The instinct when moving abroad is to bring your life with you. It is worth resisting, and not only for the freight cost.
The short version: ship almost nothing. Between duty, freight and what the climate does to American furniture, most people who fill a container regret it. Bring what is irreplaceable, expensive here, or specialist. Buy the rest.
1. Most of your furniture
Heat and humidity are unkind to upholstered furniture. Fabric sofas hold damp, wooden pieces made for a dry heated house move and split, and anything with a foam cushion becomes a mould question in green season.
Locally made wood and rattan furniture is built for this climate, widely available, and reasonable. It also looks like it belongs here, which your Ohio sectional will not.
If you are shipping one thing, make it a genuinely good bed. Everything else, buy locally.
2. Your car
Import duty on vehicles is heavy, calculated on value and age, and older cars are taxed harder rather than more gently. Add shipping and the paperwork and you rarely come out ahead.
The uncomfortable truth is that cars are expensive in Costa Rica either way, so people expect importing to be the clever workaround. It usually is not. Most people sell at home and buy here, and budget more than they wanted to.
Whether you need a 4x4 at all depends where you land, which is covered in driving in Costa Rica. Ownership sits on the public register at the Registro Nacional, so a used purchase can and should be checked properly.
3. Winter clothing, and most of your wardrobe
All of it. Coats, sweaters, boots, thermals, the lot.
Guanacaste does not get cold. The Central Valley gets cool in the evenings, which is a light layer, not a wardrobe. Keep one warm thing if you plan to visit the highlands and let the rest go.
Beyond winter clothes, most people find they wear about a quarter of what they brought. The tropics reduce your outfit to shorts, a light top and something for the evening, and everything else stays in a cupboard growing mould.
4. Your entire kitchen
Bring the good knives. Bring a favourite pan if it genuinely is a favourite. Leave the rest.
Kitchen basics are available and cheap here. Small appliances are the ones to think about: they are more expensive here, so a good blender or coffee grinder can be worth the suitcase space. A full set of dinner plates is not.
One thing worth checking: Costa Rica runs on 120V with US-style plugs, so American appliances work directly. Europeans and Brits should not ship appliances at all.
5. Books, in bulk
This one hurts, and it is still right.
Paper does badly in humidity. Books left on a shelf through a green season come out wavy and spotted, and a boxed collection in a cupboard can come out worse.
Bring the handful that genuinely matter. Get an e-reader for everything else. If you cannot bear it, at least keep them somewhere with air moving.
6. Anything with high sentimental value that cannot survive damp
Photographs, documents, textiles, anything paper or leather. The climate is genuinely hard on these.
If it matters, digitise it before you come and store the originals with family, or accept that you are committing to a dehumidifier and a sealed container for the rest of its life.
7. Expensive jewellery and status items
Not because Costa Rica is dangerous, but because the common crime here is opportunistic theft, and a house full of things worth stealing changes your relationship with leaving the house.
Most long term expats end up with less of this than they arrived with, and are happier for it.
8. The expectation that everything will work the way it did
The least tangible item and the heaviest one.
Deliveries take longer. The technician comes Thursday, or does not. Paperwork wants another stamp. The people who settle well leave this expectation behind at the airport, and the people who struggle carry it around for years.
More on that in what to know before moving to Costa Rica, which is really a whole post about this one item.
Bring eight suitcases and no container. Furnish here over the first two months, which also forces you to rent first and learn the town before committing to anything. The money saved on freight and duty covers most of what you buy, and you end up with a house that suits the climate instead of one that looks like it was airlifted from somewhere colder.
What to bring instead
The genuinely worthwhile categories:
- Prescription medication for as long as you can, in labelled packaging with a copy of the prescription. Do not assume your specific brand exists here.
- Electronics and laptops, which cost meaningfully more here.
- Good knives and a small number of quality kitchen items.
- Specialist hobby gear: dive kit, camera equipment, tools, fishing tackle. Available here at a price, or not available at all.
- Documents, apostilled and ready: birth and marriage certificates, background check, proof of income. These are what your residency application runs on and getting them re-issued from abroad is miserable.
- Your pets. Genuinely easier than people fear. No quarantine, a health certificate from a USDA accredited vet, current rabies. Airlines embargo animals above certain temperatures, so plan the season, and check the live position with your airline into Liberia or San José.
- Quick-dry clothing, which is the only clothing category worth optimising.
If you are visiting rather than moving, the packing list is the shorter version of all this.
The sequencing that makes this easy
Rent first, for a year. Furnish gradually. You then discover what you actually need in this climate rather than guessing from a different one, and you have not paid to ship a sofa across an ocean to find out it does not suit the house.
That advice comes up in nearly every one of these posts because it is the single decision that saves people the most money. The full moving guide puts it in order, and if you want to talk through your own shipping decision, book a call.
