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Comment by Swizec | Hacker News Reader

You’d be surprised how affordable and effective a virtual personal assistant can be. Mine handles almost all of my life admin stuff and it’s the best $500/mo I spend.

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$500 per month is a lot for most people.

Indeed. People run entire families on like $300 a month, where I've been.

It is likely that a part-time assistant can be hired for much less in low cost-of-living regions.

What kind of stuff is that? Don't think I can come up with anything I do that I could see someone else handle for me or that would be worth paying for.

The sort of stuff that feels silly to delegate but 10min here, 10min there adds up fast.

Big ongoing thing is that she helps with my inbox, deals with ordering stuff online, random annoying tasks like booking travel, some customer support, stuff like that. Oh also makes calls for me when I don’t wanna deal with it like booking appointments and such.

Kinda wishing I could afford someone in the same city so they could help with physical tasks but maybe later.

This is kind of like Visa Concierge, although they don't handle your inbox :)

I find I have to constantly tailor my requests with additional details, otherwise it's a back-and-forth email tag which rapidly diminishes the usefulness of the service. But I suppose that's to be expected when each time you contact them you get a different agent helping you..

Yeah this only works if you have your person not "some person". A fantastic example recently:

Some newsletter sent a book recommendation list. Instead of clicking links, finding the right format, and dealing with all that, I just slacked my assistant "Hey can you get me all the books from X newsletter on audiobook". Feels silly to delegate, instead of a task I put off and think about and finally waste time on eventually, it's a 5 second thing and I can move on right away.

The "not have to think about it" part is the bigger benefit imo.

The reason I spend time booking travel is either because I want to save a few bucks (and then paying someone makes no sense) or because I'm exploring options to know what I want (again, makes no sense having someone else do it). If it were pure business travel as in "I have to be at a conference in city A from X to Y" I could see the value, maybe. But for personal? No.

I spend literally a minute with customer support a year, I think it would be easier voicing my issue directly than having to explain it to a third party and having multiple follow ups..

I don't get this at all. I'm so at the opposite I would almost pay money to be able to do this myself instead of having others in control. Can't fathom paying for the hassle of having others do this.

You’re not scared that someone has access to your emails?

I’d rather spend this 500/month on a bigger rent.

Is it always the same person? How do you build up the trust to let them mess with your bills/tickets/money?

yeah this is one of my concerns with virtual assistants. Do you trust them with your identity and privileged information? eg SSN, CC's, passwords etc

This was a major plot point in the movie "Where'd you go, Bernadette". Wife of a Microsoft executive hands over all the family information to a virtual assistant that is actually a Russian identity fraudster.

It’s been the same person for almost 5 years. Trust was built over time.

She doesn’t have direct access to my money, only credit cards. Those are easy to cancel or chargeback if things go screwy. She does know my SSN which is a bigger concern, but then again you give your SSN to all sorts of people and services in USA, it’s very not actually a secret.

Oh and she doesn’t know passwords to anything. LastPass sharing only.

Doesn't that mean she knows the shared passwords?

Most password managers let you share passwords without actually revealing the password.

I struggle with this concept. Suppose a password manager's password sharing utility allows me to login to a web service in my browser. Couldn't I open the Network tab and observe the network request that displays the plaintext username and password?

Probably. It’s not meant to be bullet proof I don’t think, but most people who aren’t developers don’t know that the network inspector is even a thing let alone how to use it.

How can they possibly login without the password being available to them?

What kind of stuff is your “life admin stuff”?

For me, it’s usually house stuff. If something breaks or needs maintenance that I can’t handle, it’s often a chore lining up contractors to get it surveyed and repair. Other than that, I’m also curious what people’s life admin stuff is.

How'd you go about finding and choosing one?

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