Immigration in Ecuador; there are several different types of visas you can get.

Coming in on the plane you get 90 days on your passport (I call it a passport visa). It's actually a 90 day tourist visa but it's just because you have a passport from the US. You also can get a 6 month visa but you have to get it in the US before you leave, you cannot get it in Ecuador.

If you have the 6 month visa when you leave, once you get to Ecuador you cannot use the 90 day visas, so you get 6 months instead of 3.

When you get here you will need to get your Censo card with in 30 days. It will cost you $4.00 dollars but after 30 days it goes up to $204.00 for each person. I know I am repeating myself but I think it's important to mention it several times to help others understand the snags you could get yourself into.

There is first an Investment Visa, meaning if you come over on a 6 month visa and you get your Censo card, you can begin the process of looking for properties with values of $25,000 dollars or more, which the government here has to value it as $25,000 or more (this can give you permanent residency). If the property is valued for like $27,000.00 then a spouse can get on the visa for around $800.00 dollars more. So the two of you are on the visa.

Permanent residency is not the same as Citizenship.

So when you purchase the property, you have permanent residency and you can stay as long as you want in Ecuador.

There are rules here. There are only so many months that you can leave Ecuador on a certain residency card where you cannot even go to the US for but maybe 2 to 3 months out of the year. So you really need to look into all the current rules.

The second one is a Retirement Visa. Right now its $800 or $900 dollars a month that you have to be getting some type of government retirement payments from the US. You can come over here and use that retirement and get permanent residency. Once you get your permanent residency then you get a Cedula card (not sure on the pronunciation) which is a form of permanent card.

So the retirement visa is fairly easy to get. The investment visa is fairly easy to get also, just make sure you have everything checked out and if you're buying property from us, let us know what your intent is (that you are using the property to get your investment visa) and we will make sure all the dots and T's are crossed.

Then there is the Work Visa. It is one of the harder ones to get. This is the one we did. We came into town and started a company and that company was able to hire us. We got a one year work visa out of that and once being in the country for a year we can request an application to get permanent residency through that work visa.

So, we don't have to own any property and we don't have to have a retirement visa to stay. So the Work Visa is good for someone who does not have the money to invest in property right now and who does not have a retirement but does want to start a business.

If none of the three here work for you, you can do a student visa or become a teacher.

To be an English Teacher, you do not have to know any Spanish to be a teacher here. You can teach English because that is your native language and they will give you a one year visa if you go through the right channels (of course there are fees in all these things), but you can get a Teacher's Visa for one year, which I assume you can renew after that one year.

Or you can roll it into permanent residency as well. Different Visa's have different ways to get your permanent residency. You can stay for many years on a student visa because you're coming here to learn something. If you came here and signed up for 1 or 2 years of Spanish and when that runs out then you sign up for it again. When that runs out you could do another type of schooling here. At this time, schooling here is very cheap. 4 years of college to become an Architect is $2000.00, ($500.00 per year), which is insane for what someone would have to pay for schooling back in the States.

This is just an overview of some of the Visa's you can get here.

To summarize:

90 day visa on your passport, if you don't use that you can get the 6 month visa but that has to be done in the US not in Ecuador and once in Ecuador you have 30 days to get your Censo card for $4.00. If you are over your 30 days it will be $204.00 for each person.

The investment visa (buying property here worth more then $25,000)

A retirement visa,

A work visa

A student visa

And there are others. For example a non-profit visa but I've seen countries change these things and then you have no ground to stand on.

The ones I have listed are the most secure to obtain a permanent residency. Now, after you have your permanent residency for 2 or 3 years then you can get your citizenship if you want. You could even get duel citizenship at this time. If you do have duel, you can drop one or the other at any time.

There are a couple more easy ways to go right to citizenship very fast. These are quite different but if a women from the US comes to Ecuador and gets pregnant from an Ecuadorian, she becomes or receives citizenship and if a man or women marries an Ecuadorian, then they have immediate citizenship.

Citizenship is the highest you can achieve and permanent residency is below that. When you have Citizenship, you are forced to vote. I don't think they throw you in jail but I think you would actually get a fine. I don't know what their rules or policies are as to where you go to vote or how they get you to vote, but it is a rule here. This country is not as sophisticated as the US.

So again, this is just a general overview. When you get here, call us. We will connect you with interpreters if you don't know how to speak Spanish, even if you do, still give us a call as there may be some snags that you might get yourself into because you didn't get the information you really needed.

We can get you in touch with taxi drives that won't rip you off and they speak both languages, we can help you get a rental, take you around and show you the shops, the markets, etc.

We hope to talk to you soon!