Rentista in Costa Rica

Residency laws in Costa Rica are changing again!  I am having difficulty keeping up with all of the changes this time so I have enlisted the help of my friends at Fragomen to help weed through some of the new laws.

I will be posting them here as they are made clear to me.

The first of the many changes that I learned of today is the following….for RENTISTA status.  This is the status that  family would file or someone that is not yet of the retirement age.

This new law is both good and bad for the Rentista’s.  For a family, it is a very good thing.  A family of 3, 4, 5 + it is far less expensive to file for residency now than it has been for the last couple of years. Now whether there is one member or 10 in your family, the amount that you have to prove as income is $2500/month or $125k/annually.

That opens another can of worms…Until a couple of years ago, it was only proof of $1k/month/ $65k /annually for a family of 1-2 or more to file for Rentista status, then everything changed.  The amount doubled, tripled, quadrupled etc.  The more in your family, the more you had to prove in income and deposit as guarantee in income.  If you had a family of 5, you would have to deposit $210k to file for Rentista.  It was just a bit ridiculous and apparently the CR government saw the err or their ways because only 2 years after this law went into effect another one follows that makes a little more sense economically for a large family.

This new law will be in full effect in March of 2010.  Until that time, I imagine many people will continue to hold off on filing for Rentista.

More to follow about the other types of residency status available to foreigners soon.