Expat Community > Costa Rica

dallastx75243
Joined January
Posts: 5

Import Duties

10 months ago

My wife and me have already purchased a home in CR and are getting ready to move in early February 2024.

We are currently in the process of obtaining the necessary paperwork required by CR immigration in order to obtain our residency cards. Once this paperwork has been sent back to us by our State and Federal authorities we will forward it to our immigration attorney so he can get started. However, we've already been told by him that this process will take several months to finalize following his receipt of this information

In the meantime we've run into one issue and are curious how other people may have overcome this problem.

We plan on shipping a lot of our personal goods plus one vehicle via container. Based upon conversations with our shipper it was our initial understanding that until recently there would be fairly substantial import duties applied to our belongings by CR Customs. However, we were recently told that a new law has come into effect which would waive import duties for expat retirees moving to CR.

Unfortunately, our immigration attorney is now telling us that although we are retirees and have already invested by purchasing a home these duties won't be waived, because at the time of our move we still won't have received our residency cards.

Previously we thought we would be able to pay the import duties and then request reimbursement of these fees once our residency cards were obtained. However, our immigration attorney has informed us that CR won't retroactively credit these fees even after we've obtained our residency.

This seems like a Catch 22 situation.

The only solution we've come up with to avoid this problem, would involve placing all of our belongings in storage in the US and then waiting until we receive our residency cards before shipping them, in order to avoid the projected import duties. However, this means we will be waiting a long time for our belongings to be shipped after we are already living in CR, which is very inconvenient.

Has anyone else recently gone through a similar situation, and if so have they found a way to overcome this problem which if possible would enable us to save several thousand dollars of import duties, or alternatively avoid delaying the shipmentof our belongings.

Thanks in advance to anyone who may have an solution to this problem.

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Import Duties

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