Short sales are heavily dependent on the bank approving the sale and it may take a bit longer than the end of the year.

It's easy to bootstrap large sites by starting small and rolling your profits into infrastructure, inventory and employees.In physical real estate, there is a large startup cost -- either you're paying cash for property (in which case you're spending a lot of money), leveraging heavily (in which case you're servicing a large debt) or somewhere in between.

I will be opening up a restaurant down there and will need one to heavily remodel. 

Shared spaces like this have to be heavily discounted below private spaces, so you will have prices on the low end of the local market. 

How heavily do you weigh the doomsday advice and articles in your decision making?

I'm satisfied with what I have now because I'm pretty heavily weighted in directly owned properties.

I would definitely consider a rehab project there but it would heavily depend on the street in grier.

As of this writing, the S&P 500 was down a little over 17% year to date, and in the same period, my passive investments have been kicking off 5-7% monthly distributions, one of my passive investments went full cycle in just 14 months producing 80% returns, and I sold my long-term rentals that produced about 20% returns annualized over the past 2-3 years.Bottom line: I’m very glad that I invested heavily over the past 10+ years in the real estate space, and I believe that everyone should have at least a portion of their net worth in the hard, physical assets like real estate.I’m not suggesting that everyone should have over 50% of their net worth tied up in real estate investments like my wife and I, but real estate investments can and should part of your diversification strategy to make sure 100% of your investments are not subject to the volatility of the stock market.I’ve recently started tracking my investment allocations across the following categories: stock market in retirement accounts, personal residence real estate, passive real estate investments, cash and autos (anything with an engine – Yes, that’s a Dave Ramsey’ism).

I could "live off of" the income of these STR (husband has W2) and then I can probably make $ from other ventures (potentially flips, as my family is heavily involved in that and new construction in southern CT) to rinse and repeat.

My point is that while Mexico is often treated unfairly in regards to it’s crime problem (which is very real but perhaps not as bad as the sensationalized reporting of it), Costa Rica has a similar crime problem that is majorly under-reported intentionally to protect it’s tourism industry that the economy depends heavily on.