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Editor’s Note: This is a guest post from Marion Harrington, our resident International Tax & Finance expert. I asked her to answer a common question about whether it’s worth incorporating your location independent business. Her answer might surprise you…
I’ve involved myself in a serious joint partnership as well as a limited company arrangement; I’ve flirted with offshore this and offshore that…and my experience tells me that corporate anything can be a complete pain in the butt.
Setting up a corporation – whether state, interstate or offshore – is not something that should automatically feature on your pre-launch task list before becoming location independent & taking off round the world.
I know I’m beginning to sound like a scratched CD but I am forced yet again to reiterate my standard mantra: “It depends on your unique financial set of circumstances and what you are trying to achieve”. With that caveat now dispensed, the aim of this post is to give you some useful general guidelines to help you make a decision one way or the other.
At that point, I strongly suggest you talk with a professional who can walk you through the types of companies which may be appropriate for you…
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Well over a year ago I walked into an O2 shop in the UK, picked up a shiny new iPhone and swooned. I *had* to have it. Simply had to.
But then I walked out again, iPhone-free. Don’t ask me how I managed it – gadget freak that I am – but I did. And to this day I remain iPhone free and proud of it.
Since then I’ve been in and out of phone shops (don’t ask me how many times), resisting the urge every single time to get an iPhone. You’ll hear a few digital nomads talk about how iPhones are the perfect handset for LIPs but I beg to differ. I’ll summarise why a bit later on.
Our mobile set-up for the past year or so hasn’t been that snazzy…in fact it’s been pretty low tech. We’ve deliberately chosen not to have fancy handsets for a number of reasons, including:
- We don’t really need them – we rarely use them to speak to anyone, using Skype for the majority of international calls to family & friends. The only time we need to speak to anyone else is to organise something local in which case we stick a local SIM card in our cheap handset and away we go.
- We’d rather not walk around with expensive handsets, flashing our bling wherever we go. It’s not like we’ve visited the ghettos or slums anywhere but we’re pretty casual in our appearance and try not to walk around with too many valuable things when we’re out & about.
- We’d rather be untethered from emails/Twitter/Facebook when we’re out & about; we have our laptops for that and there’s rarely anything crucial that we need to know about the instant it happens.
But I’m still a gadget freak at heart and had been hanging out for a new phone so I finally decided to go for it. I had a shortlist which went something like this:
- iPhone
- Blackberry
- Android
- Palm Pre or other smartphone
To cut to the chase, I went for a Blackberry Bold 9700 & I couldn’t be happier. Now you know what I went for, here’s the process I went through to make my decision. You may find a similar process yields a different result for you. But first…
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This post is a guest post by Charlie Gilkey, written specifically for our 12 week challengers. It was such a valuable message however that I wanted to share it with all of you…
“Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.” – Theodore Roosevelt
One technique some teachers use to discourage cheating is to have multiple versions of exams so that people can’t copy the answers of the student next to them. When you don’t know what version of the test your peers have, you have to focus on yours.
The way I see it, the 12 week challenge is a test. What can you accomplish in this set period of time with a given number of resources?
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