Travel Log: Day 11 (7/8), Costa Rica

Failures

It was a day of failures and lessons learned.

Lesson #1 – We aren’t professional cleaners

This lesson kicked off first thing in the morning with an email from our property manager saying the new tenants thought the kitchen and bathrooms weren’t cleaned sufficiently. We put a lot of effort into cleaning, probably a combined 80 hours. When I saw some of their specific complaints my reaction was oh, yeah…. Other complaints I didn’t really understand though, like the kitchen which I thought we left spotless.

There are things we have never been able to get truly clean despite our best efforts. We assumed certain things were impossible to get clean since we never succeeded. For example the master bath tub having a slightly darkish tint, or the master toilet perpetually having a brown stain at the bottom. After scrubbing these things and them looking the same, we just thought they were old.

The renters hired professional cleaners and apparently got these things clean. We paid the cleaning bill and have to accept that we failed on this one. In hindsight I can’t believe we didn’t just hire this out. Our 80 hours was an exercise in futility. The cleaning bill was $340, making our savings rate $4.25/hr. So not only did we do work for a 1990s minimum wage, but we didn’t even succeed at the job.

Lesson #2 – It’s easy to spend money

As we continued to rack up charges here and there over our time in La Fortuna, I figured I should do a budget check-in. After a little more than a week we were already approaching our discretionary spending target for the MONTH. Between the coffee tour, the waterfall, and eating out a few times, we were at $400 of $680.

We still have several things on our wish list, but we realize we can’t do everything and stay within a 4% withdrawal rate. We picked out the most important things we still want to do and we’re going to take that discretionary amount up to $800 or so. That will put us at a 4.29% rate when we also factor in the cost of fail #1. The bad thing about this is that Costa Rica was supposed to be well under 4% to balance out higher cost places.

Flush This Day

This stuff bothered me all day and I want to wake up fresh tomorrow. We need to take proactive action on spending and the budget, and be glad we’re reigning this in on day 11 and not day 111. There’s not much we can do about the rental cleaning situation. That should be over with the professional cleaners having done their thing. If that’s the biggest thing we whiffed on I’ll be pretty happy. My only lingering concern is the renters being high maintenance, but we’ve got a property manager to push back if anything unrealistic is requested. We are fairly accommodating people, so most likely this partnership will stay in the happy intersection of their need bubble and our accommodation bubble.

Volleyball

On a positive note, we went to the local volleyball court and played a few games. The court is really nice and almost out of place around here. It has black sand that is great to play on, and the entire court is enclosed so there’s no chasing the ball.