With a virtual office you can earn money anywhere

Very often, my trusty laptop goes with me to my favorite corner café where I can logon thanks to free Wi-Fi (available all over Paris!) and order up a frothy café crème. Just watching the buzz on the street from a café is what living in Paris is all about…I wouldn’t want to miss a single moment of it.

For almost 17 years it’s been my home, and for all that time I’ve worked from my portable U.S. office… living the dream I had for so many years to be rooted in the City of Light.

Your dream might be a Caribbean beach or a South American mountain town. But whatever your overseas life looks like, you can have it now and keep your U.S. office—or even start a new business.

All you need is a laptop, an Internet connection, and a bit of preparation and you’ll be ready to do business wherever you land. Here are seven easy steps to make it happen:

Step 1: Set up a business entity such as a DBA (“Doing Business As”) or LLC from which you can conduct business. This provides an entity from which you can invoice a client and get paid for it, plus illustrate that you have a real and viable business.

Operating outside of the foreign country you choose, I do not recommend using your own name in your company name. There are many reasons to distinguish your personal self from your business self, particularly when you will be answering to immigration and tax authorities. You can easily create your entity through online companies that specialize in small business start-ups. (I recommend Bizfilings.com, but there are many online.)

Step 2: To keep taxes to a minimum, choose carefully the state within which you register your company. Some states do not tax your business affairs – Alaska, Florida, Nevada, South Dakota, Texas, Washington and Wyoming. Two others, New Hampshire and Tennessee, tax only dividend and interest income. (For more information, see here.)

Step 3: Set up a mailing address where you can receive mail and which acts as the official company address. It doesn’t have to be in the same state as the one in which you registered the company.

If you don’t have a friend or relative who can manage the mail for you, the U.S. Postal Service offers mail-forwarding services. However, I discovered that if a forwarding label to your new address is placed over the old address (by a friend or other) and the item is dropped into a mail box, the USPS will gladly forward it to France (or wherever you are) free of charge—I did this for almost 10 years! Beyond the USPS, a host of other international mail and forwarding services exist. Try Myus.com or Mbex.net.

Step 4: Choose a bank that can manage your portable career well and that has Internet banking. Open a bank account under the same name as your new company. Make sure that there’s an agent at the bank assigned to your account: someone you can correspond with by email and who can accept your check deposits by mail.

Attach a debit card to the account that lets you take out cash from that account anywhere in the world using an ATM. Watch out for fees associated with your debit card—it may affect which bank you choose. If you are taking payments in foreign currencies, be sure your bank can accept foreign-currency checks. Be prepared for the checks to take weeks to clear. And prep yourself for the hit you’ll take in bank charges associated with the deposits and with exchange rates. (It’s the price of doing business!)

Owned by BNP Paribas, Bank of the West in San Francisco offers business accounts in U.S. dollars with an equivalent account in euros. This is very convenient for eliminating exchange-rate risk when receiving payments in euros.

Step 5: Apply for a credit card for your business account. Use the credit card to pay for as much as possible so that payment for your charges is easy and you have a record for business purposes. Capital One offers a credit card that accrues mileage rewards (two miles to the dollar) and has no additional fees on foreign transactions.

Step 6: Set up a North American phone number that acts as your professional and official phone. You can do this using Skype, Google Voice or Vonage, depending on what suits you best. The idea is that your U.S.-based clients can easily reach you, and no one needs to know where you are…you could be anywhere in the world! Plus with all these services, you receive your phone messages as files that you can listen to, and they are often transcribed into emails, as well.

Step 7: Create an online fax account that allows you to receive your faxes as .pdf or .gif files. This way, people fax you at a U.S. number but you can receive their faxes from anywhere. If you wish to send a fax, you can have a local copy shop do it for you. Or you can scan the document and then e-mail it or fax it through your online fax account. The least expensive I’ve found is Pop Fax.

About the Author
Adrian Leeds is an American living in France for almost two decades who has built a successful consulting business by assisting others in moving to France; earning a living; purchasing, renovating and renting investment property; learning French and a host of other things to make the dream of living or owning property in Paris or France come true. See here to subscribe to Adrian’s free online publications and learn more.