down a whole thing of bananas, you might get about 80 or so bananas in one bushel.
But that's it.
The tree's done growing bananas for that season.
You got to wait until the next season before more bananas will grow.
I also did find out that you can take a pineapple when you're done eating it.
If you cut the top inch off of a pineapple and bury it in the soil,
to the point where just the green stem or the green leafy substance at the top is exposed, you'll have a pineapple plant within two years that will spread out.
So pineapples grow very low to the ground.
And hello Hal, thank you for being here.
Greatly appreciate you coming back.
Hello JC, thanks for being here.
Mr. Brown Blue Eyes, appreciate that as well.
Thank you folks for showing up.
So some of the common questions that I am being asked all of the time here is should I plan
a trip to Costa Rica?
Well, I mean, that's an easy answer.
All right.
When do you go somewhere and not plan to go somewhere?
There are places that I've gone where I just said, yep, the hell with it.
I'm putting on my backpack and I'm gone.
Usually places like that were American cities where in America, if you land in a town and you get bored, you can jump on JetBlue for 80 bucks and fly to a different city.
That's very handy.
I used to live in the United States in my 20s, so I know American culture inside and out.
it's very comfortable to do.
And once in a while, I would pick up and go to Mexico or anywhere else, but I was only doing so for a week.
So you could survive going to pretty much anywhere that is considered a developing country in the Western hemisphere with your backpack, phone, your charger, and other things.
I highly recommend if you're going to do that, take $2,000 US cash with you because every country in Latin America will take US dollars.
Mexico right now,
is the one that where in some cases they only want the peso now they won't take us dollars now that's not in playa del carmen where i was in mexico they are taking um us dollars wherever i went so um what is the average cost of a house there well uh brown eyes blue like
What city are you in?
Where do you want to be?
Let's ask that question.
If we're going to talk about housing prices, I want to know where you want to be.
San Jose is loaded with action.
In San Jose, the temperature is about 75 to 80 degrees during the day.
But as soon as the sun drops and it drops fast here,
it drops to like 68, 69, 70 degrees with a beautiful breeze coming through.
So some folks actually even wear sweaters in San Jose here, even though it's equatorial, they still wear sweaters at night in various areas.
San Jose is much further above sea level than the West Coast.
Now, on the West Coast there, Jaco
You've got Jaco, you've got Capos, and then you've got Parita, followed by Yuvita.
Those places are hot, okay?
So anywhere where you are at sea level on the west coast, you can count on between 80 and 87 degrees during the day.
It's also going to be in the 80s at night, unless you're renting a villa or you own a house up on the mountains.
Now, when we say mountains here, yes, they are mountains, but they're mostly made of soft clay.
the only thing that holds them together is all the vegetation like there's just trees it's look at uh costa rica on satellite view on google and you'll see that there's no shortage of trees anywhere the whole country is just jungle it's trees all right so um this idea that the rainforest is going missing it's an absolute fallacy this country is loaded with trees and it's the trees with the roots that hold these clay mountains together but you can build houses on these clay mountains
And when you do, for example, the place I've got in Uvita is about a thousand feet above sea level at night.
Temperature drops to about 72, 73.
Nice light breeze coming through.
It's actually incredibly pleasant in that area.
But when I was living down at sea level at night, it would stay 82, 83 and no breeze.
And you figure it would be the opposite with you being right beside the ocean.
But the reason you don't get
breezes coming off the ocean is because the ocean water isn't cooler than the air.
The ocean is 78 degrees and so on.
So you don't cool off in the ocean on the West Coast.
It's warm.
It's excessively warm.
Now, it's beautiful.
Don't get me wrong.
I'm not complaining about that.
It's not like you're going to get in and freeze.
It's warm.
So you don't get any breeze.
Ingrid's asking $400,000 US.
There's a lot of houses that I've got listed right now.
that are between 320,000 and 400,000 US.
Now, typically those will be two bedroom homes, sometimes three, but they will be smaller houses.
Most houses do come with a pool, even though the pools might be small, maybe 12 feet long by seven, eight feet wide, but you still want to have a pool to cool off in.
I mean, without a pool outside, your mood's going to kind of drop a little bit.
because it does get hot and you want that freedom to just dunk and cool off quickly.
And hello to everybody in Winnipeg.
Thanks for being here.
Appreciate that, Gord.
So these are some of the observations that I've made.
You can always see my listings, everybody.
If you go to my personal website, kevinjjohnston.me, right in the middle of the navigation bar at the top of the site, it says Costa Rica Real Estate.
So what I'll do is I'll show it to you now.
This is what it looks like on my website.
So first, here's my homepage.
I know you can't see it over here on TikTok, but I know you guys know how to use the web.
so there's the home page and this is costa rica real estate right up here at the top we click on that and this is where i have my listings put in place
but it's also where we have archives of the show and there's also a whole bunch of question and answer videos that we did.
For example, all of these Q&A videos I did with Mark Savoia.
So many of you have so many questions that we just started making videos to answer all of those questions for you.
All right, so I actually have $750,000 cash.
Is that enough to leave Canada and stay in Costa Rica?
It would depend on the city that you're going to be in, Howard.
And also, you might want to make sure you have some type of an income to be here.
Now, if you're able to pay cash for your house in Costa Rica, especially on the West Coast, your living expenses become incredibly low.
So electricity is the most expensive thing in Costa Rica.
Why?
They don't have nuclear plants or coal burning plants here.
It's imported electricity.
So at about 300 bucks a month is what you'll pay for electricity if you're big into air conditioning, which many of us are.
but your water is about 25 bucks a month.
Propane, everyone's stoves and ovens are on propane, so it's up to you how much of that that you use.
It's a good idea to have a combination of cooking indoors on your propane stove,
and also cooking on your propane barbecue.
If you split that up, you can run two tanks for a couple of months at least.
And then your property taxes.
So far, I don't have a house on my listing side right now that has a property tax of more than $900 US per year.
So that's not even $6,000 a year.
to run your house food that's up to you how much you eat and of course car expenses are not are not house expenses so i'm just making it as realistic for you as i possibly can if you're on the west coast i highly recommend vehicle ownership of some type whether it's motorcycle atv side by side or pickup truck on the west coast everybody you want to make sure that you have four-wheel drive
the jaco capos uh manuel antonio and uvita the the cities are built on both sides of a paved highway but the vast majority of the roads are on the sides of these mountains they are clay roads with rocks pounded into the ground uh some of these roads are on 45 degree angles believe it or not and uh i
love to walk up 45 degree angle roads because it's like doing a massive leg workout.
But cars that are two wheel drive are not going to make them up there.
So it'd be up to you to make sure you've got a four wheel drive vehicle.
Even if it's only a four cylinder four wheel drive, you'll have more torque with four wheel drive to get up these hills.
But San Jose, there's none of that.
Don't have to worry about driving up steep hills.
Everything's been pretty leveled out.
I'm just going to check the rumble room here.
All right, here we go.
All right, so we're looking for all your questions here.
We're going to answer as many as we possibly can.
Okay.
And thank you, Hal.
I really do appreciate that.
All right, more questions here.
Again, getting back to the question, how should I approach planning a vacation?
to costa rica well i mean you decide to go you get a plane ticket as long as you got a passport uh you can be here if you're going to show up um in in costa rica you just want to make sure that you've got a plane ticket that shows that you're leaving now you don't have to have a return ticket to where you're going but if you arrive here and you want to stay
for a long period of time, they will want to know that you've got a plane ticket.
So I actually deal with a company that puts together plane tickets for people who want to stay for longer periods of time.
They come with legit code numbers.
The flight may or may not be taking place.
And because it's only a reservation, it's not illegal to print these things out, have that with you, present that with you, and proceed to enter the country.
This is what happened with me entering Costa Rica.
I was in line, the border guard,
Asked me my name.
I said, you know, here's my name.
Here's my passport.
How long are you staying?
I said, six months.
Do you have a plane ticket?
I said, yes, here it is.
Handed it to him.
Where are you staying?
I had the address on my phone from my contact here in Costa Rica.
He said, how are you getting there?
Shuttle bus, stamp my passport, welcome to Costa Rica.
And he wrote six months on my passport so I can stay for six months.
At the end of that six months, I have to leave the country for a day and then come back in and I get to stay for six more months.
So you want to make sure you got cash by 2000 us with you and you'll find you can spend that anywhere, but you got to understand.
A little bit about the culture of each region that you're coming to now I obviously answer questions on my website Kevin j johnston.me you can ask me questions on my contact form and i'll answer those if you're going to ask me where should you go.
My question to you is, what do you like to do?
You know, if you like a really busy, bustling city, San Jose.
Go south to San Ysidro.
You want to surf?
Hakko.
Absolutely go to Hakko.
If you want to boogie board, Kaipos.
If you want to be around, like, if you're here to pick up chicks or pick up guys,
Hakko and Kaepos, those are the two places that you go.
If you're looking for quiet and you wanna be in the cheaper area, you go to the northwest of Cocoa Beach or Liberia.
You also can fly directly to Liberia.
If you want absolute quiet, you wanna be left alone and be a hermit, Uvita.
So these are places, there's just different things available to you to do in these different regions.
So before I can tell you
everything that you need to know.
I need to know what your lifestyle is.
And there we go.
There's a lot of nightclubs here in San Jose.
I think you'd be quite pleased if that is what you are after.
Okay.
Yeah, so Rock fan Jonathan, as much as I would love to move to Costa Rica, I can't wait.
Okay, hockey.
I haven't seen hockey anywhere here, but if you were to open up a ball hockey league, I'm pretty sure you'd have a lot of expats, lots of ex-Canadians and Americans joining you for that.
um pickleball is big down here all the pickleball courts are completely booked up all of the time uh if you were to open a business down here let's say open 20 pickleball courts on one plot of land and charge club memberships you probably do quite well you know so long as the business that you're opening here in costa rica is something that people want
Well, they'll flock to you.
So don't just come down here and open up the status quo stuff.
If you're going to come down here and open up a restaurant, you got to have a hook, man.
It's got to be a good hook.
But let's just say you did want to open up a basic burger joint down here in Costa Rica, especially on the West Coast.
And I didn't tell you this.
People don't know jack.
And I mean, they know nothing about marketing.
So if you're really good at marketing, if you've got a big mouth like me and you're out there all the time, putting up signs, putting out flyers, having parties and the whole bit, having social events, your burger joint will do better than everybody else.
That's just how it is.
So they don't do a lot of marketing down here.
They just don't.
They open up a storefront and they expect people to show up because it's more like the 80s here with a lot of cash deals being made, a lot of signage outside, but not a lot of social media presence.
If I had to hazard a guess, I would say more than 60% of businesses in Costa Rica do not even have websites.
They rely on the signage that they have and word of mouth.
which is okay for the culture here, but not good enough if you're an expat.
You want to come down here, you got to be loud, loud, loud all of the time.
And yeah, Rock fan Jonathan, I love lacrosse.
You guys know that I owned my own lacrosse league for three years.
I love the sport.
I haven't seen it down here.
To play it outdoors, I'll be harsh.
It's hot.
That gear is hot.
All right.
Is it okay for a Viking from Norway to move to Florida?
Yes, and I'm going to actually be introducing a gentleman in a couple of weeks on my other show, The Kevin J. Johnston Show, who is an expert at getting visas and getting applications filled out for anybody who wants to move down to the United States.
So yeah, I'll be able to answer questions about the United States in the coming weeks and the coming months.
I don't have all those answers right now.
Um, Kev, what do you think of Santa Teresa beach town?
Uh, white shortly.
I don't, I haven't been there yet.
Um, I got down here to reestablish myself because the Canadian government was giving me a very difficult time.
So I have quite frankly been to the gym in the morning.
And I work about 12 to 14 hours a day every single day.
This three-day trip to San Jose, sorry, is something that I needed just to kind of clear my head.
I have been building this business very hard.
I'm going at it very hard.
So I've only been to the beach about four times that I can think of since I got here because I did come here to work.
And so I don't have any opinions for you on hanging around and partying yet because I just, I haven't been doing it.
How do you spell UVita?
U-V-I-T-A.
To make it even easier for yourself to find UVita on the map and to learn more about it, just type in whale's tail.
There is a beach in UVita called the whale's tail.
It looks like a whale's tail from a satellite or from the sky.
And there's a lot of whales that breed and swim off the coast.
So you actually do see whales at the whale's tail.
Why?
Because the magnetic poles of the earth converge at that point.
It confuses the whales and that's where they will hang out.
That's why property values in Yuvita are so high.
But also at the end of February and at the beginning of March, there is a massive festival in Yuvita called the Envision Festival.
And this is where people from all over the world congregate and party for like a solid week and a half.
concerts, Reiki events, crypto events, mostly partying.
There's very little informational stuff happening.
It's mostly partying.
Let's be honest here.
People show up and they hook up all the time.
Like it's a big hookup festival for folks under 40, but anyone's welcome.
It's not just for under 40.
It's just that a lot of folks under 40 are here to engage or indulge in hooking up
like Burning Man.
So that big festival is the Burning Man of Latin America.
A lot of people will be here for it.
People that own houses in Yuvita, they can get $1,000 a night, a night renting out their place.
So in some cases, homeowners will not rent their property out monthly from January to the end of March because they want, oh, be greedy.
It's fine.
They're allowed to be greedy, by the way.
It's their property.
but they'll want to make the higher fees per night during that particular bit.
You thought I was in San Diego?
No, I'm not in San Diego.
Although I do like San Diego, I have not been there since 1996.
It's unfortunate.
Okay.
Yeah, folks, there's a lot of properties I've got.
We're going to be adding about 25 more listings on my website, KevinJJohnston.me.
And there is a gentleman I'm now working with in Puerto Vallarta who's going to help Canadians, Americans, Brits, Aussies, and New Zealanders get their hands on property there if that's where you'd like to go.
But the big problem with Mexico is when you compare it to Costa Rica,
If you buy a property here in Costa Rica and you sell it, you don't pay capital gains tax.
It's your money.
In Mexico, as a foreigner, if you buy a house and you sell it, you pay a 30% tax on the sale price.
So you might actually lose money on your house.
That's a very big problem.
All right.
So Mexico purchasing, if you're not going to hang onto it for 10, 15 years, I wouldn't buy in Mexico, but that's my personal viewpoint only.
All right.
How how's Brampton.
mean brampton ontario i wouldn't give you five dollars for that place it is a zoo uh the gang wars there are getting out of control it's about to become a very violent place i wouldn't i wouldn't go there at all all right yes folks i heard about uh david menzies
The rebel reporter who was assaulted by the police officer.
This is not a political show.
So we're not going to cover that stuff.
I cover that tomorrow.
Tuesdays, Thursdays, 9 p.m.
Eastern time.
That's my political show.
But David Menzies is a friend of mine.
We've chatted about this.
He's okay.
And there was no, the charges were dropped like an hour later.
Not even that.
Is it true that people complain more about spiders in Florida than in Australia?
I actually never heard anybody in Florida complain to me about spiders.
Alligators are the problem in Florida because they're sneaky buggers.
They really are.
And they've killed a lot of people in Florida.
So you got to watch your back there.
And the other problem in Florida now, it's not just the alligators, but there's a lot of people that buy reptiles like anacondas, like Burmese pythons, like boa constrictors and so on.
And then they get tired of owning them.
So they release them in the wild, which is no, don't do that.
Those are not indigenous to the area.
So these large stakes now are killing pets, killing alligators and killing humans.
So please don't do that.
Don't release animals into a environment where they did not come from.
Please, we beg you on that.
Okay.
How's Pensacola, Florida?
Last time I was in Pensacola, 1999, I think.
I mean, it's fine.
It's malls, theater, restaurants, close to the beach.
It's good.
I like Pensacola.
I mean, that whole west coast of Florida, I love.
Tampa, which includes the region of Tampa, downtown Tampa.
Then you've got St.
Petersburg, St.
Pete's Beach, Clearwater, Tarpon Springs, Indian Rocks Beach, Indian Shores, Burdenton.
What else do you have in there?
I said Indian Rocks, John's Pass.
That whole area is amazing.
And yes, I do work with a couple of real estate agents in that area in Florida as well.
Okay, moving on to the next question here.
How long can you stay in Costa Rica?
Six months at a time.
At the end of your six months, leave the country for a day, come back in, and you are good.
How soon in advance do I need to make reservations for hotels, transfers, or car rentals?
Car rental is the only one that you really have to plan ahead on.
Hotels, if you're in San Jose, they're easy.
Walk up to a hotel,
a room you're good to go a lot of the hotels in san jose are quite nice and i mean like nice nice we're talking four or five stars in some cases or at least what we what is considered a four or five star hotel in latin america i'm happy with the hotel that i'm in right now i really am so there's no planning required for hotels
Rental cars, you got to plan for folks because there are a shortage of cars right now in Costa Rica.
So you'll find that cars are very expensive to rent in Costa Rica right now until that problem of a shortage of cars is corrected.
So we're hoping that that happens sometime in the next year.
Car rentals, plan for everything else you can do off the cuff.
Trust me.
Have fun.
All right.
Does Costa Rica accept U.S.
dollars or do you have to convert everything to colognes?
Everybody that I have spoken to takes U.S.
dollars.
Sometimes they'll take U.S.
and they'll give you change in colognes.
A thousand colognes is $2.50 Canadian right now.
A bottle of water like this is about 400 colognes.
So what would that be?
90 cents, I guess.
Maybe a buck.
there you go protein powder all right yes i'm working out protein powder this year uh was um 45 us in san jose was 125 us on the west coast so a lot of times people from the west coast will drive into san jose do their shopping for a couple of months and then go back to the uh to the coast
Question here, I want to get out of Canada, how do I go about it?
Well, Shanghi, it's a matter of what do you want to do with your life when you leave?
All right, do you want to open a business?
If you do, you go to Costa Rica.
If you want to be a beach bum, you go to Mexico or El Salvador.
If you want to be a tourist who does travel blogs, then just be a forever tourist and go wherever you want.
If you have a low budget, you could live comfortably in Parita
on the West Coast, which is a very nice place, close to five beaches.
You can buy houses there for $60,000, like literally $60,000.
And your electricity bill in that town might be 100 bucks a month, maybe.
There's also in the West Coast here, a lot of Christian groups sell cheap health insurance.
So you can live quite well in some of the lesser known towns that are not tourist locations.
So before, Shanghi, that I could really answer that for you, I need to know what you want to do with your time and with your life.
My decision was to get into two things for me.
I want a freedom of speech, which you have in Costa Rica.
The government here does not care what you have to say.
They're too busy trying to build their country up.
I did not have freedom of speech as a journalist and social commentator in Canada.
I have it here.
So I came here for that right.
As soon as I came here and started saying what's really on my mind, my Instagram channel went from 200,000 views a month to 1.8 million a month.
Just because I don't have to self-censor anymore.
Because Canada has ridiculous hate speech laws and ridiculous laws about freedom of speech.
You've got to be careful who you upset in Canada, otherwise you get arrested.
So I'm here for that, but I'm also here to help Canadians, Americans, Brits, and Aussies relocate because all those countries right now are quite crazy.
And I took that business very, very seriously, which is why I'm typically alone for two, three weeks at a time, just getting my videos made, getting my listings done, going to my listings, filming them, getting those videos cut and getting everything out there.
So since I got to Costa Rica, this is now six weeks ago, my head is completely on straight.
Like my mental health, beautiful right now.
I have made over 360 videos since I got here.
Whereas in Calgary, where I was living in Canada, I was getting maybe two or three a week done because it's tough to concentrate when you know that there are so many restrictions on your speech and what you can actually do in Canada.
So for example, this is how bad Canada gets everybody is I gave a lecture.
It was just a lecture in a town called Leduc in Alberta.
about cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, Ethereum, and a couple of other coins we were talking about and how to trade them and stake them.
And I got a threatening letter from the Trade Commission of Alberta telling me that I could not converse publicly about crypto because they had just designated themselves the ones that were completely in charge of crypto in the province of Alberta.
Why would I want to be there?
I can't even have a conversation with 10 people about cryptocurrency without the government telling me that I shouldn't be doing what I'm doing.
It's not like I was even selling crypto.
I was just telling people what it was.
So think about think about that.
For a social commentator, for a crypto investor, for someone who's looking to make a lot of money, you need to leave Canada and most of the United States and come to countries that actually want investment.
So that was my goal in coming here to Costa Rica.
Kiwi Click, are there jobs in Costa Rica?
If you can line yourself up with an American, British company, maybe even a German company here, yes, but those resumes are probably stacked six miles thick for those companies.
So if you want a job with one of those large corporations, you're really gonna have to find a way to break through the noise that they hear.
But if you want to come to Costa Rica and work, first off, you can't work unless you have a work visa, which your company would get for you if it's not a Costa Rican company.
But the other thing to consider is that if you do work for a Costa Rican company, you might be making between three and seven bucks US an hour.
That's it.
So you're not really going to advance your life making that kind of money.
Costa Rica, it's much better to come here and open a business.
because you can pay the locals $3 to $7 an hour and charge US rates or Canadian or Aussie rates for your services and put a lot more money into your own pocket.
All right.
Just checking all the questions over here.
All right.
And we've got some more questions popping up.
What are your thoughts on universal basic income joker?
Let's ask that question on tomorrow's show.
My political show is Tuesday, Thursday on freedomreport.ca, 9 p.m.
Eastern time.
Questions like that are perfect for the political show.
Absolutely perfect.
Okay.
Hey, Nick from Calgary.
Hello.
Hi, Hal.
Thanks again for being here.
Shangheed, you are a healthcare aid for 43 years.
All right, so what would you like to be doing?
If you were to come to Costa Rica, what do you want to spend eight, nine hours a day doing?
If you can answer that for me, I certainly can guide you a whole lot better.
Excuse me.
I've seen Cool Nature documentary about crocs in Costa Rica.
I've not seen crocodiles yet, but there are guys in Costa Rica who will charge you a couple hundred bucks US, but they'll teach you how to hunt and kill crocs.
I paid a guy in Florida back in the 90s to jump on his airboat.
and shoot an alligator in the head with a shotgun and then yank it up onto the boat with a meat hook and pull the skin off and cut everything into filets.
And I had alligator meat forever.
It was great.
You can do the same thing here.
And if you wanted to, you can trap iguanas.
Gray and green iguanas have a lot of really good meat on them.
They taste phenomenal.
If you saute lizard, it's so good.
Oh, you got to saute it in butter.
In lemon juice, lime juice, sugar cane juice, I just saute it and all that stuff.
It's just perfect.
But you can't be squeamish, right?
You do have to gut the animal and you got to know how to yank the skin off and cut it, which I have not been trained in yet.
And I am going to learn soon because I shouldn't say this, but I will.
Iguanas are really stupid.
They really are dumb, but they're very easy to catch if you bait them with cat food.
They love dry cat food.
They'll show up and they'll keep eating it until you grab them.
So to catch them, you put out the bait, which is not illegal, by the way, and then you enclose them with something so they can't get out because they can't climb
a smooth surface.
They climb trees well.
they cannot climb smooth surfaces um and they are cowards so they're not going to actually attack you they're going to run away from you they've got that weird walk where their body shuffles side to side you make the slightest noise and iguanas are just gone right so uh if you're trying to trap them don't make any noise because they they're gonna run and you're not catching an iguana who's taken off by the way they're just they they just know how to get into the bushes real fast all right ready
Should you tip in Costa Rica?
Not mandatory, you know, but I do tip in Costa Rica.
For example, the hotel I'm staying in right now, I gave the guy a tip and we have been handed so much food by this guy that we can't even eat it.
Like the guy gave us almost seven pounds of scrambled eggs, ham and pulled pork.
Because the breakfast, the buffet breakfast was ending and they were going to throw it out anyway.
So he just brought it all to our room.
I tipped him five US dollars and that's what he did for me.
Plus he got me a whole bunch of extra coffee.
So it's to your advantage.
I mean, if you guys ever saw the movie Caddyshack from the late 70s, early 80s, the character that Rodney Dangerfield plays where he's slapping $5 bills into all of the golf caddies hands and they get him everything that he wants.
That's how it works.
But that's how it works anywhere.
Oftentimes, even in Canada, folks, I would slip 10, 15, 20 bucks into someone's hand who is working at the wedding, and we get all the extra cake and all the extra whatever we wanted for that table, all right?
So tip, if you want favors done for you, toss a couple of bucks at them.
They like that.
All right, so people are asking why should we leave Canada and move somewhere else like Costa Rica?
We have a leadership problem in Canada, a very, very big one.
Olivia Chow, for example, is not qualified to be the mayor of Toronto.
She has no people skills.
She has no diplomatic skills.
She can't speak English.
She is a staunch communist.
And she is also someone who does not necessarily even like where she is.
She is raising property tax this year in Toronto by 10.5%.
Joy T. Gondek in Calgary, same thing.
Completely unqualified for the job.
and is raising property tax 7.8% in Calgary.
So Canadians, they're broke.
You're broke.
If you own property in Canada, you're broke.
And it's all to do with that Klaus Schwab bit, you'll own nothing and be happy.
Well, no, whenever I owned nothing, I was never happy.
I want my own house.
I want my own car.
I want my own clothing.
I want my own microphone, my own phone, my own laptop over here.
Eventually, I'd like to have my own water company.
Yeah, I want my own stuff.
I want these things.
And in Canada, they have been completely, they're completely unaffordable.
And in a lot of the Democrat states, they're either unaffordable or the crime rate is so bad that there is no point staying in those areas.
So that is one of the reasons why I would recommend purchasing property here in Costa Rica.
Also, you have more land rights here as a foreigner than all the countries in Latin America.
That's the truth.
You just have to be careful.
Now, here's something I'll warn you about.
If you are going to buy property in Costa Rica, make sure someone is living in the house all the time.
This is where it gets a bit strange, is sometimes you'll get squatters that move in and it's tough to get them out.
And in very, very rare occasions, let's say you buy a house and you disappear for two years, somebody might just get a crooked lawyer and sell your house, pocket the money, and your house now belongs to somebody else.
So you want to make sure you've got a rental program, you're Airbnb-ing it out, or you've got a concierge service like what I do with Mark.
to go to your house often.
And what we'll do is we get staff to come in, clean the outside of the house, cut the grass, trim the trees, clean the pool, and so on.
And that way squatters will look, they'll see that the house is taken care of.
We will install LED bulbs that cost, ready for this, 10 cents a year to run.
And we'll leave them on 24 hours a day so that it always gives the impression someone's home.
That's what we do as concierges.
So it is a different country with a different culture.
And people will try these things.
But the same thing happens in Canada, right?
Land is being stolen.
That's why title insurance is so important in Canada, because criminals are learning very quickly that with a lawyer and an ex parte court motion and an order from a judge, you can sell anybody's property you want.
You can tug the property right from them.
This happened to a friend of mine in British Columbia.
So you got to be vigilant wherever you are.
I'm just saying, if you're going to be a property owner here, be smart about it.
Talk to Mark and myself, and we will set up concierge services for your property.
Okay.
Oh, yes.
Mel Gibson bought a house recently close to Hakko.
It's this massive $10 million mansion.
Good for him.
And he hires a concierge service.
Here's what's funny.
He pays the concierge service to have someone live in his house ten months a year.
So he pays to have someone live in his house.
Now, he can afford it, but that's what some of the richer folks will do.
They'll buy these big mansions
and pay people to live there.
All right.
Okay, I'm just checking the rest of your questions here in all of the chat rooms, everybody.
All right.
Houses, construction materials.
A lot of you are asking me about construction materials.
All the new builds of houses, everything that I've looked at and everything that I'm listing, concrete slab floor, concrete brick construction.
And then they smooth everything out.
So it's concrete on the inside and concrete on the outside.
So houses in Costa Rica, they're not going to burn down.
Not now, not ever.
You'll find that the minimum height for ceilings on all new houses is 12 feet.
Why?
You want heat to escape the floor and go up where it belongs.
A good design will have windows that open up at the top to allow heat to exit the house.
But in most cases, you'll find that ceilings are as high as 15 to 18 feet.
So that is just, again, that's heat management within the house.
If you're going to build a house, I'd like you to understand that there is a rainy season here.
And when rain comes down, it comes down pretty heavy for about an hour, hour and a half a day.
And if your roof is a steel roof, which is fine, you'll survive.
But it's loud.
God, it's loud.
Now, I do my show, my political show, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and I've had a few rainstorms come down.
I can't hear anything.
So I've got to put headphones on and
crank the volume on the headphones to be able to hear.
It is that loud.
So you want to make sure that if you are building a house anywhere in Costa Rica, that you insulate the ceiling with soundproof insulation.
You've got to do that.
And when that happens, it'll be a light tinkle or tap on the roof as opposed to something excessively loud.
That is a very big consideration.
especially for a lot of you out there.
So many of you are making a living on the Internet now, like remote work.
And for me, podcasting this show on Wednesdays, along with the political show Tuesdays and Thursdays, you want to make sure that the house that you're in has a roof with soundproof insulation.
What about a dome home?
Well, Mike, those are awesome, but not cheap to build.
So you always got to factor in the production cost of your house.
The reason that houses can be built for about $125,000, if you have a blank piece of land and you buy a house, you want to build a house, three bedroom house, you can build for about $125,000.
That's everything included.
That includes labor, supplies, the concrete pour, the roof, the windows, the air conditioner, the toilets, the sinks, all that.
It can be done, but it's going to be square.
or rectangular or off-shape.
You could have rectangles intersect at 45-degree angles, but it's still going to be all straight lines.
Dome houses can be done.
Your architect will cost you a bit more, and then the actual construction will cost you more because not everybody knows how to build domes.
Let's be honest here.
And Eskimos, they don't use brick, so you can't hire them.
How is the mafia here?
Well, they're here.
The mafia is in every country in the world, but they don't bother anybody.
Mafia, they're actually happy to have tourists around.
So you'll find the motorcycle gangs, they tend to run places like Hakko and further north, but you don't bother them, they don't bother you.
They don't care about you.
They want you to be in their town, enjoy yourself, spend lots of money because whatever racket they've got going on, they're going to benefit from that in some particular way.
It's the same thing with the gangs that are running smaller towns in Canada now.
So long as money is coming in the door, they are ecstatic.
You'll be left alone mostly.
Young people in Canada can't have a family because they can't afford it.
Joker, that's true, unless you move to a different country.
And that's what I'd recommend.
I would never... Look, this might be a bit political and a bit philosophical, but...
Do not deny yourself fatherhood and motherhood.
Don't do that.
Find a way to make it work.
Even if you've got to pool your money with two or three other small families, build a house that has maybe one communal room, but three kitchens.
on the same plot of land in the same house, three separate bedrooms.
Um, so you all can have your own private space, but you share parking and whatnot.
They're just find a way to have a family.
It's the greatest thing I ever did when my kids were toddlers.
I had the time of my life.
I didn't see trampolines riding bikes, you know, playing in the mud, swimming.
There's, it's no end to it.
So find a way to have a family folks.
It's absolutely worth it.
All right.
Orlando Arocena, Bill Gates has a 66,000 square foot house, one of the houses i'm currently selling is 16,000 square feet it's selling for 7 million it's got two pools, both of them are infinity pools and the top pool pours as a waterfall into the lower one movie theater.
Orlando Arocena, five bedrooms six bathrooms.
Overlooking the beach in, in Capos, uh, places like that.
Um, if you buy it, it's more of like a corporate purchase because you can rent a place like that out for $50,000 a week, a week.
So these major five, six, $7 million homes that are being built, they're just moneymakers.
They're huge moneymakers.
Absolutely.
They are.
All right.
U.S.
money to build a house, how much to live there a month?
I answered that already, but if you own the house, you're looking at about $6,000 a year to run the house.
That's the actual house services, the maintenance of the house, fuel, water, electricity, property tax.
Your car expenses are separate, obviously, and your food expenses are separate, obviously.
All right.
How much would I need to make in order to move out of Canada?
Stefan, depends where you want to go.
I mean, United States, there's places like Enterprise and Mobile, Alabama.
These are cities that you can buy houses for like $40,000, $50,000 and live like a king.
If you're looking for Costa Rica, Costa Rica is a place you come more so for investment opportunities.
It's very much an investment center.
Someone was asking me earlier about investments.
Costa Rica is the ultimate place to invest.
So if you've got a low budget, obviously United States.
El Salvador and Argentina is another one.
I'm actually going to head down to Argentina in the summertime to check out Buenos Aires and a few other places.
I've been talking to a lot of people who live there now.
and argentina apparently is quite inexpensive to live and it's quite modern a lot of people make the mistake of assuming that south america and latin america don't have the infrastructure they don't have technology sure they do should they got everything you possibly could ever want across the road from this hotel is a trampoline center
mixed with a huge gym a hooters um a big guy sorry five guys fries burger joint another couple of restaurants in there some office space and a massive movie theater with six cinemas in it
All right.
But they have what we have just depending what city you're in.
And wherever you want to go, you'll find what you want if you like to travel.
All right.
We're down to our last couple of minutes for the show here, folks.
I'll address a couple of more questions if anybody has any other questions about real estate here in Costa Rica.
And then beyond that, I'll just encourage all of you to talk or to communicate with me on my website, kevinjjohnston.me.
Hit the contact page, put Costa Rica in the subject line, and I'll get back to you immediately.
And yes, Curly Mae, the topic on Wednesday nights is just real estate.
The Wednesday night, 9 p.m.
is the real estate show.
My political show is Tuesdays and Thursdays, 9 p.m.
Eastern time.
All my shows are live on freedomreport.ca.
Tam, yes, I'm single, divorced three years now.
Why don't you go ahead and tell me in the chat why you're asking me that question.
And yes, I agree, my hair is looking pretty wild these days, everybody.
I thought I would try the beard, but it's mostly white now, so I don't know.
I'll tell you what, I'll let everybody, all my fans here watching on freedomreport.ca, Twitch, Facebook, Restream.
You guys can tell me if you like the beer or not.
How does that sound?
All right.
So anyone else have any questions here?
I'm going to take one more and then I'm going to bolt.
All right.
Because I have to get on the phone with some clients who want to buy properties here.
All right.
Oh.
Mountains, yeah, we covered mountains earlier in the show tonight, but mountains, guys, they're not made of rock unless they are volcanic.
Most of them are really like just, it's huge, 2,000 foot clumps of clay.
And they're covered in trees and the trees hold them together.
So yes, we call them mountains just because of their size.
But they're not made of rock.
There you go.
Are any of the properties Airbnb?
Yeah, Krista, you can buy properties and Airbnb them out.
You can rent them out.
There's very little restriction on what you can do in Costa Rica with your property.
Kirk is asking, how are the schools?
Kirk, I don't have an answer for you on that one yet.
I've done no investigative work into schools or education.
What I can tell you about schools is that they all have soccer fields.
That's the best I can do for now, but I'll get you a better answer than that for the next time that we talk.
Will you become a resident if you have a baby in Costa Rica?
What I would recommend, Mike,
is if you're gonna have a child in Costa Rica, yes, that child will become Costa Rican, but then you're gonna have to go ahead and make sure you become a Costa Rican resident yourself.
Now, it's not complex, but I did answer that question on my other channel on Rumble.
So if you go to Rumble and you look up Costa Rica real estate, that question is actually very thoroughly answered for you.
And I'd like to spend some more time and answer that right now, but I do have to get going.
I'm heading to Tambor on the 22nd.
Any advice on places to hit?
Fred, no, because I haven't been to that region.
So anything I would say to you would be a guess, unfortunately.
Background checks?
Oh, great question.
Okay, that's the last one.
When you come to Costa Rica, they're not checking your background when you get here.
For the most part, everybody who shows up with a passport and who doesn't look like a maniacal psychopath,
is going to get in.
You'll get your passport stamped and you can come in the country and they want you to spend your lovely, lovely money here in Costa Rica.
If you want to become a resident, they will check for criminal record.
Indictable offenses from Canada or felonies in the States, but major stuff like DWI, weapons offenses,
assault and battery causing bodily harm, attempted murder, like stuff like that, you're not staying.
But misdemeanors, got into a fistfight in a bar, who cares?
You stole something as a kid, who cares?
And so on.
So these are things that your lawyer, and we will recommend lawyers to you, will explain to you.
Now, there are ways to avoid the police check altogether.
But you gotta be careful with that because there's a lot of scammers out there that'll say, oh, I can bypass the system for you for 20 grand and you'll be a resident in no time.
If some such person ever decides to come and talk to you like that about that subject, please communicate with me and I'll find out if they're full of crap or not.
And if they are, I'm gonna tell you, don't deal with them.
And last question, and I gotta get going.
Do they have facial recognition at the airport?
No, they don't have the infrastructure for any of that.
The odds of anything becoming a 15 minute city in the next 30 years in Costa Rica are zero.
They're not interested in that.
They don't care.
The only place I've seen heavy cameras is a place in San Jose here called Escazu, where they built this brand new massive multi-level mall, which is a very
at a well-to-do high-end place.
And in this mall, they have cameras every 10 feet.
But that's just for theft and whatnot.
It's not surveillance.
So the surveillance lifestyle that everyone is so worried about in Costa Rica, or sorry, in Canada, in the United States, in Australia, especially London, England, does not exist here.
They're not interested.
And yes, Ray, right now I'm in San Jose.
I've been here for the last three days checking everything out.
Okay.
All right.
Well, that's it for now, everybody.
I appreciate all the questions that you've asked me.
My name is Kevin J. Johnston.
This is The Real Estate Show that plays absolutely every single Wednesday, 9 p.m.
Eastern Time at freedomreport.ca.
And don't forget, I've got my political show, which is every single Tuesday and Thursday, 9 p.m.
for two hours and we give away cash on the Kevin J. Johnson show.
So every Tuesday and Thursday, somebody wins money while we talk about politics and some solutions to all the political problems that we have around the world.
I want to thank you all for being here, everybody.
We'll see you soon.
Good night.
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