Outlaw Design Blog

Q&A With Danny Outlaw Pt1 (VIDEO)

Posted on 11. Mar, 2009 by admin in Video Posts

Last week I asked you guys to send in some questions for me to answer in a video post. This post is has those answers! There is a rough transcript of the video included as well.

On a side note, I haven’t found a video editing program that I like yet so this video is unedited. This is obvious by me turning on and off the camera, as well as the brain fart I had near the end of the video.

Q&A With Danny Outlaw Pt. 1 from Danny Outlaw on Vimeo.

Show Notes

In this episode I answer some questions from readers about living and working in Costa Rica. To be more specific, I answer these questions:

Yeah, one question - is it possible to live on like $1000 a month in Costa Rica? Because a lot of the web development jobs I see posted there don’t offer much more than that. Thanks!
By Eric

To be honest, I never really did much local work when I lived in Costa Rica. I have a nice set of repeat clients that make up most of my work, as well as some other online projects. That said, you probably won’t find a lot of people who are willing to pay more than $1000 for design work. Either they don’t have the money for it or they don’t understand why design should cost so much.

If you really wanted to find local work, your best bet would be to visit some of the bigger hotels and restaurants. These are probably owned by Americans, Canadians, or Europeans. Thus you might be able to convince them to spend more money on design work.

For the most part, your best way to make money is to start tackling the freelance job boards. My advice is to start finding work on them now. This way you can build up a reputation, get some feedback, and really grasp how tow in work on these types of sites. That way when you do move, you will be a step ahead and not struggling to find work.

As far as being able to live on $1000 a month….it is possible, but all depends on your standard of living and where you want to live. I’ll talk about this a little more in the next question. But for one person $1000 is pretty easy to do, but for two people it can be pretty tight.

Yeah, I agree with Eric. I’d like to know what the average cost for a 2 bedroom place out there would be.
By Mike Smith

It’s kind of strange, but there aren’t a lot of traditional two bedroom houses. Actually there aren’t a lot of traditional houses period. They are all one room or five, with some variation in between. Some things to keep in mid though is that bedrooms in Costa Rica are just for sleeping. So you typically find really small rooms with a barely enough room for a bed. But the rest of the house will usually be really open and probably have a huge porch.

Outdoor living space is just as important as indoor living space in Costa Rica. So you might find a house with small rooms, but will probably have a huge porch that is twice the size of the house.

As far as price goes, you will find houses for anywhere from $200 to $1000+. It all depends on your standard of living. If you don’t might living back in the jungle with all the animals and critters that come with it, you can probably find something for $200 or less. But if you want something a touch more modern and secure, you can expect to pay around $600 a month.

Tags: costa rica, Freelancing, videos