The IESS offer that’s hard to refuse (Or bury me standing, I’ve been on my knees all my life)

When you live in Cuenca long enough, someone will eventually lean across a café table and whisper, “Have you joined IESS yet? You get a free funeral.” They usually say it like they are offering you a key to an occult club for expatriates that meets somewhere between Supermaxi and the afterlife.

At first, I thought it was a joke. Free funeral indeed. Next they would tell me that the dogs didn’t bark in Cuenca. Then I checked the official site and discovered the truth. Yes, there is funeral assistance. Coffin. Hearse. Ceremony. Smoke. Flames. Probably even incense available if you check the right box. The whole a la carte menu as you depart from the Terminal Terrestre for higher realms.

Let it be known that the government of Ecuador will send you off with dignity, from the mortuary to the final departure lounge without any co-pay or deduction, so come on down. Provided you are an active member of IESS in good standing and have paid in within the last 6 months, this generous benefit can be yours.

But just as I was sucking in the joy of this realization, and about to pick myself a stylish laurel-wood coffin to match my dining chairs from a catalogue, reality materialized like the ghost of Navidad past carrying a calculator.

If you are an Ecuadorian worker earning the basic wage, your IESS contribution is not too painful. About $10 per week from the employee, with the employer chipping in a little more. But if you are a retired foreigner receiving a respectable pension from overseas, the official rule says you are supposed to contribute a percentage of that income. Seventeen point six percent, to be exact.

I did the math. If you have a three-thousand-dollar monthly pension or social security check, your personal IESS bill would be more than five hundred dollars every month. Let that sink in.

At that price, you are essentially prepaying for a funeral in monthly installments, like a layaway plan for your own departure. If your pension was $5,000 per month, then you would be expected to pay $875 per month. (These percentages seem to have been put into place when officials were thinking about Ecuadorians returning from overseas, rather than expatriates.)

If that rule were ever enforced strictly, the foreign community in Cuenca would thin out faster than pigeons when the street cleaner’s truck hits the Parque San Sebastian. Many retirees live comfortably but not extravagantly, and an extra five hundred dollars a month could be the difference between staying put and moving back to Boise. The IESS would lose members, the government would lose revenue, and every café would lose one more customer who used to order the second cappuccino. Or more realistically expats would stop contributing to IESS altogether and get a private commercial health insurance policy instead.

A recently published article suggested there are about ten thousand gringos in the Cuenca area. If only half of them subscribe to IESS at the minimum rate (about $80 per month), that alone would produce something close to half a million dollars a month for the system. It is not hard to imagine why nobody asks too many questions at the window.

Here in Cuenca, life is what the lawyers back home would call interpretive. The law says one thing. The practice says something slightly more relaxed.

The usual story from expats is that they pay the minimum and nobody at IESS ever asks whether they receive a fire department pension from Milwaukee or Miami. This has worked for years. It may continue forever. Or one morning, while you are sipping instant coffee in the kitchen, the government may decide to audit foreign retirees and send polite letters beginning with “Estimado contribuyente” and ending with “saldo pendiente.”

Nobody knows what will happen, if anything. That is part of the charm of living in the Andes.

Meanwhile, if a funeral is what you want, funeral homes in Cuenca offer plans for far less than five hundred dollars a month. They will plan your end using glossy brochures with pictures of peaceful clouds and smiling families whose sadness at your departure is greatly mollified by the quality and finish of the box you departed in.

Of course, if you want IESS health care as well, as many do, that is a different story. Others look at the crowded waiting rooms, remember the Mayo Clinic, and stick to local private clinics in the Athens of the Andes. The smart ones may also pay out of pocket for private medical care but keep IESS as a backup and for the funeral.

Five years of contributions in the IESS system may also earn you a theoretical pension of 44% of the SBU (do not take this as legal advice without verification), but don’t expect a payout until you have contributed for 10 years, and don’t expect lifetime medical care and your free burial unless you keep paying in each month right up to the bitter end. This ejecutivo departure lounge is reserved for members only as is not for the riff-raff.

As for me, I have decided that when my time comes, I want something modest. Perhaps the municipal crematorium. Perhaps a short walk along the Tomebamba for anyone who liked Charlie Larga well enough to show up. Please no imported flowers. Please no speeches about how I always followed my dreams. I lived in Ecuador and dreams had nothing to do with it. Airfares, rents, visas, and a language I can speak tolerably well had a great deal to do with it. And no snow or ice in the winter. In fact, no winter at all, come to think about it.

If you are tempted to join IESS for the funeral benefit, here is my friendly advice. Ask yourself whether you want to sleep soundly knowing you are paying what the law says you should.

If you choose this option, pour yourself a stiff drink first and look up the percentage contribution again. Otherwise just plead gringo ignorance and send in the money by automatic bank transfer each month and keep stumm.. And remember that in Cuenca, life is cheaper than you expect, and death is also discounted.

We are all trying to get value for money and when the final curtain falls, we just want to know we paid a fair price for the ticket and that we did it our way.

Swing low, sweet I-E-S-S,
Coming for to carry me home.