value of money

Last weekend I was in sunny Scotland enjoying a bit of down time, a catch up with family and some handstand practice on a beach. When we were driving back down south I happen to notice quite a few wide-load vehicles transporting houses!
 
When I thought about it, I didn’t see any on the journey up which made me think that no-one builds houses down south and transports them north, only the other way round. My reasoning was that it’s clearly more expensive in the south, which I’ve experienced when comparing other peoples refurb/buying costs of property compared to the HMOs, flips and serviced apartments we’ve done in Essex. There may be a simpler reason in the fact that the ‘house building factory’ (I’m sure that’s the technical term) is located in the north, and this again would be due to the cheaper commercial property & labour.
 
This got me thinking into the value of money and how readily available it is to spend/invest in places where it is valued more and you can get more for your money.
 
Take for example VAs (Virtual Assistants). I have recently just hired a fully qualified accountant to be our businesses full time Finance Manager.
 
In the UK this would have cost at least £2-3K per month, probably more when you take into account employers NIC, pension contributions, insurance etc.
 
In the Philippines, which is where I hired our Finance Manager from, it costs 35,000PHP per month, £540, which is almost double what they would earn in an office job doing the same work.
 
What does this allow me to do?

1. Take a risk and hire quicker – I would not be able to hire as quick as I have done if I needed to pay out £2K+ per month. This has allowed our businesses to grow quicker.
2. Hire better skills – again creating accelerated growth. This is also true for one-off tasks that I am no good at (like design), I just use fiverr.com, get the job done a lot better and quicker than I would ever have been able to do, at a relatively low price.
3. I get to spend my time on more valuable tasks, for example growth, new products or improved processes. Just to note, in the gap between my last part time bookkeeper and hiring our new Finance Manger I had to dip back into running the accounts. I worked out that I was doing this for £3.37 per hour (the amount it costs for my new Finance Manager), so a lot less than the minimum wage!
4. Keep the flow of money going:
   1. Spend/invest more with local businesses – as the business grows we are taking on more serviced apartments that need furnishing, cleaning etc.
   2. Provide more services/products for customers
   3. Put money into the economy of the Philippines
5. And ultimately work towards achieving my 4 hour work week.

 
Hiring VAs or outsourcing using fiverr is just one way of being part of the world economy and being able to be smarter with your money. It has its limitations (I’m sure I can’t quite get a house built in the Philippines and have it shipped over yet) but for online businesses this is perfect.
 
I hope that you find this useful and start to consider what tasks you could be better off getting done by someone else for cheaper.
 
Thanks again for reading,
 
Steve