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I have a house in Costa Rica that I use part of the time and rent out. I am closing one corporation that currently only holds a cell phone because of the new tax on corporations. I am thinking of putting the cell in the house corporation or getting a prepaid cell. I hear the prepaid service is even better priced than regular cell service, you can pay online and you can keep the phone number. Is that the case? Can anyone comment on the advantages and disadvantages of a cell in a corporation verses prepaid? And what is required at ICE to get either one?
It’s easy to get a prepaid cell account with ICE. You just walk up to the kiosk in the airport and buy it, or you can go to any of about a zillion retail outlets. Since you only pay for what you use, it should be cheaper than maintaining a postpaid account and you can dissolve the corporation and avoid the annual coropration tax. There will, of course, be costs involved in that dissolution.
If your prepaid account goes dormant for a while, ICE may close it. Maybe you could just add a few colones to the account from time to time via online banking. Or maybe whenever you retun to Costa Rica you could just get a new prepaid account with a new number.
A few things:
1) Make sure you ask ICE how long a prepaid account can remain dormant before it must be refilled. It used to be a pretty short time, but now by law I think, it’s longer, but I don’t know precisely the length, and you need to know so that you can refill before your phone number gets cut off and your prepaid funds surrendered. I did manage to recently lose one phone number I had that was dormant for about 8 months.
2) I tried to fill up my ICE prepaid account online once, about a year ago, and according to the ICE web site since I wasn’t a resident I had to mail them a passport copy and G*D knows what else in order to be able to do this. I said, “forget it”, and so I just refill at various kiosks. Maybe they’ve simplified this process now, I don’t know, I haven’t checked.
3) If you don’t care about retaining your existing ICE Cell phone number, you may want to look seriously into some of the new cell phone providers as some may be easier to deal with than ICE for prepaid service in terms of refills (and may offer better rates and service!) If their coverage is OK for where your home is, this is an option. Unfortunately, it will be several months before ICE finally implements the ‘number transferability’ provisions that I believe were codified when the country allowed in cell phone competitors, so if you want to switch providers now, you still have to get a new phone number.
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