Working Remotely From A Tropical Island In Thailand
blog.mobilejazz.com
blog.mobilejazz.com
There are a number of tax incentives for people wanting to start tech companies here. Google Puerto Rico Act 20.
Short version: "Act 20 offers a four (4)% corporate tax rate for Puerto Rican businesses providing services for exportation, 100% tax-exempt dividends from earnings and profits derived from the export services income of eligible businesses, and a 60% exemption on municipal taxes."
Eligible businesses include IT software development.
Besides the tax benefits there are a lot of other things to like here.
Can you list a few?
Some questions I have, if you don't mind: How do you like Rincón? Do you need a car if in SJ? How much is Spanish used over English? Are living costs cheaper? Thx
I can't say a lot about Rincon because I don't know but Mayaguez is the most American like city here with the highest rate of english speaking people I have seen.
Living costs on most everything is a little expensive here except for service related items (car repairs, appliance repairs, etc). Expect a 5 - 10% increase in living expenses.
You will need a car to get around unless you live in Palmas del Mar and then you will need a golf cart, there is a car rental on site if you need to go further than the onsite.
Things to like. 1. The weather 2. Simpler Life 3. Tropical Fruits/Nuts everywhere 4. Less regulations on things I care about (homeschooling) 5. Tax system that is not the IRS 6. More community minded people, probably more like the states in the 70/80s. 7. I have a personal swimming pool, tennis court, basketball court and decent sized house for less than the one I left in Atlanta.
I've never had a problem here or felt in danger.
I'm in Atlanta now, but have definitely been mulling PR over.
Heard the same thing about east vs west sides of the island.
For the most part of the year it is the same time as ET zone so it works out nicely for east coast jobs.
With tropical weather.
What's the schooling like?
Public schools are a no go. There are some good private schools and a large number of homeschoolers. Don't know much about the colleges here but probably not good.
Puerto Rico is part of the united states, just not a state, which means no visa required, same currency, and etc.
Additional info on tax benefits: http://puertoricotaxincentives.com/act-20-export-services-ac...
I agree with most of what you said, except for the college part, which you admit you didn't know very well.
The public Colleges of Puerto Rico are actually great and very competitive with the rest of the colleges in the US, but with lower resources.
I studied computer engineering in UPRM in Mayaguez. While studying there I had internships with multiple fortune 500 companies which allowed me to pay for my own tuition as it was at the time $40 per credit. When I graduated I was hired in a fortune 500, many of which recruit heavily in PR, and was recently able to move to a startup with ease. Many of my alumni were hired in various companies both big (Microsoft, IBM, Lockheed Martin) and smaller startups. I only mention this because many of us were hired alongside many ivy league school students or from other larger universities with more resources, which may serve as a signal of how competitive the school is compared to others.
I would happily recommend anybody to study in any of the UPR campuses.
Also, the income has to be sourced in the foreign country, if it is sourced in say New York you can't magically tansfer those taxes to another country without incorporating there.
You do not have to pay payroll taxes. When living abroad, some treaties allow you to pay them instead of local ones, but without a treaty you just don't pay. Of course, good luck ever collecting on your chinese social retirement account.
You are correct on the SS and medicare but the assumption is if you are the business owner the majority of your income will be dividends and not subject to SS or Medicare, so just the 4% tax applies.
The Timezone thing is also a really big deal too. PR is the same most of the year and just one hour off Nov-Mar. I do not ever see myself waking up at 5:00am for meetings.
How does the tax work? It's part of US territory, so are you paying your income tax to the US as you usually would while earning in the US?
Or are you resident there and your earnings subject to taxes in PR? Aside from that, as a US citizen are you not still obliged to pay the IRS the taxes on a certain amount of earnings made outside the US?
I posted my email address to another comment here. If you are interested send me an email and I will put you in contact with a tax accountant here and a few others that work on this.
Add the @ and . in the above.
Domain for one of my future micro services frameworks projects.
For those of you in the pacific time zone (sf bay). If you're interested in doing this, I recommend Tahiti or Hawaii. It's three hours off from pacific time during the summer months but only 2 hours off during winter. You can easily work a local time of 6-3 which would be 8-5 in PT. This gives you the rest of the day to enjoy paradise.
A tip on how to convince your boss to let you do this: Plan to go on a two week vacation somewhere. When asking for time off, ask your boss if they mind you working remotely for a couple weeks following your vacation. It might just work--and like in my case I found out that my boss didn't care if I stayed longer.
I called it CA time. Roll in at 10am, 1.5-2 hour lunch, surprisingly most everyone gone at 5pm because kids or something else.
My coworkers would ask me how many hours I was working, to which I'd reply 40. How many are you working?
I care because when you're working as a team and people are gone, it kills productivity across the team.
Not everyone works in silos.
I knew they didn't like having remote workers, but for a contract extension they were willing to do it. So I spent two months working from beautiful Brazil and had a raise waiting for me when I came back.
Moral of the story - there might be a way to work from a distance for a while after all even with employers that don't normally allow it.
1) Why did't they move to one of the Canary Islands? Part of Spain, Barcelona is a part of it. Less hassle because you stay in Europe, same language, same culture as in Barcelona. I rent a flat (70m2, furnished, 500m from the palmtree-beach, €500 /month), in the center of the capital on one of the islands, the internet connection is reasonable. Sounds comparable to Thailand.
2) How long did they stay in Thailand, was it a 2 month project-move or a multiple-year company move?
To answer your questions:
1) We actually wanted to experience a new culture and also have some kind of adventure. We're already doing things in Spain, so we just wanted to try out something new and see how it works :-)
2) This was only a 2 month experiment, but our whole company is set up for remote work. So some of us continuously travel and work from different places. Myself I've been living in a camper van for a year now (blog post pending ;-)), but this was the first experiment where we actually rented two houses offshore and moved a bunch of people there.
Since then we also had another experiment. We spent some time in the Austrian Alps for skiing. We'll write about it soon.
And the next thing we want to do is actually in Spain (in the mountains) and then we're planning to go to Mauritius for a month or so.
It can be a great way to run project in a lovely pressure cooker. Everybody 7days per week involved/committed without the distraction of homely nuisances.
I'm very interested in your camper-van-blogpost
And Mauritius is great!
If you need people to work 7 days per week, that's a problem. Hire more people, or set longer deadlines. Emergencies happen, but working late for a whole week or more is a systemic, productivity and morale sapping flaw.
But you're right. Mauritius is great!
Your original post talked about relocating so team members could spend 7 days a week committed to the project. That goes far beyond a weekend BBQ.
Good times.
Not many developer meetups here in Santa Cruz though :/
Or start a functional-reactive-concatenative-meetup group here
But I know what you're talking and while what we're doing is technically a gray zone, what the government is after is mostly freelancers that basically live in Thailand, but are not paying taxes there and are constantly on a visa run to re-enter the country.
No, you stated you were working. From your article's title: "Working Remotely From A Tropical Island In Thailand"
> what we're doing is technically a gray zone
Did you file a tax statement and did you pay any taxes on income earned while you were residing in Thailand?
Noticed the smiley?
Nevertheless, how do you differentiate between holidays and work and where to draw the line? If you're responding to a work emails while being on holidays, does that count towards the taxable income in that country you're visiting?
> Did you file a tax statement and did you pay any taxes on income earned while you were residing in Thailand?
Absolutely. We're not evading taxes. All income is taxed in Spain. And we weren't residing in Thailand. We were only visiting it and happened to also do some things that were related to our business back home in Europe. The work we did had nothing to do with Thailand itself.
I'm not an international tax specialist, but at least from a moral point of view I don't see that we did something wrong.
In European countries for example you only become a tax resident if you spend more than 183 days there.
EDIT: formatting
Pity Thais cannot easily come to Spain and work illegally. Despite what you've said it's blatant public abuse of the tourist visa system in Thailand.
Honestly when I see blog posts like this my opinion of the author and company goes down considerably. Breaking the rules and publishing the fact that you are makes me question what other grey areas you'd operate in.
But there's really nothing to get bent about. No locals were out of a job. They lived there as tourists so paid a lot more into the local economy than locals, including a lot more taxes in the form of VAT on all their purchases.
The only real issue is that they were at risk even if they didn't sense it, because what happens now and then is someone gets pissed off (usually another foreigner) and rats someone out. Then the police see an opportunity to collect an extortionate "fine" before they get deported.
Could you explain how you formed that conclusion?
> They lived there as tourists so paid a lot more into the local economy than locals
How did you determine that? I've lived as a hippie in India, similar to what Steve Jobs did. I spent 0 money and lived off the temple welfare system. I was exploiting the generosity of people who had a thousandth the resources and welfare that I had. I wasn't alone. There were hundreds, if not thousands of other Westerners doing similar things.
It appears that Mobile Jazz is a company that caters to western audiences, most of the work they will be doing will be for western clients who wouldn't hire Thai workers. The workers just happen to be out of office when they do their jobs.
It might contravene visa issues from a literal read, but I think the intent was fair. Many Australians would call this "the vibe of the thing" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJuXIq7OazQ
Increased strain on policing and hospitals. Strain on Thailand's subsidised public transport system, subsidised diesel fuel, subsidised water utilities.
No tax revenue from foreign workers as they don't declare in Thailand despite being required to do so by law. The only exception being VAT.
The general point of nomads working in Thailand is the ability to lower outgoings beyond what you could do in North America or Europe. Nomads don't spend cash like tourists and that makes them a drain on the economy.
So what's Thailand got to lose from allowing foreigners to set up shop. Well the huge fees required to be legal for one.
While from a legal perspective it might be all correct what you're saying, I think that most people simply have more important matters to worry about.
For example, it's also illegal to cross a red traffic light as a pedestrian at 3am in the night on a deserted street. That doesn't mean that it is immoral or that it causes harm to anyone.
And I wouldn't even want to know all the "illegal" things you're doing that you are not even aware of. Just saying.
Not really. Thai people do not easily get a tourist visa for visiting Europe. There's a whole bunch of constraints to keep them out.
There's been around eight of these posts of 'Digital Nomads' working in Thailand and not one of them bothered to mention that they were breaking the law.
You did. You lied on your Thai tourist visa application form. It explicitly said: "I hereby declare that the purpose of my visit to thailand is for pleasure or transit only and that in no case shall I engage myself in any profession or occupation while in the country"
Don't wanna state the obvious,but even If you're coding(could claim to be open-souce work), it's not like the police is gonna spy on you.
Re "spying on you": immigration police have conducted "raids" on coworking spaces, not to mention the potential for upset/disgruntled locals/competitors/whoever to report you.
Sounds reasonable , but it doesn't work that way. Work for free or charity work still counts as work and is no less illegal.
See also: http://www.thaivisa.com/462-0.html (the article is from 2006, but that law hasn't changed)
My colleague's wife is on H4 (dependant) visa and prior to coming to USA, she had a job in India. We talked to a lawyer and then with USCIS and both of them confirmed that it is not a possibility that she can work remote here in USA on H4 even though she gets paid in India.
"Digital nomads – people working remotely or running online businesses – in Thailand can legally work there on tourist visas"
But one paragraph down:
"It is unlikely that travellers will be granted a re-entry stamp after two or three visa runs. If your passport is stamped “O-I” (out-in) upon arrival, it is unlikely that you will be able to re-enter the country again should you decide to do a visa run"
http://ashleyconnor.co.uk/blog/2014/09/07/working-in-thailan...
But we also do all have families with their own lives, so we have a stable home somewhere, and spend the majority of our time at that home. We also get into a working rhythm at our home, which gets disrupted with travel and adjustments to a new working environment, so when we really need top effectiveness for a project, it works better from "home", at least in our experience.
And then once you're set up and feel 'home' in that new place it's already time to leave again. So the biggest learning experience for us is to stay longer next time.
Would it not be wise then to send someone ahead to scope these things out? As in, you're planning to have a team move to X, send someone to X two weeks in advance to sort out logistics, get internet dongles, map out places to eat, do laundry, etc?
Rather than having whole teams trying to sort it out on arrival.
I think what you've offered is great btw. The criticism being leveled on you here is pretty unfair and I'm not sure what is behind it. It's of great benefit to the locals to have westerners on western salaries come in for a month or two, spend maniacally on local resources and then leave.
The argument against it is well you should be incorporating there and providing the locals with jobs and that's nice in theory but unfeasible in reality, and all those tourist bucks create and supply the locals with plenty of jobs in themselves.
The most capable, adaptable, and accomplished adults I know moved around a bunch as kids. It forces you to learn how to live in the world and get out of your comfort zone. The most anxious, bitter, and underperforming adults I know grew up in the prototypical suburban bubble environment. End meaningless personal anecdote.
I still agree, and in fact kids are often more adaptable than adults. Usually they can handle change, and it is good for the mind to experience different worlds.
Depends on the country / school system. Not all kids have 3 months of "summer break."
I haven't lived in one place longer than two years since I was eight or so. It wasn't the easiest thing in the world, but I wouldn't be the person I am today if I hadn't grown up that way.
I guess there's a happy medium. I've heard horror stories from both ends of the stability spectrum.
To Thailand only a few of us went, mostly for the family reasons.
However, to our most recent trip to the Austrian Alps we had almost everyone in the company head over there.
In general we're actually very pro-family. We do have a main office in Barcelona, but everyone is allowed to work from virtually anywhere. Some of us travel and work from remote locations, but for those with families it's also a great benefit to work from home and have more time with their families.
London, Tokyo, Singapore, China, San Francisco, Iceland, France, Germany, Russia, Australia, India, Canada...
We could be a travelling startup.
That would be so cool!
It's simpler to have a remote company. Then you can take all the trips you want, and your team can work from wherever they want.
It's not always perfectly possible, but at least we try :-)
Also, I presume from the article that not every employee was in Thailand, and some chose to remain at home, correct? Did the remote team ever feel left out of the conversation as most of the team was speaking in person in Thailand?
Thank you, and nice article.
Regarding the remote work, even when we're at home, that means we're in different cities and even different countries, so our whole company is set up as a remote company, although many chose to work from the main office in Barcelona. To answer your question, no one felt left out, because we simply continued to work as usual (chat, video calls, etc.), it just happened that some of us were at the different location.
Or are my conclusions inaccurate?
I think a lot of people here are very keen on experimenting quite radically with what work itself looks like. Like all experiments, they are not for everyone, and nobody expects any single radical experiment to just stumble upon the final answer to work, but they may learn a thing or two that the rest of us can benefit from.
I've been working remotely from different countries over the past couple of years, and while it's a great life experience, it's just not practical for work. The wife and I are now looking for a home base.
And yes, I agree it doesn't make sense to be there permanently, but traveling once in a while to the big business hubs in the world and spending a month here and there helps.
What I personally don't want to do though is to permanently live in a city that is crowded with people. So doing those time-limited remote experiments is a nice change of perspective and a very good way to recharge your batteries while still staying productive.
I say that as a French who decided ten years ago that China was my place, learnt the language, married a Chinese woman and have kids and job in Beijing with no special return plan.
They like living in Spain / wherever else they live. They also like travelling to other countries. They're taking a vacation and working from a new place, for a short time. They don't want to live there.
1. http://philippinevisalawyer.com/?q=special-investor-resident...
I started consulting in the last few months, and my biggest client has recently had to delay payment because they don't have enough money. I've also been applying to a few gigs on gun.io, and one proposal was accepted, but they've just pulled out. They need some more time to scope out the idea before starting development.
Living overseas is awesome if you have a stable job or a lot of savings, but it can be pretty terrifying otherwise. So I'm in a bit of a jam at the moment, and would like to ask for your help with finding a one-off or part-time gig to stay afloat. I've already tried most of the remote job sites [1].
I'm a Rails developer with over 5 years of experience and I'm competent with front-end development, most JavaScript frameworks, and DevOps. I also have 6 months of full-time experience with iOS development, in Swift and Objective-C. One other thing is that I really enjoy debugging, and am pretty good at tracking down difficult bugs. If you or one of your developers are stuck on anything, I'd be happy to take a look. No payment until it's fixed.
My rate is $150 per hour, and is not negotiable. I can usually commit to 20 hours per week, but I will be available for full-time work (up to 60 hours per week) over the next few weeks.
Please leave a comment if you have any advice. If you would like to get in touch and view my GitHub profile, then please send me an email at needaremotegig@gmail.com
>> My rate is $150 per hour, and is not negotiable. I can usually commit to 20 hours per week, but I will be available for full-time work (60 hours per week) over the next few weeks.
So you're stuck in Thailand, turn to help on Hacker news, and then mention how "My rate is $150 per hour, and is not negotiable."
Not sure how many people you'll attract with this strategy.
I do have a little bit of a buffer. My client's site is also profitable, so they'll be able to pay me in the next few weeks. But I'll have to ease back the hours with them, so am looking for some more projects.
I think it's obvious why you're finding demand to be so low when you've set your price so high.
The amount you want for 60 hours a week ($9k) could get two extremely experienced engineers and provide them with a massive bonus incentive on top of their salary almost anywhere in the world.
It comes across as a bit delusional.
I've been working with my current client for the last 3 months. He brought me on at $150 per hour after he had to fire his previous contractors, and I've been cleaning up their mess ever since. I've heard of quite a few situations like this, but I'm sure that there are cheaper developers out there who are doing great work.
Demand for part-time + remote jobs seems to be pretty low in general, but I don't think my rate is the issue.
I am able to charge this much because of my experience with startups, and my open source contributions. I was an early engineer at a startup which is now worth over $500 million, and I'm currently the CTO at my own startup.
Obviously networking is one of my major weaknesses, and I need to work on that.
I get what you're saying, but as an employer, the "non negotiable" and inflexible attitude is a point-blank no for me. Your OS contributions (caveat: spent 2 minutes looking) are hardly much (lists on github are not 'valuable programming', to me it's just content marketing that may as well be on a blog) compared to people asking for 1/2 to 2/3 of your proposed salary, who have core contribs, manage production-deployed packages/code that are in frequent use etc.
Your mileage may vary, so best of luck. But that's my perspective, as an employer, looking for remote devs. The competition is actually pretty high, and you can get awesome candidates that might earn $120-160k a year when working in the valley for $80-120k due to the lower costs they can incur ('valley tax') and the flexibility you offer as a remote employer.
Don't get me wrong, I know the value of a high-priced consultant (am/was one) to fix an emergency. But you're not asking people to deliver you an emergency, you're asking for a job. And to deliver in an emergency, you need a hell of a lot more credibility and slickness, which your post suggest you don't have.
* might be one, might be more. Depends on who applies and what it looks like.
At your suggested rate, these clients will be able to get an on-location contractor with significantly more experience (think 10-15 years). I.e. No hassle with international payments, timezones and what not.
Compare that to what you are suggesting: A very high cost (150 USD an hour) at a very high risk (completely unknown resource). This makes it a highly unappealing business proposal.
For you to get that rate while being remote, you need to have already established yourself with such clients, i.e. You need to have worked for them before and built a lot of trust.
If you're having power outages or brownouts, you want voltage regulators and UPS'. Bad power will wreck your electronics. It's good to have a backup internet connection as well. I've had outages lasting up to 3 weeks, and what are you really going to do about it to motivate a telephone company to work faster?
The 37signals people created a short book about working remotely. At about the same time as I was having problems with someone not overlapping their hours with the rest of the team, their book pointed out the same issue. If you don't overlap, people will become isolated in a very bad way. If you hire someone you just have to clarify the expected hours upfront.
My startup is really similar. We also value people over profits (and we're profitable!), we all work remotely, and we all meetup in random places for a few weeks so we can get a vacation plus some face-to-face working time in.
So far, it's been awesome. We've only done 1 meetup so far, at a ski chalet in the Alps, and it was great. The significant others & kids came for 1 week, and then we had 2 weeks of just the employees.
The biggest challenge is definitely the internet. When you have 6 people in a house all trying to pull/push from git, sync dropbox, do skype calls, etc; it can put quite a burden on whatever crappy DSL the vacation house has installed.
We would love to do a SE Asia work trip but so far we have ignored the region due to the internet connectivity. I'm actually really surprised that the mobile internet there was good enough for you guys to work with.
Cheers, and keep it up! It's nice to see there are more startups like this out there.
There are reports in the archives http://blog.expensify.com/category/company-life/ including Portugal, Croatia, Thailand, Vietnam ...
Just posted an article about the blue house doing a similar thing in Morocco (or at least providing a framework for startups to do so in tropical locations): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9347228
It's about a startup residence in Morocco, startups came and work there for one month
However for the trip we did just recently to the Austrian Alps pretty much everyone joined. But that was also a lot shorter and the focus was more on skiing/snowboarding than on doing work.