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Before the documents go to the Costa Rican consulate for authentication, they must first be apostilled by the Secretary of State’s office for the state in which they were issued. This includes marriage documents, divorce documents, birth certificates, and police reports. Without the apostille or certification (as it is referred to in some states) there is nothing for the CR consulate to authenticate. I’d think twice about using a lawyer who neglected to give you the proper information about how these forms need to be presented to the CR government.
Thanks for the information, especially the link to the US Customs rules. Now I have to figure out the logistics of getting the dog vaccinated for rabies within the time frame for taking him into Costa Rica and then out again a few weeks later.
Most of what ails the aging boomer population is caused by a horrid diet comprised of junk and “fast” foods, lack of exercise, and pure gluttony. If it weren’t, we wouldn’t have stats that idicate 60%+ of our population is morbidly obese. Diabetes is rampant in the US, and that leads to blindness, strokes, loss of limbs, neuropathies. I had the pleasure of meeting George Lundquist and one of his boomer tour groups on a recent trip to CR. Every single person in his group was 50 – 100 pounds overweight. One was in a wheelchair, one was on oxygen, one walked with the cane, and the rest of them were huffing and puffing on a 50 yard walk. In the morning I saw several of them popping a handful of pills. We know that obesity leads to diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, and some cancers. Most of what ails America could be prevented or reversed by a healthy lifestyle, which I would hope people would adopt when they move to Costa Rica. It will be a pity if there is an influx of these patients into Costa Rica who will absolutely put a drain on Costa Rica’s fragile medical system. The nursing home industry in the States has basically deteriorated into little more than warehousing the elderly until they die. There has been scandal after scandal about how patients are treated and with what drugs, many times it’s a chemical straitjacket that makes the person docile and nonconfrontational. Many of these drugs have sudden death as a side effect, especially in the elderly. A nursing home should be the last ditch choice for an aging or ill person.For a fraction of the cost of a nursing home, one could hire fulltime nursing care in one’s own home in Costa Rica. Seems like a far better option than being stuck in some ghastly facility from which nobody escapes alive.
http://www.irs.gov/publications/p54/ch04.html
Who Qualifies for the Exclusions and the Deduction?
If you meet certain requirements, you may qualify for the foreign earned income and foreign housing exclusions and the foreign housing deduction.If you are a U.S. citizen or a resident alien of the United States and you live abroad, you are taxed on your worldwide income. However, you may qualify to exclude from income up to $80,000 of your foreign earnings. In addition, you can exclude or deduct certain foreign housing amounts. See Foreign Earned Income Exclusion and Foreign Housing Exclusion and Deduction, later.
You may also be entitled to exclude from income the value of meals and lodging provided to you by your employer. See Exclusion of Meals and Lodging, later.
Requirements
To claim the foreign earned income exclusion, the foreign housing exclusion, or the foreign housing deduction, you must satisfy all three of the following requirements.Your tax home must be in a foreign country.
You must have foreign earned income.
You must be either:
A U.S. citizen who is a bona fide resident of a foreign country or countries for an uninterrupted period that includes an entire tax year,
A U.S. resident alien who is a citizen or national of a country with which the United States has an income tax treaty in effect and who is a bona fide resident of a foreign country or countries for an uninterrupted period that includes an entire tax year, or
A U.S. citizen or a U.S. resident alien who is physically present in a foreign country or countries for at least 330 full days during any period of 12 consecutive months.
Depends on the source of your pension and whether it is taxable in the States. Most social security payments are not taxable. But for private plans, if you’re taxed in the US, you’ll still be taxed in the US even if you are living in Costa Rica. Remember the US taxes us on all worldwide income, so leaving the country doesn’t allow you to opt out of the tax plan! LOL And don’t forget to file your form with the Treasury Department listing your worldwide holdings in excess of $10,000.
But don’t you have to be employed by a company outside the US? Because you won’t be able to “work” in Costa Rica, how is it that you intend to take advantage of this exemption? My husband got the exemption when he was the chef at the St. James Club in Antigua, but he was employed by the resort. And I think the exemption is up to $80,000, plus there are other restrictions and provisions such as how many months you must be out of the country in order to quality. It’s not as simple as you made it sound.
Thanks for your comments, Gr, none of which I take issue with except your comment about torts being a cause for higher med prices. I have a great deal of expertise when it comes to Big Pharma and I can tell you unequivocally that torts are NOT to blame for high drug costs because the pittance Big Pharma pays out for injury or death claims is already factored into their bottomline and a few hundred miillion dollars to pay off a bunch of grumpy plaintiffs in a class action lawsuit doesn’t even cut into their $6+Billion a year rake-in. One company, which shall remain nameless, spent $100,000,000 in legal fees to defend claims that they manufactured a bogus antidepressant that turned out to be far more addictive than heroin and caused people to commit both suicide and murder. Big Pharma has only one interest and that is making money off your illness. The more drugs you take the sicker you are going to get. Every year Big Pharma deliberately manufactures new diseases for which one of their products “may” work (and may not) when a drug is going off patent. When it comes to psychiatric drugs, they are constantly quantifying every human emotion as a disease — the latest being Intermittent Explosive Disorder — a bogus dx if I ever saw one, but it will net another billion or so for each drug company that manufactures Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft or any of the atypical antipsychotics (some of which have sudden death as a side effect, not to mention heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and cancer). And most of what they spend on R&D comes from the government, so don’t be fooled into thinking that they are spending THEIR money to develop a drug. Acid Reflux Disease is another bogus disorder, but all those proton pump inhibitors make the shareholders a tidy dividend. The goal of Big Pharma is to have every man, woman, and child on at least 3 drugs. If you get sucked into psychiatry, that’s easy. And almost every other drug on the market produces so many side effects that at least two other drugs are needed to allow the person to function while the drugs slowly kill him. Don’t even get me started on the cholesterol-lowering drugs which may bring your numbers down but you are more likely to die of kidney failure if you take them. And what’s breaking the back of socialized medicine? Not surgery, not diagnostics, but PHARMACEUTICALS, because Big Pharma doesn’t give a break to anyone. Knowing what I know about these companies, I would have to be bleeding from every orifice and on my death bed before I ever took another pharmaceutical. I know so many people who have gotten out of the clutches of their doctors when they moved to Costa Rica, and guess what? They now don’t take any of those blood pressure meds, cholesterol meds, stomach meds, etc. because they didn’t need them in the first place. Thank God Costa Rica is a poor country — you may actually survive getting medical treatment because all those frontline pharmaceuticals won’t be rx’d, which certainly isn’t the case in the US where you are more likely to die if you go into the hospital than if you got no medical treatment at all.
Dwayne, good grief, you sound more like Ann Coulter with each post! First of all, it’s Bono, not Bonham. I know him, and he was doing fine until he made those ridiculous statements about Hugo being an evil dictator! He should stick to music. Oh, we saved 200,000? Wow! That’s impressive, eh? What about the MILLIONS that have already died because of this scourge while we did nothing and Big Pharma wouldn’t come down on their price to help them, and then they dumped a bunch of bad drugs into the country? And the statement I made about the “pigs” was not referring to Bill or Warren, and you know it. I made it very clear that I was referring to the people who willingly destroy our environment, our social structure, and our health in the name of greed. Surely you know who some of them are — Exxon Mobil, Enron, WorldCom, Dupont, Monsanto, McDonalds, GlaxoSmithKline, Pfizer, etc. There are way too many to list while I’m on my first cup of coffee. So stay on track, Dwayne. And what SSI cry baby are you referring to? Not me. And yes, Dwayne I knew about the adjustments/pay hikes, whatever YOU want to call them, when I posted originally. You were splitting hairs. I’ve lived in DC, and I also worked for one of the most powerful senators. It’s possible I might know a thing or two about how it all works. Sure, there’s plenty of good in the US, but there are things I can’t abide and one of them is supporting a war that I believe is immoral and illegal and profit motivated. That’s why I’ve moved to Costa Rica — because it has no standing Army and is not going around assassinating leaders who refuse to go along with their gameplan. Now, Dwayne, please don’t go off on another tirade, insulting me and making statements about me even though you have no insight into who I am or what I’ve done or who I know. Yes, I’m one of those tree huggers that drive people like you and Joseph nuts. I respect our environment. I want clean air and water, not water that is laced with chlorine and fluoride and now pharmaceutical drugs and chemotherapy drugs. I want food that is not contaminated with cancer-causing pesticides. I also don’t want to eat genetically modified food so Monsanto can make more money. I also want not to be propagandized every day and made to live in fear. So, I’ll take Pura Vida any day, thank you very much. Here’s Lou Dobbs’s take on it all:
NEW YORK (CNN) — Without much fanfare, the House of Representatives last week voted to give members of Congress yet another pay raise, as it has done almost every year for nearly a decade.For some reason, our elected officials decided against holding a news conference. Maybe that’s because they didn’t want to draw attention to the fact that they raise their own salaries almost every year while refusing to raise the pay of our lowest-paid workers.
Corporate America, the Bush administration and the national economic orthodoxy with which they’re in league have consistently argued against helping working men and women at the lowest end of the wage scale by raising the minimum wage. Big business groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce say it will harm the economy and eliminate jobs. As is so frequent with the faith-based economics that grips both political parties in Washington, such concerns have absolutely nothing to do with reality.
For example, it’s impossible to deny the national minimum wage of $5.15 is not enough for a family to live above the poverty line. The annual salary for workers earning the national minimum wage still leaves a family of three about $6,000 short of the poverty threshold.
Raising the minimum wage to $7.50 would positively affect the lives of more than 8 million workers, including an estimated 760,000 single mothers and 1.8 million parents with children under 18. But even this 46 percent increase would get them only to the poverty line. Don’t you think these families just might need that cost-of-living increase a bit more than our elected officials who are paid nearly $170,000 a year?
With no Congressional action on raising the minimum wage since 1997, inflation has eroded wages. The minimum wage in the 21st century is $2 lower in real dollars than it was four decades ago and now stands at its lowest level since 1955, according to the Economic Policy Institute and Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
Also, since the last time Congress increased the minimum wage for our lowest-paid workers, buying power has fallen by 25 percent. Yet over that time our elected representatives have given themselves eight pay raises totaling more than 23 percent.
Raising the minimum wage isn’t simply about the price of labor. It’s also about our respect for labor. One of this country’s greatest business innovators, Henry Ford, made history almost a century ago by raising the salaries of his production-line workers far beyond the prevailing wage. Ford not only paid his employees well enough to buy the products they built, but he kept his employees loyal and productive. That’s also very good business.
The myth that raising the minimum wage will lead to job cuts is just that: a myth. In fact, research suggests just the opposite. According to the Fiscal Policy Institute, since 1998, states with higher minimum wages experienced better job growth than states paying only the federal minimum wage. Among small retail businesses in those higher minimum-wage states, job growth was double the rest of the country.
The House Appropriations Committee has passed a $2.10 increase as part of a spending bill, but the business lobby pressured the House leadership to hold up the measure.
“I think it’s disgraceful that we waited nine years to do this,” says Rep. David Obey, a Democrat from Wisconsin. “We have seen gas prices go up by 140 percent since the minimum wage was increased. We have seen home heating oil go up by 120 percent. We have seen health care go up by almost 45 percent.”
This administration, our Republican-led Congress and the dominant corporate interests in this country want cheap labor. And to achieve that goal they’re outsourcing middle-class jobs, importing illegal labor and cutting retirement and health-care benefits.
It’s time for the federal government to reverse the trend, to at least substantially raise the minimum wage in this country, and by doing so express how much we value all working Americans.
Under legislation passed in 1989, members of Congress get automatic cost-of-living raises unless they specifically vote to block the pay hikes from being implemented. Because they technically aren’t passing a new law every time a raise kicks in, sympathetic federal judges, who also benefit with cost of living raises under the same legislation, have ruled the practice doesn’t violate the 27th Amendment.
So, every year they get automatic hikes while the poor hourly worker goes ten years without an increase.
And how many presidents has the US had that SHOULD be in jail?
Anyway, giving it a rest is a good idea.
Saddam was NOT a threat to the US. He was not going to invade our country and spray us all with weaponized anthraw. Yes, he and his degenerate sons were despicable, but so is that little twerp in North Korea so why haven’t we invaded that country? If there was oil we might. And IF he had any biological weapons he got them from the US. Remember, we used to be Saddam’s pal when it was in our best interest to be so. But this is a board about Costa Rica, not geo-politics, so I’m not going into any other details, but it does shock me that so many people still believe this was is about terrorism. It might be now though.
The War in Irag has nothing to do with the world trade center bombings. there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Saddam was not a threat. But the Central Asian pipeline project is a major priority. Are fast food restaurants paying $15.00+ an hour? Because if they are not you are still way below the poverty line. As for the oil crisis, you might want to read “Sleeping With The Devil — How the US Sold Its Soul for Saudi Oil” by former spook Bob Baer.
