Living Abroad in Costa Rica

Imagine yourself living in Costa Rica. You stroll home past lush vegetation after a long day of surfing. You know the locals and speak Spanish with ease. You show visiting friends around with the confidence of one who belongs. Author Erin Van Rheenen shows you how to make your dream take shape. She left her life as a guidebook editor in the San Francisco Bay Area to make a home abroad in Costa Rica. While some give up—daunted by the financial, bureaucratic, and decision-making issues that accompany a move so extraordinary—you'll be led step-by-step through the information you need on visas, money, jobs, housing, safety, language, culture, and history. Erin has done the research and made the mistakes—so you don't have to. There's a place that matches your budget, needs, and dreams: perhaps it's an impressive new condominium in the upper-class San José suburb of Escazú, a wooden house on stilts in the isolated Caribbean coast town of Tortuguero, or a mountain retreat with a view of the Arenal Volcano. You can make it happen. With Living Abroad in Costa Rica, it's easier than you think.

When Erin Van Rheenen was three years old, her parents moved the family from their native Oregon to Nigeria for a two-year Peace Corps stint. Since then Erin has been fortunate to live outside the U.S. for extended periods of time—in Ireland, Ecuador, Mexico, and Guatemala. She answered Costa Rica's call in 2002 and found a second home where she could put down roots. Currently, she spends time in both California and Costa Rica.

Erin earned a B.A. in Latin American literature from the University of California at Santa Cruz and a masters in fiction writing and English literature from the City University of New York. She has published essays and stories, won the Pirate's Alley Faulkner Society prize for best new novel, and taught writing at City College of New York and in the San Francisco County Jail.