Concerned about taxes and tariff, AD military family arriving

Probably you'll be more successful directly contacting an English-speaking shipping company, 'Cookie.

We folks on Expat.com Ecuador have no experience shipping containers from Japan, and most of us are clueless about the jargon, i.e. AD member, PSD.

cccmedia in Quito

According to the following link about Ecuador Customs it looks like you won't be able to bring in personal belongings on a 12-V Student Visa, at the very least you will be subject to taxes and duties.

http://webportal.atlasintl.com/Customs% … cuador.pdf

I'm sorry, I didn't think about the abbreviations. I've tried contacting a few stateside, but they were unable to assist me. Ah well, looks like I can't bring anything, so storage it is!

A lot of Expats who move here from far away -- and you're in Japan, "por amor a Elvis" -- load up a bunch of suitcases with the stuff they'd really miss, and dispose of the rest (sell, give away, toss).

You have to weigh the value to you of what you'd store against:

1. The cost, trouble and even possibility of shipping it someday to a currently unknown future location.

2. The monthly cost of the storage.

3. The fact that you might be able to furnish a place in Ecuador for less than the costs of #1 and 2, above.

4. The fact that you create emotional-mental freedom for your family by not having stuff you may never see again locked away in a storage unit 9,000 miles away.

I brought the suitcases and haven't missed the majority of the stored stuff that I didn't have shipped here.  (I 'donated' that stuff to the storage facility by agreement with the manager, and she made it available to a company that sells and disposes of unclaimed storage articles.)

cccmedia in Quito