How Career Change After 40 Brought Me To Costa Rica

How my husband and I picked Costa Rica for our post-corporate life is a question we get a lot.

There are very practical reasons that I have already explained in past blog posts, including why Costa Rica is a good real estate investment, why Costa Rica is good for our gig-based new retirement, and why we love coming to Costa Rica.

Costa Rica also builds on key elements we had already been putting in place before we both went corporate-free – real estate investing and building up freelance skills.

But why pick a new place at all? Why did I evaluate my career at the age of 40?

Why I was in a business malaise

In 2012, my coaching business was peaking. My business partner and I were five years into the business and had our biggest year yet. I had well exceeded my corporate salary, and I was doing work I absolutely loved.

Things were great but too busy. There was no way I could maintain the clients I had, while still marketing and selling for additional clients. In the services business, you always have to focus on both execution and sales. Too many service professionals experience feast or famine by trading off one for the other.

Too much business is a luxury problem to have and enabled me to experiment with all the typical ways to scale a business. Unfortunately my efforts didn’t solve the problem, and came with their own set of additional challenges:

• I hired additional people to execute the work while I sold the work …BUT… hiring people meant managing people. It also meant selling enough to keep the best people busy. This was a completely different role than what I envisioned for myself;
• I outsourced sales and marketing, while I focused on doing the work …BUT… no one sells as well as you can. We were a multiple six-figure business with good press but still not big enough that we could remove sales and marketing from our personal brands;
• I turned my services into products, thereby continuing to sell something (in our case, audios and course material) while I worked …BUT… a products business is so different than a services business. Information products is big business, so definitely a worthy pursuit. But it’s a very different business, again a completely different role than why I started this business;
• I delegated some of the operations and saved some time there …BUT… delegating operations didn’t save me enough time and put cost pressure on the business;
• I raised my prices to cut down on clients while keeping revenue constant and saved some time there …BUT… raising prices freed up time but it also prevented me from taking on some clients that I liked working with but that couldn’t pay the higher rates, or from doing activities that I enjoyed that were lower-paying.

I was starting to resent my business and looking to make a change. My logical solutions were frustrating me. I felt like I had to choose a less-than-ideal solution and find a way to make it work.

A hyperlink reconnected me back to Costa Rica

I read a lot of books and blogs about professional and personal development. One coach/ blogger I follow is Valerie Young, and her newsletters often link to articles she has contributed elsewhere.

One of these hyperlinks brought me to an article in International Living about relocating abroad. I’ve been a subscriber to that publication for several years now, and the stories of regular people completely recreating their life expanded my thinking about what was possible.

International Living features Costa Rica frequently, as it’s an ideal expat destination, and these frequent mentions reconnected me to Costa Rica.

I say reconnected because I actually had a friend who emigrated from the US to Costa Rica years ago, well before the digital nomad thing was an actual thing. This was an old friend from summer camp who I had always admired – intelligent, fit, well-grounded. I figured there must be something to Costa Rica that she would settle there.

But I sat on that information for over 10 years, including several years of angst on what to do about my business. I needed a career change, and career change after 40 is a big risk. Reading story after story, however, about people much older than 40 making a big change to retire abroad certainly expanded my thinking and snapped me out of analysis paralysis about what to do next in my career.

Costa Rica gives me an alternative solution

I didn’t change careers in the sense that I kept running my same lifestyle business. However, I did make some changes in 2013 and beyond to reduce my frustrations and get me through these last few years:

• I let go of some projects so that the business is currently running at 70-80% of its peak. In exchange, I am not feeling so maxed out;
• I stopped worrying about outsourcing, delegating, building products, or any of the other scaling solutions I really don’t care about. I just take the work I enjoy;
• I invested my profits out of the business into real estate to keep additional revenue coming in, separate from my day-to-day work and from my time, which is enough of a scaling solution for now.

I envision re-exploring the scale issue when I can be in Costa Rica for longer stretches (our youngest goes off to college next year, which will free us up to live anywhere).

Time moves much slower in Tamarindo than in New York City, and I can concentrate on the longer-term projects like converting my services to products or building time-saving systems into the way I work. While I’m in New York City, I can take advantage of the work more suited to being here – high-value, high-touch assignments that I couldn’t fulfill from abroad.

Is Costa Rica a solution for career change after 40?

To those that know me personally, Costa Rica might seem like a surprising choice versus staying right where we are. Prior to the first year we visited Costa Rica, we were not well-traveled, neither of us speak Spanish, and we are homebodies and not all that adventurous. Also, I have never left my hometown, New York City, for any substantive length of time, not even for college.

But I believe that Costa Rica is a great solution for me based on how I work and what I’m trying to accomplish. To the extent that Costa Rica is a great destination for gig economy workers, Costa Rica holds potential for others looking to change careers after 40.

At the very least, knowing there’s an alternative out there can expand your thinking into what’s possible.