We recently spent three months living in Mazatlán Mexico as an experiment in living away from home. We’ve previously written about our goals, the cost of living, and running our businesses from a remote office, and even how to maintain a house from 4600 km away, but what would it take for you to do it, too?

If you have now caught the bug of living remotely, then let us share with you a few tips to help your experiment have a better chance to succeed.

• Find out how to move money from any account to any other account without walking into a branch. This could require more work than you think. In Canada, learn how to use Interac Email Money Transfers.
• Automate all bill payments. We have set up preauthorized payment to a credit card for as many vendors as we can, with preauthorized debit from a chequing account for the rest. We pay bills from a line of credit account in order to avoid overdraft fees. This means maintaining a credit balance in a line of credit account, but considering that chequing accounts offer virtually no interest, this costs us a few dollars per year.
• Go paperless at home and at the office. Scan all incoming mail and file it electronically. Buy either a graphics tablet or an older tablet PC so that you can sign documents without printing them. Subscribe to a fax-to-email service, like myfax.com. I found a Motion Computing M1400 on e-bay for USD 250 and spent CAD 200 upgrading it. Sarah owns a Nokia N810 internet tablet device and an entourage eDGe, both of which fit the bill.
• Avoid having to use the phone while roaming. Especially in Canada, roaming costs remain high. In Mexico, using the phone would have cost us CAD 3/minute. Subscribe to a voicemail-to-email service and don’t answer your phone. Train people to SMS you when they need to talk to you, so that you can call them back over the internet. Direct most communication to email and don’t answer too quickly, or people will expect that level of service all the time. Set a vacation autoresponder on your email account and don’t answer email for 3 weeks. Direct people to SMS you if your failure to respond costs you a significant amount of money. (I put CAD 1000 in my autoresponder. Your number will vary.) Consider directing people to call a Skype Online Number or Grasshopper number instead.
• Outsource any day-to-day business operations that have to happen back home to a trustee. We have a property manager in Dauphin MB who takes care of our rental properties and our housesitter scans all incoming mail and emails it to us a few times per week.
• Write a comprehensive document about how to live in your house so that other people can do it. We have specific instructions like “please minimize electricity use, because it costs more here” and “check the basement twice per week for water” and “here’s how you reboot our router”. If you have any gadgets that require specialized knowledge, then explain how to use them. If you do things differently from others, then don’t assume others will know how to live in your house. In particular, if your house does things that you’ve got used to, but that might trouble someone else, mention it. Put Post-It notes around the house to remind people about any tricky things.
• Find a maintenance man in your area. Let him mow your lawn or do some light maintenance while you’re at home. If you trust him, then make him the point man when things go wrong with the house. Find someone who feels very comfortable communicating by email and doesn’t expect to speak on the phone.
• Hire a general contractor to do some work on your house while you’re there. It can be something small, but it has to be a big enough job to give you confidence that he will do good work when you’re not there.
• Learn how to buy anything and send it back home. This can range from having household goods delivered from a local grocery store or online drug store to making arrangements with your local pet supply shop to keep your credit card on file and deliver cat litter to your house in response to an email. Remember that delivery fees cost less than flying home.
• Only use delivery services that allow anyone to receive and, if necessary, pick up packages. Canada Post wouldn’t let our housesitter pick up a package on our behalf, but UPS or DHL would.
• Consider a service like myus.com as a clearing house for incoming packages so that you can route them to wherever you are in the world.
• Let your bank know that someone will be depositing cash on your behalf, or arrange to have deposits sent in by mail. While ING Direct, for example, routinely accepts deposits by mail, they also routinely impose standing clearing periods that your local bank would likely waive for you. If you have someone local to deposit your cheques, and your bank gets to know that someone, then you’ll find you have access to your money sooner.
• Make sure someone cleans your house on a regular basis. This not only keeps the place clean, but ensures that someone runs water through the pipes and even helps fulfil your insurance policy’s requirements for not leaving the property vacant for more than 48 or 72 hours in a row.

We could probably identify more, but we think we provides a great start.

This experiment in living remotely has meant that a whole new class of opportunities has opened up to us. For example, if a lucrative contract to work for six months in Europe, we can take it without hesitation. We don’t have to worry about bad timing or having too many constraints to stop us from going. Once we have a housesitter in place, we can go.

How much would your life improve if you could take advantage of opportunities like that?