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Blog Categories: General, Costa Rica Retirement, Costa Rica Living

Living in Atenas can be a blast for less than $165k
Posted: 10/08/2011 04:00 PM
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By Isabelle Jones

I have been living in Atenas since before the boom and I can assure you my family and I still have a blast. While many retirees moved here since 2004, which is when I started selling real estate in Atenas seriously, there was only one real estate agent in Atenas and surrounding areas. Most have moved away again after the boom was over and we’re back to an easy going life as it was before.

The biggest advantage Atenas has received thanks to the boom is the much better choice for grocery shopping, restaurants and all kinds of services, while the opening of the new highway has made our visit to Escazu and San Jose a lot easier. This also gives us the necessary access to medical services, religious services and going to the movies for example.  We do have a great farmer’s market here.

Have a look at Atenas

If you are amongst those looking to move to Costa Rica, and buying Costa Rica real estate, you should for sure have a closer look at Atenas. We have many real estate opportunities and today I want to tell you all about one of them.

Warm and friendly home for sale

This 2 bedroom - 2 bath, fully furnished ranch home for sale is located in San Isidro of Atenas. This 1400 sq. ft. home is perfect for a single or a couple, it is an open and bright design that makes the rooms appear larger.  This Atenas home for sale is in a country setting only 15 minutes to the center of Atenas, in a neighborhood with Costa Ricans, Canadians and U.S. ex-pats where everyone knows each other and is warm and friendly. 

Home with yoga benefits

Another benefit of this great home is if you are a yoga enthusiast, you are walking distance to Leah McLaughlin’s yoga outdoor platform where she teaches 3 mornings a week from 7 a.m. to 8:30 a.m. for only 2,500 Colones per session.  This Atenas home is priced to sell at $165,000 turn-key and of course it would also make an excellent rental investment.  


 

Use your retirement fund

Also, if you are a real estate investor or have money sitting in your 401K, IRA or even Canadian RRSP, and you are not even reading to retire yourself yet, you can make your retirement fund a lot fatter with the income a rental home in Atenas can produce and you can roll it back again into your retirement fund when you are ready to move into it yourself, so you won’t have any tax problems.

The famous Atenas climate

Atenas is known for its rural appeal and friendly small town atmosphere that hundreds of ex-pats from the U.S., Canada and Europe have chosen to call home.  Climate, natural beauty and location are just a few of those reasons.  Daily, you see both Costa Ricans and foreigners walking, jogging and biking throughout Atenas.  

Entertainment Shangri-La for retirees

There is plenty to do such as a bridge club, book club, women’s clubs, a couple of gyms, yoga classes, zumba classes and so much more.   The new highway has made Escazu, Santa Ana and San Jose just a 30 minute drive away, where there are shopping malls, theatres, restaurants, nightclubs, golf courses, museums and if you’re looking for more excitement, nightlife and culture.  In the other direction, the beautiful Central Pacific Beaches such as Herradura, Punta Leon and Jaco are within an hour drive if you want to take off for a day at the beach or for a weekend.  

Isabelle Jones has been the GoDutch Realty agent for Atenas when Atenas was still a very small town in the Costarican mountains on the way to the Central Pacific with hardly any foreigners around. It was due to the easy going nature of the locals in Atenas that more and more expats were attracted to Atenas as a beautiful place to retire to.

Isabelle, known by friends and clients alike as Isa, knows Atenas inside out and can not only sell you the Atenas home for sale or an Atenas lot for sale or even an Atenas mansion or a home in a gated community that you are looking for, but she can also get you going with your shopping, your doctor and everything else you need when moving to a new community. Isa is knowledgeable, easy going and you Atenas real estate agent you want to contact now for a showing of any of her real estate listings.

Comments (2)
Ivo Henfling says:
Comment by Chuck Shannon: Sunday PM, October 23, 2011 Read your blog on speeding. I, like you, have mixed feelings about the amount of the fines. There is no doubt whatsoever that the reckless driving habits in Costa Rica need to be reduced considerably (other than the fact that the highway deaths help to lessen global overcrowding). Altho' we don't have any cameras out here in the stix, I am apprehensive of making one of my infrequent trips into San José to run afoul of the cameras. One of the other complaints that I read about in the letters to the editor in la Nación is that speed limits are not well posted and, many times, the drivers don't know what the speed limit is, although the 20 kph over the limit for a ticket should take care of most of those complaints. Why I am actually writing this is for a different reason: As we all know, most people have no fixed address to receive notifications and the advent of the cell phone adds to the inability to locate people. An additional problem is that many vehicles on the roads have been sold and the new owner has failed to make the title transfer (mostly because it costs money). Since the cameras only capture an image of the vehicle tag, the ticket is charged to the owner of that vehicle who may or may not be the current owner or the driver (in the case of company vehicles). Add to this, the cases of "pirated" tag numbers (gemelos) + some errors in reading the camera image and you end up with a bit of a nightmare. It appears that the owner of a vehicle only has 10 days to protest the ticket after it is listed in the newspaper. One vehicle owner saw his tag number published strictly by chance and, because his vehicle was in a repair shop for that full week, knew that it was an error. He claimed that he lost work and paid a lawyer for something that was not his fault. In other words, errors occur. Now, in North American law and usually down here, silence can never be taken as acceptance of an agreement. In this case, the agreement is the acceptance of the ticket. The fact that the acceptance was never conveyed to MOPT, makes it a non-legally binding obligation of the vehicle owner. This is my interpretation of why Sala IV is throwing out the tickets, the driver MUST be apprehended in the deed. Just because the driver doesn't know of the existence of a ticket and he loses all right to object in 10 days is neither reasonable nor legal. I had predicted a fiasco for these cameras when they first were being considered because of the notification problem. Like many things in Costa Rica (and much of the world), the bureaucrats never think things thru before instituting "solutions". Your tax dollars at work! Chuck
10/24/2011 08:45 PM
Ivo Henfling says:
Thanx for your comment Chuck. Though you are totally right about the reasons why Sala IV is throwing this out, its too easy to throw everything that is done to make the roads safe (along with a zillion other things that get stopped by Sal IV) every time someone has a good idea but because we don't have a way of acceptance of the ticket. I borrowed the car of a friend in Holland and he got 2 tickets in the mail after I arrived back in Costa Rica. He doesn't have a clue where I went and he is responsible for the tickets I got. But at the same time, I sold a car to someone 10 years ago and he quit paying and the car is in my name. Impossible to recover the car, even though I own it. So the guy who never paid me can get all the tickets he wants and I will have to end up paying them. It's all screwed up. But does that make it right to not to discipline the dangerous drivers? How do we discipline them?
10/24/2011 08:52 PM
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