Since Costa Rica is the place we are adopting as our new home away from home, one of the things we would love to learn more about is the history of the country.
Costa Rica closed down the military in 1948
One of the things that makes Costa Rica unique is that it has no military. From LA Times:
To this day, Costa Rica has no army, navy or air force, no heavy weapons of any kind. There are local police forces but no national defense force. When visiting dignitaries arrive in San Jose, they are never met by bands in military-style uniforms or uniformed national officials of any kind, because by law there are none; rather, foreign VIPs are met by schoolchildren wearing the visitor’s national colors.
December 1, 1948 is the day the Costa Rica military was disbanded and this week marks the 70th anniversary of that event. The country is now considering whether to celebrate the date as a national holiday.
Having no military is remarkable given the region of the world where Costa Rica is located, and they have gotten by quite successfully for 70 years in a region that has seen a lot of civil war, unrest and complications due to the drug trade.
To the north you have places traditionally considered to be dangerous or unstable and with military presence like Nicaragua and Honduras, and while their southern neighbor Panama also has no military (abolished when Manuel Noriega’s own military dictatorship was ousted by the United States in 1989, more than 40 years after Costa Rica), the next further neighbor to the south is Colombia, which has the 2nd largest military in the western hemisphere!
This is not to say that there is no spending on security. According to this 2011 report, Costa Rica spent approximately $300 million that year, but that was only 0.6% of the total GDP, ranking them 157th out of 197 countries in annual military spending vs GDP.
Costa Rica has many other progressive policies
This is one of the qualities of Costa Rica that gets pointed out when talking about how progressive it is, especially given its region of the world, and that’s one of the things we love about it.
Disbanding the military was a first big step that was way before it’s time, and it continued with efforts such as operating almost completely on renewable energy, protecting it’s ecology and biodiversity, and most recently with a move towards allowing gay marriage.
In fact, this weekend Tamarindo is hosting Costa Rica’s first ever LQBTQ festival.
We are Scott and Caroline, 50-somethings who spent the first 20+ years of our adult lives in New York City, working traditional careers and raising 2 kids. We left full-time work in our mid-40’s for location-independent, part-time consulting projects and real estate investing, in order to create a more flexible and travel-centric lifestyle. 
Financial independence and early retirement is not something we originally focused on, but over time realized it was possible. Our free report, 
