We recently spent three months living in Mazatlán Mexico as an experiment in living away from home. We’ve previously written about our goals and the cost of living, but we could never leave Canada if we couldn’t keep our businesses running.
Diaspar Software Services, Mexico office
We’ve written before about our impressions of Tim Ferriss’ The Four-Hour Work Week. In this book, Ferriss extols the virtues of first eliminating as much administrative work as possible, then automating the rest. For example, I have eliminated a majority of email communication by training others not to expect quick responses from me. Only the most expensive-to-ignore emails get through, and this system has given me significant peace of mind. We have automated almost all our bill payments. We have outsourced managing our rental properties. I estimate that we spend less than two hours per month on recurring administrative issues, and we can do better. For example, we have too many bank accounts, including chequing, savings, and credit. This requires moving money around each month. This summer, we will eliminate as much of the confusion as we can. I bring up elimination and automation because these two activities make it easier for us to live away from home. We have outsourced much of our administrative work to housesitters, handymen, book-keepers and accountants, but we needed to know whether we’d outsourced and automated enough to move ourselves off all critical paths. What could possibly happen at home that would require our physical presence? It turns out that we managed to handle a number of things remotely, with a combination of the internet, a tablet PC, Skype, headphones, a scanner, and MXN 10 per page for printing costs at the nearby internet cafe.
- We filed an annual return of information for our company by fax.
- We filed both corporate and personal tax returns.
- We collected significant revenue from clients by wire transfer and direct deposit.
- We invoiced a client entirely electronically, including an expense report complete with receipts.
- We even sent a tax treaty document by post to the US!
Even when the outside world insisted on receiving physical paper, we managed to make that happen with little effort: a few minutes’ walk, a USB drive, a few pesos, and a stamp. I conclude from this experience that we have made our office paperless enough to travel anywhere with an internet cafe or a printing service. We have one major annoyance to eliminate this summer: TD Canada Trust’s Euro account requires the accountholder to sign a piece of paper in a branch in Canada to transfer funds out of the account. It also does not allow withdrawing cash in Euro. We intend to try out the Euro account with HSBC bank to see whether it indeed solves those problems. With this, we’ll have provided for the vast majority of our day-to-day needs, and for the rare item that requires an unusual amount of our attention, we will have saved up more than enough energy to deal with it.
