Residency Visas in Ecuador

If you want to stay in Ecuador you either have to hide once your original 90 day tourist visa is up or you need to get a resident visa. There are three options for a person who wants a resident visa - Pensioner visa, professional visa or investment visa. The pensioner visa requires that you have a steady, monthly income of about $800 for an individual or $1100 for a couple. After I list all three I will add the other things necessary for the visas. The investment visa means that you need to "invest" $40,000 in Ecuador. The easiest way is a 2 year CD which pays 8.5% interest yearly. You can also buy a house or apartment or start a business, but the CD is easy. We opted for the professional visas since we both have college degrees. Our degrees needed to be registered in Ecuador and the rest of the visa documentation needed to be completed as well. We had to order transcripts and copies of our diplomas along with our marriage licence and Pam had to do an adiitional affidavit of name change since her diploma was in her maiden name. All of those documents had to be apostilled in Ecuador which is like a kicked up notary public thing. The rest of the required documentation for a visa requires a FBI and a state criminal check which requires you to be fingerprinted on 4 seperate forms. The process also has costs and we opted for a Visa company to do our paperwork to limit the headaches. Our total cost for both visas was between $4000 and $5000. Both of our visas are complete now and we are now going to apply for and get our Cedulas which is a National ID card that is used even at the grocery stores. It is the basis for most other items like a pass for the Tranvia - the tram that runs through town. We hope to have them in hand by mid next week. As to the amount of income necessary for a pensioner visa, you can live in Ecuador for $1100 per month as a couple. There are furnished one bedroom apts for about $400, food and utilities are really inexpensive and many apartments include the utilities in the price. We are fully settled in now and next week we are hosting a couple of artists who have a showing at a place near our house. It will be fun to have some guests in the guest rooms. We will certainly post about that soon. We hope that you are all well and we wish you peace and love from beautiful Cuenca.