We have day jobs and a family and sometimes those other commitments interfere with our travel blogging.  Honestly though, we could not be where we are in the world without the types of jobs we have created for ourselves.  We are actually working on two new business ventures that will allow us to escape the work day and make a more independent income.  More to come on that.

The group that we most associate ourselves with is the growing number of LIP’s across the world (Location Independent Professionals / Location Independent Parents).  Although we love Uruguay, who knows if we’ll stay here. Our jobs can allow us to go wherever our hearts desire.

While we realize this is a little late in coming for our travel blog, here is a little more about us:

Brad’s love is travel, and after 14 years in the industry, he launched Pangaea Travel. Pangaea specializes in planning complex itineraries and round the world trips, as well as student, teacher and group programs (and it turns out there is a great market for booking fellow expats, their friends and family!) Brad is also known as the “Airfare Guru” on Brilliant Trips – which is a very prestigious association with a well known travel site. As you might have known with all of our previous posts on Technology, Brad is a tech geek and he works via high speed internet, VoIP phone and a love for the latest tech solutions.

Brad’s newest addition to the Pangaea family is Pangaea Insure: an online travel insurance comparison site where you can search the major travel insurance providers and come up with the best quote for you- all in seconds.

I am an Interior Designer who has focused my work on kitchen and bath design. I’ve been working independently at Lisa La Nasa Design, Inc for the past 6 years. Moving abroad has provided some fun long distance projects that prove nothing is impossible with the right technology!

My love of kitchen and bath design is brought to life in my newest project, laNeva Artisan Tile. After focusing for years on interesting tile designs and having installers tell me ‘You can’t do that!’, I created a tile line the way it should be offered: Accessible to both designers and the public, made to order, handmade, lead-free, custom design/layout assistance, tons of combinations and our signature Rift Series blends of two colors on one tile.

Our service jobs: Pangaea Travel and Lisa La Nasa Design are technology based and time based. While we can do them from anywhere, and already are considered LIP’s (Location Independent Professionals/Parents) we have to put in the hours to make an income.  Pangaea Insure and laNeva Tile will allow us to be more independent, spend more time with our family and travel this beautiful world as we can maintain incomes with a little less time at our 9-5 day jobs.  We are so excited for the future!  Bring it on, 2010!

Miami-Box is a parcel forwarding service between Miami, FL and Uruguay.  Set up a free account on their website and you get a unique address to send packages to in Miami.  This is a great solution for items purchased online or gifts from family and friends. Once a package arrives for you in Miami, you are notified via email and you have a few options depending on the purchase price of the package: if under $100 USD, you can opt to pick up your package at the airport and handle the aduana (taxes) yourself (with Miami-Box supplying the paperwork for you), or you can opt for full service delivery, with your credit card on file being billed for the aduana and delivery fees.  I decided on the latter and it was so convenient.  Not necessarily inexpensive, but convenient.

My little 2 kilo package cost me $99.60 on a $30 retail value.  A little painful, but still cheap in comparison to what UPS or FedEx were quoting.  The fees were broken down as follows (all in USD):

Airline freight from Miami (based on weight) $27.00

Aduana Taxes (based on retail value of $30 + freight of $27.00)  $36.00

Delivery (optional) $15.00

Handling  $15.00

Administrative fees  $6.60

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Grand total of $99.60 USD

The package arrived within 5 days, in one piece and hand delivered to my door.  I will try priority mail next time for comparisons sake.  The correspondence with Miami-Box throughout the process, as well as the delivery were all extremely professional.  I would certainly recommend their service.

*As noted on the Miami-Box site, books and magazines are not taxed to bring into Uruguay.  I will definitely use Miami-Box in the future for that purpose. They are also offering 60 magazines without the normal subscription cost for a limited time.  Please see their site for details.

Our lives are here in Uruguay but in this global economy, we do business with the USA on a daily basis. My laptop is still set to MN time so I can see what time it is for my clients.  Brad has a tougher time because he works with clients all over the US.  This means that he sees the start of the East Coast business day at 9 AM  Uruguay time and the end of the California business day at 9 PM Uruguay time.  Makes for one long work day.

It’s an interesting dynamic that makes the world feel really small.  It also, though, seems like we are not fully tied to the country where we are living because we are still living vicariously in several other time zones.

Part of why we chose Uruguay is because it’s a similar time zone to the US.  I imagine how the situation would be much complicated for those doing business with the other side of the world on a daily basis. Our few hours difference is nothing, really.

Now, come October, our understanding of the time zones will flux once again as Uruguay goes into Daylight Savings time and the US comes out of Daylight Savings a month later.  Our current 2 hour difference ahead of  US Central time changes to 3 hours  for a month, then 4 hours for the remainder of the Uruguay summer and until March (remember seasons are reversed in the southern hemisphere).

So much to keep track of!  Man, just makes you just want to unplug…

So now you’ve eliminated the bulk of your mail. What to do with the rest? In our case we receive the remainder of our postal mail through an online scan and mail forwarding service. We started this about 6 months before we left with a company called Earth Class Mail (ECM). ECM receives your mail at a PO Box, then does an initial high resolution color scan of the front and back of the piece of mail. This scan is then emailed for you to take action. Scan what’s inside, Recycle, Shred or forward via FedEx to another location. The service is great for sorting mail. You have copies of all your mail in PDF form that you can save to your computer or it can be archived on ECM’s site.

We’re self employed as many expatriates are. We still received paper checks from clients and vendors, which is another issue. I wish everyone just did ACH/direct deposit, but they don’t. One of the many tools that ECM offers is “Deposit Check”. After scanning your mail you may deposit a check with a click of a button into a Wells Fargo account. I had to establish a new account with Wells Fargo to make this happen but it beat having to worry about sending checks to family for them to deposit on my behalf. For a small per check fee I can deposit online in just one step.

To be honest the set up process with Wells Fargo was long and painful. It took nearly two months for the account creation and testing. I believe this was due to it being a relatively new service at the time of my set up, but be prepared. Wells did cover the cost of my checks (which I may not use since I live in Uruguay, but still) and waived account fees for the first couple months.

I love ECM. I love receiving mail online. If I return to the States I will continue this service. It just simplifies things too much for me to give it up. They also license the technology throughout Europe with Swiss Post (addresses available throughout Europe). It’s great if you’re a road warrior traveling for business 4 of every 5 days of the business week or just don’t want to deal with all the junk. With Earth Class Mail, junk mail is almost all gone and if I do get it,  I hit the recycle button. I’m kind of a hippie too and this is a fairly green way to deal with your mail. You’ll have a much higher percentage of your mail recycled and a much lower percentage of garbage mail making it to your virtual door.

With ECM, you still have a physical mailing address to select.  There are many PO Box locations to choose from as well as several street locations.  If you want to be virtually in Manhattan…bam!  You’re there.  (Or at least your mail is there). If you’re only receiving personal mail, a PO Box will location will probably work for you. Since we receive business mail, it complicates matters when vendors will accept nothing but a street address. We pay a small additional fee to have a street address in Seattle (instead of a PO Box). This still wasn’t ideal for us, though, and we decided to have an additional address set up with a UPS store in Minneapolis. Twice per month our UPS Store automatically forwards all of our personal and business mail that is not already directed to our ECM location in Seattle. ECM receives it and upon our instruction they open the Priority Package from UPS and “induct” all of the individual pieces of mail as though they had been sent directly. Many probably won’t require this extra step but ECM just didn’t have an address in Minny so we felt if was necessary for us to maintain our presence there. They have addresses in most major cities and  are adding more all the time.

There are several other ways to get your mail. You can DHL or FedEx regularly to your new foreign locale. Or in the case of Uruguay, you can try a service like Miami-Box. Have your Amazon and other packages shipped right to the street address of Miami-Box and they in turn will bring to down to Uruguay and deliver right to your door very quickly. There are high fees and duty to worry about, as well as certain items that can’t be shipped but it’s a service that’s worth taking a look at.  We also employ the minions that read our blog to courier items down to us.  Not a bad practice!  If you have family or friends coming down, have them take a trip to Target or Costco to grab some of your favorite items.  But I digress… 

Earth Class Mail : Receive PDF files of all your mail online. Sort, save, recycle. Very simple, very easy.