http://www.archive.org/details/silence_60sec

Make this the ringtone for any unwanted number that calls you. Problem solved.

Enjoy.

One such person, Matt Heusser, had been writing articles about “The Jimmy Buffet lifestyle” and asked to interview me on the topic. here is the result, an interview about going independent, not just from your job, but from working altogether.

But when we sometimes only pop into a country for a few days, my fear is that in the event of delayed bags, we may be off to another destination before our luggage turns up.

When we’re on the road, we can be flying as often as a couple of times per week. And since it will typically be weeks or months until we return home, labeling our luggage with our home address is useless. I’ve instead switched to labeling “In case of delayed bags …” because really, that’s the only reason we need identifying information on the bags at all.

On the back of a scrap of paper or trimmed-down index card with our name, email and phone numbers, I will typically write a detailed itinerary:

2011-01-15:   YYZ —(AF306)—-> CDG —(AF2911)—-> BUC

FINAL DESTINATION: (Hotel Name, Address, Phone)

2011-01-20:   BUC —(KL1192)—-> AMS —(KL691)—-> MUC

FINAL DESTINATION: (Hotel Name, Address, Phone)

It’s my thinking that a reasonable human can therefore figure out, depending on when it is discovered, what to do with our luggage.  In other words, please don’t send my bag to a hotel in Bucharest if I’m already on my way to Germany.

Staples Print and Copy Centre has a deal on business card printing right now (250 cards for $9.99) and in an effort to avoid using scraps of paper in my purse while standing at the check-in counter, I’ve ordered a stack to at least reduce the number of times I have to write our phone numbers (one of which is a toll-free phone number that only works in North America, so the fewer times I have to explain that in writing, the better).

The cards I designed last night (I forgot to save a capture of the proof) look like:

J.B. and Sarah Rainsberger

In case of delayed bags, please deliver this bag to the following address no later than: _(space for date)_

(space for handwriting a final destination)

travel email address

various phone numbers, and which ones can be used where

For more travel information and full itinerary, please see reverse >>>>>>>>>>>

I have tried re-using cards (front written in pen, back in pencil) but that does get messy pretty quickly. I have thought of using a wet/dry erase solution for the back of the card, but bags are not guaranteed to stay dry and are subject to rough handling. If our bags really have been misplaced, fallen off a conveyor belt, or left to rot on the tarmac, then I don’t want to assume that non-permanent markings will remain intact.

I have also considered simply leaving a full itinerary in each bag, but since we typically use travel locks, that means our bags would have to be opened in order for someone to find our schedule. (When our travel itinerary is pages long, it doesn’t exactly fold and fit into the ID slot.) I have also had attached luggage tags go missing from our bags, so the built-in slot seems like a more secure option. We have even mis-identified our own luggage, and filed a “delayed baggage” report, because somewhere along the line, one of those elastic rainbow “belts” magically appeared on our bag! (We’re assuming it came off of one bag in handling, and the crew reattached it, but to our bag by mistake.) So, we’ve decided nothing that goes on or comes off the bag.

It’s true that this “In case of delayed bags” labeling strategy depends on reasonable, thinking humans. But I’m hoping that giving explicit instructions might save a bit of back and forth in the event that something does happen. Any staff member from any airline or airport can come across our bag and know which airline is responsible for it and where it should eventually end up, even if the airline’s tag is missing.

If you have another idea, let me know!

• Keeping your job costs you money and time.
• You probably don’t consider these costs when you think about how much money you earn.
• Most people’s “true” hourly rate is half what they think it is.
• Your “true” hourly rate also represents how long you have to work to earn $1.
• Expressing the cost of something you might purchase in terms of the energy you must exchange for it could really change the way you feel about spending that money.
• Coffee can be more expensive than a computer.
• Understanding the value of our life energy was an instrumental part in our journey towards financial independence.

The Details

I have referred to life energy value of money before, most recently in an article about an LCD projector we bought to use as a mobile TV. In it, I said:

A portable TV capable of 1080P for less than CAD 600. Not bad, and an easy value to compute. Even at 8 minutes of life energy per dollar (approximately $30k/year salary), the entire setup costs you 80 hours of pre-tax energy, and I’ll bet you’ll enjoy the projector for more than two weeks.

How did I compute this number? What does it mean? Let me tell you.

I learned in Your Money or Your Life how to express an amount of money, say the cost of something I’d like to buy, in units of life energy. As they put it, I can compute how much of my energy I must trade to pay for this thing I want to buy. When I worked at IBM, I made the calculation roughly like this.

Here I’ve started with my overall salary after taxes in the left-hand column and the amount of time I spend in the office working in the right-hand column. I show you the calculation at the scale of a year, but I’ve done it at the scale of a week and a month, too. If you try this, then choose whichever scale that you find easiest to think at, and pro-rate everything else at that scale. I have found that scaling this to year helps me remember once-per-year expenses like vacations.

Although I had a salary of $82k, I had net pay of $56k per year, so I calculated based on that. Nowadays, my personal tax rate stands much, much lower.

I counted all the costs in time and money associated with having a job. I kept asking myself, “If I didn’t have to keep my job, would I spend this money?” Every time I answered “no”, I added it to the list. All costs mattered. I had a long list. At the end, I subtracted all the money costs from my salary and added all the time costs to my time working, which led me to the figures at the bottom of the table.

At the top of the table I computed my hourly pay rate on paper. In this case, $56k / 2250 hours = $24.89/hour. At the bottom of the table I computed a much more accurate hourly pay rate, taking into account the cost of keeping my job. In this case, $39.9k / 3585 hours = $11.13/hour. I had had no idea.

Most people learn that they earn a true hourly rate about half as high as their pay stub leads them to believe.

The next step involves taking the reciprocal, whose unit is “hours/dollar”, which I usually express in minutes per dollar by multiplying by 60. In my case, 60 / $11.13/hour = 5.39 minutes per dollar. What did that mean?

I chose to exchange 5.39 minutes of my life energy to earn $1 by working where I worked and how I worked.

Now I could quantify purchases big and small in much more concrete units, and we humans tend to judge things more accurately when we have more concrete information. The morning coffee at Second Cup? (Forgive me; I knew not what I drank.) cost $1.50 or 8 minutes. Every day. It took 8 minutes to stand in line to get the coffee. Not worth it. A new MacBook Air? $2,000 or 10,780 minutes or almost 180 hours. Given how much time I spend online, I could easily justify one of those per year as long as I have the discretionary funds to spend on it. A new first-baseman’s glove? $200 or 1,078 minutes, almost 18 hours. Back then I played softball every week all summer and really enjoyed it, so 18 hours seemed a small price to pay.

Now I had a less abstract, less intuitive, and perhaps more meaningful way to evaluate the utility of a purchase. This helped me decide which expenditures I valued (the computer) and didn’t value (Second Cup’s crappy coffee). This played a central role in our personal financial strategy: we expressed our expenditures in life energy units, which helped us identify the expenditures we didn’t value, then we stopped buying those things. We must have saved 40% on our discretionary spending.

Awareness of the money we spent is just one of the ways we have learned to free our minds to do great work.

We have also installed it as a TV in the bedroom. Normally I don’t like having a TV in the bedroom, but this configuration works too well to pass up. Projecting onto the slanted portion of our bedroom ceiling&mash;we have a steep A roof—we get a good picture of around 80-90 inches, which beats our TV by a decent margin. The picture sharpness doesn’t match up, but it performs well enough to enjoy thoroughly.

We paid a total of USD 434 + CAD 105 or around CAD 540 for the projector, shipping, and import fees. We bought it directly from the manufacturer iSival Instruments.

We had some difficulty connecting it to my MacBook Air: the computer wouldn’t detect the projector as a display without re-booting. Fortunately, a little testing revealed the solution:

1. Connect the adapter (DisplayPort to DVI in my case) to the cable (DVI to HDMI in my case)
2. Connect the adapter/cable to the projector, then
3. Connect the cable to the MacBook Air.

This sequence works for both DVI/HDMI and VGA connections. I plan to purchase a DisplayPort/HDMI adapter in order to get direct HDMI output to the projector.

A portable TV capable of 1080P for less than CAD 600. Not bad, and an easy value to compute. Even at 8 minutes of life energy per dollar (approximately $30k/year salary), the entire setup costs you 80 hours of pre-tax energy, and I’ll bet you’ll enjoy the projector for more than two weeks.

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?

A little roof problem damages the ceiling

Our housesitter sent us this photo of our second-storey ceiling crumbling as a result of a roof leak. Fortunately, this didn’t present a serious problem, but a few emails back and forth sufficed to fix the problem. Our housesitter coordinated with our handyman to diagnose the severity of the problem, and concluded it wasn’t serious. We asked the contractor who worked on our roof to coordinate with our housesitter to fix the underlying roof problem, and he did so free of charge, since his previous roof work created the problem. Finally, our housesitter told us that the roof no longer leaks, and relayed from the contractor that we needn’t bother fixing the ceiling hole until we decide to renovate the entire ceiling. All this required no more than about 15 minutes of our time and energy. For a small problem like this, we didn’t have to worry much, but what about a more serious problem?

Making our basement more flood-resistant

Fortunately—in a strange way—the Universe tested us on this, too. Not long after we left, our basement flooded quite vigorously. We had 30-40 cm of water in the basement as a result of an old sump pump, highly saturated ground, and thawing snow. Once again, we managed to coordinate everything from the road: our handyman coordinated with a plumber to install a new sump pump, confirm that they drained the basement effectively, and even raised our basement appliances 20 cm off the floor to avoid damage from any similar flooding in the future. All this required less than an hour of our time, and while it put a little more stress on us, our housesitter sent us photos of the work to satisfy us that the plumber had done the job well. Even something as annoying as a disintegrating mailbox only required a few emails and 10 minutes of our time to resolve. We managed to do this with a combination of email, Skype, headphones, a trustworthy housesitter, a good handyman and local contractors. I think that as long as none of our important records suffer from flooding, leaks, or other damage, that virtually nothing that could happen at home would prompt us to return. We do still need to spend several hours finding housesitters, but the more people we engage, the easier time we have of finding the next one. Sarah still feels considerable stress finding housesitters, but the Universe has so far always found a way to send us someone we can trust.

When we returned home and could inspect the damage for ourselves, we found no further problems with the leaky ceiling on the second floor, a sump pump that actually works well, a dry basement floor, and a general appreciation for coming home to a house in slightly better repair than when we left it.

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.

Villa Serena, Mazatlán, México

On the advice of relatives, we chose to experiment with living at Villa Serena, located in Mazatlán’s old downtown. We found a one-bedroom apartment for USD 653 per month. This price included MXN 300 worth of electricity per month, and access to the amenities, although we did have to pay an additional MXN 150 per month to use the laundry facilities and MXN 25 per 19-litre bottle of water. We ended up spending a total of CAD 1129 + MXN 13942, or approximately CAD 2280 on housing costs for three months. That makes CAD 760 per month for rent, cooling, water, cable TV, and internet. The corresponding items cost us CAD 782 per month in Summerside. That makes it possible to live in Mazatlán quite inexpensively. We love that.

Cooking with my youngest sister-in-law, Mary

We ate quite well, mostly cooking, but occasionally eating out. We certainly enjoyed a lot of Hector’s bread at Molika Bakery, which we mentioned in a previous article. We spent about CAD 2280 on food for three months, or CAD 760 per month, which makes for a telling coincidence: we value food. We spent about CAD 183 on our Molika Bakery habit, CAD 32 on coffee beans, CAD 934 on shopping at the big grocery store, CAD 156 at the local market , CAD 216 on pizza, and the rest (about CAD 759) on eating out. After we returned home, we computed what we spent on food in June unrelated to travel, and it came to just under CAD 1000.

Traveling in style with our good friend, Jen

We love how little transportation costs at home, and in Mazatán, the taxis and pulmonías didn’t disappoint. We spent CAD 136 on transportation, excluding the trips to and from the airport, which totaled an additional CAD 53. Given the flat rate of CAD 6 or 7.50 per trip in Summerside, CAD 136 would buy about 17 trips, or 8 round trips, at home. We probably use about 4 rounds trips per month at home, which costs around CAD 180-200 over three months, depending on where we need to go. While we encountered some trouble flagging down a pulmonía in Mazatlán, we found the service overall both efficient and pleasant to use. I also owe the taxistas a debt of gratitude for letting me practise Spanish with them.

I think I can make a strong case that Mazatlán offers us an excellent place to live, with a cost of living very similar to Summerside. We consider our experiment a financial success, at least on the surface. We couldn’t resist looking at some real estate listings, and while houses cost considerably more there than at home, we had to double-take at the property taxes those listings quoted. As a single data point, a house listed at USD 250k carried property taxes of USD 200 per year. This compares favorably to the CAD 1250 per year we pay in Summerside. Although we would need a cash infusion to move there, it appears that we could live in Mazatlán spending under our arbitrary limit of CAD 2000 per month for basic living expenses.