Starting up a company in Ecuador isn't that difficult.
The cost can be anywhere from $1,200.00 to $1,500.00 depending on what city your in and what you're doing with your company.
For example, we started our first company as a general company. It was to help us to get our immigration papers (because we did not have, for example, qualifications for a retirement visa since we are not retired) to get us into the country and to allow us to do something in business. At that time we were unsure of what we were really going to do, so we set it up as a general company to where we were able to buy and sell, import and export.
We could buy and sell real estate for ourselves or for the company but we could not be a real estate company. Because we did not know if we were going to do real estate at that time, we did not set the company up that way. However, for $300.00 we could upgrade it to sell real estate.
Our company was also able to bring tractors in on a 12% tax which was good as we didn't get hit with a large tax for a personal tractor. There are a lot of benefits to having a company if you are in that arena.
We needed a work visa and our company that we started could actually hire us as if we worked for the company, so that is what we did. We got a one year work visa that we can roll into the permanent resident visa later on. We were going to buy property and never did, but had we done so from the beginning, we could have used that property as an investment visa.
It is best to know specifically what you want to do with your company. If you're not sure what type of company you want to start, you can do like we did and start with a general company. We can help get you pointed in the right direction for the right lawyer.
It is really important to keep on these lawyers to make sure they are doing the work you need done. In this country, it is imperative that you know all the right questions to ask. If you don't ask the right questions they do not give you so called "free" information. You could ask me a question and I'd give you 12 other tips/topics that are going to be pertinent to what you are trying to achieve but here, they will not do that and you could have extra out-of-pocket expenses which happened to us several times. So, the more you know, the better it is.
For example, something that should have only cost us $4.00 ended up costing us $204.00 because we didn't ask the "right" questions. Then, times that number by 4 (as we had 4 of us moving here) so the total cost should have been $16.00 and we had to pay $816.00. We didn't know the right questions to ask and they did not and were not going to reveal the extra information that we really needed to know.
We can defiantly help make sure that you do ask the correct questions as we have learned a lot from our own mistakes!
