Living a Wealthy Life

So I have been outsourcing work for about 2 weeks now and am starting to get into the groove of how it all works. It is an interesting process learning how to have someone work for you. It is something I have never done before so I am having a lot of fun learning.

Eventually I want to be a businessman and own multiple businesses which other people run for me. In order to do this I need to learn how to have people work for me, and outsourcing has been the perfect opportunity to learn that. I just want to jot down a few of the things I have learned about outsourcing. If they help you they help you, if not it helps me to write things down anyway.

A Native English Speaker Will Make Your Life One Million Times Easier

It seems everyone these days speaks English, and you may not notice a big difference between a native English speaker and a non native when you are just talking to them. But when you are outsourcing work, having a native English speaker is a Godsend.

The first task I outsourced was to someone from India, and they only spoke broken English. Luckily I was smart enough to request an update after 1 hour of work. It turned out he didn’t understand exactly what I wanted him to do and he was doing something slightly different. It was very difficult to communicate with him and to get my message across. It made me so frustrated that I decided not to rehire him.

The next person I hired spoke English as their native language. I hired him for 8 hours and first and it proved so easy that now the same person is my Virtual Assistant. He is currently working 40 hours per week for me. This will drop to 10 hours for the next few weeks, then if the business I am testing works he will be back to 40 hours per week indefinitely.

People Will Only Do What You Tell Them To Do

Even people who speak perfect English only do what you tell them to do. They will not go out of their way to get you exactly what you wanted if you didn’t ask for it. You have to tell them exactly what you want, and exactly what you want them to do.

For example, I want to find cheap bugaboo prams overseas, because I want to buy one but I don’t want to pay the $700-$1,000+ it costs in Australia. I simply asked my outsourcer to find me cheap bugaboo prams. I didn’t tell him anything else.

He must have just done a simple Google search, and maybe have gone to the bugaboo website. He came back with figures MORE than what I would pay in Australia. It’s not his fault, he only did what I asked him to do. You need to give more exact instructions. If you have no idea what to do, be honest and tell them that it is their job to work it out. Don’t just expect them to know what you want them to do.

It Is Your Job To Think Outside The Box

As an entrepreneur it is your job to think outside the box in order to achieve the most you can for your business or your life. When you outsource it is not their job to think outside the box for you, unless of course you tell them to.

For example, I am trying to plan a holiday overseas for the same cost as living in Australia. This involves thinking outside of the box. I outsourced the task of planning this holiday with my outsourcer and expected him to think outside the box for me. Obviously, this wasn’t the case. He came back with expensive figures for expensive holidays.

It is my job to think outside the box and to direct my workers so they can achieve the best result possible for me.

You Are Responsible For Refining The Way Work Is Done

A lot of the tasks I give out I give out because they are menial and take a lot of time. I am sure that there are ways to fast track the task, but I don’t know how. So instead I outsource it.

Someone who works by the hour generally doesn’t care how fast they get it done. In fact the slower they get it done the better because it means more money for them. So as the person paying the wages you need to direct how things are done to get the best results.

Outsourcing has been awesome for my life. What I am learning is worth the $40/week or whatever I am paying the person I am hiring. I now need to work hard to think of things to outsource. If my business model that I am microtesting proves successful then I will be looking to outsource a couple of people full time. It might cost me $200/week but hopefully I will be making more than that. If I hire a few people then in one gets sick and can’t work for two weeks I have others to back him up (Casey!).

One of the things Tim Ferris talks about in The 4 Hour Work Week is a dreamline. A dreamline is basically your dreams written down as goals to achieve in the next 6-12 months. A dreamline also contains the calculation on how much money per month/week/day your dream will cost.

One of my dreams is to own a Lexus Rx330, which you can buy for around $35-40k second hand (3 years old). A dreamline encourages you to look at the monthly cost instead of the overall figure. This makes things seem more achievable.

If I could borrow $35,000 to buy my Lexus I would likely have to pay 14.5% interest (on a personal loan). That works about to about $5,075/year or around $100/week. On my wage $100/week is a lot of money.

However, I believe I have found a way to achieve that dream for just $20/week. There is a property I am looking at buying in a country town. I can purchase the property for $0 down using vendor finance. The property is on a big block so I could subdivide it and sell off the block of land.

The property is negative cashflow at around $20/week. But subdividing and selling off the land will not lower the rent. So I can subdivide and sell the land, put $35-40k in my pocket and it will still only cost me $20/week. I can then take that $35-$40k I received from the sale of the land to buy my Lexus.

I then end up with a Lexus that effectively only costs me $20/week and a property that effectively costs me $0/week (because the loss is passed onto the Lexus theoretically). So instead of spending $100/week for a Lexus, by being smart I end up with a Lexus and a property for just $20/week. That makes my dreams look really affordable.

The only thing I am unsure about is whether or not you need to get your property re-valued when you sell off the land. If the banks then revalue your property lower you might be required to pay back some of your mortgage, making your profit less and the deal less lucrative. I will look into this one.

Your dream doesn’t have to be a Lexus. It could be a holiday around the world, it could be whatever you want it to be. By being smart with property you can achieve your dreams for a fraction of the cost of the traditional methods.

One of my mates asked me if I would be willing to buy a negatively cashflowed property in order to achieve that. My response was something along the lines of “As if I wouldn’t pay $20/week to live my dreams. I can afford $20/week”.

It has become my goal to be able to go overseas for a month and live a life of luxury for no more than it would cost us to stay at home. If I can achieve this then it means we will never have to save for holidays because we can simply use holiday pay in order to fund the holiday.

I decided to outsource the planning of the holiday to a Virtual Assistant on oDesk.com for $1/hour. I figured, worst case scenario, if I find out it can’t be done it will cost me $40 to get someone to see if it can be done.

After having some simple research being done I don’t know if it will be possible. If we went away for 3 months it would definitely be possible, but for just one month I don’t think it will be. Mainly because of the expenses of flights. I need to work out a way to get cheap flights, without having frequent flyer points.

Owning a business is great when you can use a business credit card for costs because you can get points on every dollar you spend. Unfortunately we don’t really spend enough money each year on our own to validate getting a credit card with reward points. Though come to think of it, now that I am buying property and looking to do renovations I may look into getting a credit card with reward points. I can use the credit card to pay for renovations and then pay them off with my own money, all the while getting points on every dollar I spend. If we do a few properties then this could turn out to generate us quite a few points.

I am sure that there is a way I can find cheap flights. Maybe we could go on standby, or find some super exclusive deal, or try and buy tickets on the day and get a discount. I will do some of my own research to work this out.

Another thing that came back a lot more than I thought was accommodation. Obviously hotels are going to be ridiculously expensive. You can pay $150/night for accommodation and expect to live off the same amount of money you would at home. Even the rental accommodation my guy came back with was more than I pay for rent in Sydney. Now I find it hard to believe that rent in Papua New Guinea or other developing nations would cost more than rent in Sydney, unless of course they are marketed at tourists.

So I think the key is to think like a local. The next thing I do (after finding cheap airfares) will be to find cheap (but nice) accommodation. I want to find out how much the locals pay for rent, and I want to pay the same. Or I want to find a local who wants to rent out a room and rent it off them for a month. As if that wouldn’t be ridiculously cheap. Paying $400/week for accommodation on holidays may sound cheap, but it doesn’t fit in my budget.

Most people pay huge amounts of money on holidays because they think they have to. It is easy to book a hotel or even an apartment to stay in. It is a lot more difficult to find accommodation at a good standard for the same price the locals pay for it. So most people don’t bother.

It requires thinking outside of the box and being open to new ways of doing things. You may even need to be open to living with a local, but doesn’t that just add to the fun of the holiday. I want to experience a new culture and take advantage of the exchange rate and the value of my dollar to theirs. In order to do that you have to, in a way, live like a local.

I still want to do things like:

• Learn how to sail with a local fisherman or sailor. I could find out how much they earn per week from fishing and pay them that to take me out and teach me to sail and let me live with them and eat with them. Why can’t it be done?
• Learn how to fly with a local. Preferably find a cheap flying school that teaches you to fly light aircraft and spend a few hours, or days doing some flying lessons. I would love to get my pilots license and I would love Kel to get hers so she can fly the plane and I can skydive.
• Hire some surfboards off a local store, or a local person, and go surfing for the day.
• Hire some bikes and go riding around the countryside for a day. Make sure we get one with a baby carrier on it.
• Buy a crappy used car and go off the beaten track.
• Go shopping for real estate and maybe even buy a rental property, if the laws allow it.

One thing you have to think about though is the added dangers of living like the locals. Health standards are lower, you need to avoid high crime areas, avoid kidnap friendly areas, try and not get food poisoning etc. So if it turns out there are cheap ways to do things I will definitely take these things into consideration.

I am thinking maybe we should just go for a week or two, and start learning how to travel. Going for a whole month might be too much for a first time. So maybe we could take a loss on the cost (hopefully a small one) and do a 2 week trip a couple of times this year. Each time learning more about travelling for cheap and being safe while travelling.

I will continue my research and continue to give you guys updates.

Well I have set up the website for my business idea (it is currently on the DL so I am not saying what the website or business is) and I have started microtesting.

In case you don’t know what microtesting is, it is basically setting up the sales funnel and marketing for a product without actually making or selling the product. For me I have set up a sales pages to which I am sending potential customers. I have a registration form almost exactly the same as a real registration form. Only when they register they are send to a page that tells them the product is not in stock at the moment. Obviously we don’t charge them or keep any of their payment details.

This way you can see how many people buy your product and whether or not it will be profitable before you spend a lot of time and/or money on making the product.

One of the best ways to microtest (apparently) is through PayPerClick (PPC) marketing. When you search in Google often there are search terms highlighted in yellow, or ads on the sides of the page. These are PPC ads. Whenever someone clicks on your ad you pay Google a certain amount of money.

The reason microtesting is proving more difficult than I first imagined is that it is quite difficult to get a lot of traffic for a small cost. I want to spend about $0.05-$0.10 per click. So for around $150 I will get about 1500-3000 hits to my site. Some of the keywords in Google cost $3.00 per click in order to place your ad under that keyword. That means for $150 you would get 50 people visiting your site, not nearly as many as the 1,500-3,000 I want to achieve.

So far the hardest part about the microtesting is finding cheap traffic to come to my site. I have been running my ads for 2 days and my ads have had 33 impressions and absolutely zero clicks. I really don’t want to spend more than 10c per click so I think I will be working this week adding more keywords to my marketing campaign.

I was thinking about maybe doing some article marketing in order to get more traffic, but I don’t really want to be spending ridiculous amounts of time writing articles that might not even get any traffic or make me any money. So I will keep trying to refine my PPC marketing campaign and see if I can start getting some decent traffic to my site.

I want to microtest my site for about a month. Then if it turns out it has a good chance of being profitable it will probably take me another month to get it up to the standard I want to start actually charging people (I won’t actually do any of the work myself I will completely outsource it using Virtual Assistants on oDesk for just $1-$1.50/hour). Then once that is done I can launch it and hopefully take a small profit as I continue to build it up, or at least break even. Breaking even or making a small profit will then give me the time I need to build up my product without it costing me any money (because I don’t have money to burn). So that is what I am aiming for. If it turns out no one is interested I will either can the project completely or sell the idea to someone else who could make it profitable.

If I can work out PPC and get cheap clicks then I can test a whole bunch of different products and business ideas, that I have floating around in my head, without taking a lot of time and effort making the product. This could change my life.

Is it possible to travel the world for less than the cost of general living expenses? Tim Ferris from The 4-Hour Work Week has proven this to be true. But can I do it? Can you do it? I certainly plan to find out.

Due to the success of my outsourcing endeavours and the jealously of my friends plans to travel around America for a month I have decided to go on a quest to spend one month overseas for no more than the cost of our normal living expenses.

Currently my sexy wife is on maternity leave. Baby is due on the 24^th of February and Kel doesn’t go back to work until August. We are living off savings for her maternity leave so it is the perfect opportunity to test out my cheap but awesome holiday idea. Kel doesn’t have to apply for leave and we already have money allocated for monthly spending. What difference does it make if we spend it in Australia or overseas. If it costs us the same amount then why not travel?

If I was to go to a travel agent like flight centre I wouldn’t have a chance in the world of spending a month overseas in luxury and having the time of my life for just the cost of my monthly spending money.

But with my new found faith in outsourcing I can get someone else to do the research for me. The benefits are that I might only be able to bear 2 hours of searching online for holiday options but for $40 I can hire someone for a week to do research for me. Another benefit is that I come from the mindset that it needs to cost thousands and thousands of dollars for a one week holiday. Hiring someone from a different culture and economic environment means that it is likely that they will be able to find options that are just as good for a tiny fraction of the price.

So my budget will be around $2k for a 28 day trip, including airfares and accommodation. It’s a big task, but it will be fun to try (especially seeing as I don’t need to do the hard work). I am looking to start with places closer to home, it seems the biggest expense will be flights.

I am thinking New Calendonia or any of the French Islands, because I studied French in school and I would love to learn the language properly. If I cant do that then I will look at places like Indonesia, Papua New Guinea or Thailand.

Here is a little list of some of the things I am thinking of doing

• Living in Luxury Apartments
• Fine Dining
• Language Lessons
• Dancing Lessons
• Flying Lessons
• Horseriding
• Private Charter In A Yaught For A Week While Learning How To Sail
• Surfing
• Snorkelling
• Hangliding

That is my list at the moment. I can’t think of anything better than having an adventure with my wife and my bubbi.

Most people use their children as an excuse why not to travel. I want to do exactly the opposite. I want to use my children as a reason to travel. Last night I was talking to my cousin and she was saying one of the best times to travel with your kids is before they are 1.  Because they can’t walk yet so you can take them almost anywhere.

Kids definitely force you to be more creative with your holidays. But I have always wanted to travel with my wife and kids. When I got married early and we got pregnant early people asked “Don’t you want to travel” and my answer was “Of course I do, but I want to travel with my family”. This is my chance to do it.

Whether this is possible or not I don’t know. But finding out is only going to cost me $40 max, so why not. If it turns out it is not possible I haven’t lost much, but if I find out it is possible then the benefits to my life will be incredible.

The other day, after a semi-frustrating joint venture meeting, I was forced to completely rethink my product. I am a property investor and previously my product was a joint venture on positive cashflow property.

They say when starting a business you should find the market first, and then create a product for the market. Well I have discovered that the market does not want a joint venture on smaller positive cashflow properties. For the business person joint venture is difficult because people tend to fall into 2 categories

1. They know nothing about property and investing and don’t want to learn anything. They lack the knowledge and therefore are afraid to invest.
2. People who know about property investing. These people want to know everything about their investment and want to have a say in everything. This micro-management makes closing a deal painful.

So I have come up with a business idea that is created specifically for the market. I am not trying to create a product and find a market, instead I am reading the market and trying to deliver exactly what they are asking for.

With the ability to outsource most of my work, the potential for creating an automated business is huge. The only problem I have is capital to start with. To get my business up and running it would cost me around $500 and ongoing costs of around $200/month. That is money I can’t really afford to lose. I don’t even know if my business model will work yet.

But there is a great way around the problem and it is called microtesting. I got this idea from the 4 hour work week.

Basically is works like this. Create the front end of your business. This is the sales page that sells your product for you. For me I need to create a website to explain my product. I can create this website for $15, the cost of the domain, and about a week’s work. So you create the front end and the sales systems but no product…yet

Second step is you begin to market your product without making it publicly known. You can do this through Google Adwords PPC (Pay Per Click) Marketing. The goal is two fold.

1. To test whether you can make more money in sales than you pay in advertising
2. To test different ads and to see which ads work the best

To do this you set up ads that point to your sales page. For me I am creating a sales page that has a complete form to collect all their information. In order to create this form I am using Aweber, which is the best in the business for email marketing.

People will be directed to my sales page and if they want to purchase my product they will fill out the required information and click buy. They will then be redirected to a page saying that the product is out of stock, or is currently on back order. I will tell them I have collected their information and will email them when it becomes available. There will also be a link they can click if they choose to not receive information.

Note: It is illegal to charge people for something that is not yet being manufactured. So I do not charge them. I believe it is also illegal to keep people’s credit card information if they cannot purchase, so I get around this by keeping their details but NOT their credit card info.

Each person that fills out the form and clicks ‘buy’ counts as a sale in my test. So I can effectively work out if my product is profitable or not. If I spend $200 on advertising and make one sale worth $100, then chances are my product won’t be profitable (unless I can lower my marketing costs). This is a great way to test whether or not there is a market for my product and whether or not I think I can make a profit. All I had to do was create a sales page and some PPC campaigns. I didn’t have to spend months of work and money creating the product.

Microtesting also gives you the ability to test different variables in your ads. Look at the two ads below (examples taken from The 4-Hour Work Week):

SAILOR SHIRTS FROM FRANCE                  REAL FRENCH SAILOR SHIRTS
French Quality, Shipped From US                   French Quality, Shipped From US
Lifetime Guarantee!                                              Lifetime Guarantee!
www.shirtsfromfrance.com –                             www.shirtsfromfrance.com

By changing only one thing, you can test which works best. As long as you disable the feature that serves only the best serving ad. Create different ad campaigns changing just one section to see which works best. In the end you can combine the best aspects to make an effective ad campaign.

Microtesting allows you to test the profitability of a business without needing to put money and time into creating the product. If your business is a dud then cut your losses and move onto the next one. If your business model works then take it to the next step and create your product and start selling it.

The best thing about using Aweber in all of this is that those fake ‘sales’ you made in the testing phase can be turned into real sales. Instead of the person clicking the buy button and then disappearing because you are unable to sell them anything, their details are collected and stored in your Aweber service. When your product is finally up and running you can email these people and turn that fake sale into a real sale. So you $200 of testing might actually make you money in the end anyway.

This idea of microtesting is genius. Just make sure you don’t break any laws by not actually charging people or storing their credit card data and you should be fine. This is the ultimate way to test a business idea without outlaying a lot of time or money on product creation.

I have created many ebooks to sell before and never microtested them. I didn’t lose a lot of money (usually I would lose about $80 and a week to a month of my life), but by microtesting I could have saved a lot of time and saved the feeling of failure a few times over. So why not think about microtesting your idea.

As you may know I have been re-reading the 4 Hour Work Week. I haven’t read it for a while so it has been great to revisit the ideas it presents and to use it in my everyday life.

One of the concepts that stuck out to me in this reading of the book was that a task will grow in it’s complexity compared to the amount of time you give it. For example, if you give yourself a month to complete a paper it will grow in complexity to fill that month, but if you give yourself one day to complete the same paper then you will make sure that you finish it.

I think my property deal has dragged on because of this very issue. Their is no defined timeline for the completion of this project.

One of my goals has always been to become more flexible. For me this means having the ability to touch my toes, which I am very rarely able to do. In fact it was one of my goals all last year, yet I never achieved it. Why? Because I gave the simple task a year to accomplish. I would therefore have all year to achieve this. Which means some days I would stretch a little bit, but most days I would forget.

After reading about this concept in the 4 hour work week I set the goal to be able to touch my toes TODAY. Not in a month, not in a year, in one day. You know what??? I achieved it, I can now successful touch my toes. The short time period pushed me to stretch until I achieved it.

It seems that achieving things is easy if you give them short time frames.

UPDATE – Yesterday I emailed my building inspector and the real estate agent saying I wanted the building inspection done today because I want to sign the contract by the end of the week. I pushed them to do it that day. After three weeks of trying I finally got my building inspection done because I created a small time frame.

When I was looking at joint venturing with my buddy (you know who you are) he wanted to achieve $50-100k in passive income in just 2 years. Prior to that my goal was $40k in 5 years. Lowering the timeframe didn’t make the goal less achievable, in fact it pushed us to make it happen and therefore makes it more achieveable.

So even though that partnership fell through I definately got a lot of good out of the short experience. My goal is now $40-$50k by Jan 1 2012 (about 2 years away). The shorter the timeframe the less complex the task becomes.

Mix this with the ability to outsource time consuming tasks and you can create complete focus and achieve great things.

In my 5 year plan I had planned to buy 3 properties this year. I am in the final stages of my first property and I am about to have my offer accepted on a second property. That is 2 properties and we are still only in Feb. By the end of March I want to have signed on 3 property deals. The short time frame mixed with outsourcing makes everything less complicated and easier to achieve.

No wonder new years resolutions fail. They give you a whole year to achieve something, maybe if new years resolutions had a shorter time frame more people would achieve them.

I went for a surf yesterday and never stopped working. I went to sleep last night and never stopped working. I watched a movie with my wife and never stopped working. All because I am outsourcing.

Sometimes I go through days where my mind is not really in the game, so instead I will do other fun things that fill my time. But when this happens I feel bad because I get no work done. But with outsourcing I can have these days and it is fine, because someone is still working on my behalf…for just $1/hour.

Here are some things I am thinking of outsourcing once my suburb profiles are done.

- Collecting data and creating ebooks or email responder lessons from rewriting that data (thanks for that idea Casey)
- Looking for positive cashflow properties
- I will draw up a template email so that my VA can make offers on properties on my behalf (then I only have to deal with the properties where my offer gets accepted…if it turns out I don’t like the property then I withdraw my offer at no cost)
- Uploading articles of mine to EzineArticles.com and other article databases
- Finding affiliate products for my email newsletter list
- Researching property stuff such as DA approval, subdividing, development etc…anything I need to know
- Bookeeping (Dont worry I don’t need to give them access to my bank account)
- Finding possible joint venture partners for property deals
- Finding real estate investors who have done what I want to do

There is so much fun with this. I think the main perk of having a VA is that I can give them things to do which I don’t have the headspace for.

For example, for ages I have wanted to create a course on making money with aweber, but don’t have the headspace for it. So now I can outsource it and I will probably outsource it with loads of products I want to create.

Another perk is that you can find more opportunities in less time. For example, if I hire someone to research properties for me they can simply sift through the chaff and email me properties that fit into my criteria. They can email agents and find out rents and other details before passing the information onto me. I might be able to look for property 5-10 hours per week without pulling my hair out and going insane. But now I can pay someone $10 and I can spend just 1 hour per week looking at the best properties. Or I can pay someone $40 per week and I can find loads of opportunities to do myself or to present to my investors. Way more than I ever could achieve myself.

If that works I may even take it to the next level and get my VA to make offers for me. Then I don’t have to email 100 agents, all I have to do is email the agents who are considering my offer. But I will do the previous one first and see how it goes.

For $20/week I have complete peace of mind because I am working hard even when I do nothing. If one property deal comes out of that $20/week then it completely pays for itself. Two property deals might make me $40/week and I can hire someone full time. I will start small (maybe 10 hours per week) and learn the ropes of having a VA and then work my way up. I can afford $10 per week. $10 buys me a tub of icecream, or it buys a teeny tiny bottle of fake tan for my wife, or 2 beers at the pub, or a meal at Maccas. $10 is cheap and what it buys me is worth so much more. It buys me time and peace of mind.

I encourage anyone to at least try using a VA. I found mine on www.oDesk.com. Before you start using a Virtual Assistant you won’t think you have anything to outsource, but once you start using one you find more things to outsource.

Think of it, how many opportunities could you take if it didn’t take up any of your time? The answer is near unlimited!

The more you outsource the more opportunities you have because they don’t have to run through you as a bottleneck. So the more you use a VA the more you will need one.

Why not try for fun. $10/week can buy you 10 hours of someones time. Have fun with it, get them to send emails for you or plan imaginary holidays to the Maldives. Give it a go.

I have started outsourcing my life, and it is only costing me $1.33/hour to do so.

I am very into real estate investing. My goal is to invest in positive cashflow real estate in a variety of towns around Australia. However, do you know how many towns their are in Australia???? There are thousands of rural towns in Australia.

So how do you know which ones to invest in and which ones to avoid. Firstly you look at population. I avoid towns with less than 8,000 people in them. But how do I know which towns are big and which towns are small? Do you know the population size of Blaxland, NSW of the top of your head? I sure don’t.

You can easily find the population of these towns but it takes A LOT of time consuming research. My solution was to outsource.

I have been re-reading the 4 hour work week and I have been loving it. Tim Ferris is becoming less of a douchebag and more of a genius the more I read his book and watch him online. I have so far gotten a few major things out of the book, one of which is the importance of outsourcing.

I found a website www.oDesk.com where you can post your jobs and people bid on the hourly rate they will accept for that job, or you can post a task and they will bid on the price for accomplishing that task. For me I create a simply job, my title was “Simple Web Research and Data Entry – Maximum Pay $1.20/hour”. Within 20 minutes I had about 15 applications, with the cheapest being $1/hour and the most expensive being $1.33/hour. I hired someone within the hour (from the Philippines) and gave him the details of my incredibly long and boring research project. I gave him a 72 hour deadline and told him to stop after 8 hours of work so we can reassess.

So far he has been able to complete 238 town profiles in 8 hours. Not as much as I expected, but still fairly decent. If I was to pay someone in Australia the base rate of $20/hour then for my 8 hours of Philippino work (which cost me $10.64) I could hire an Australian for half an hour. I don’t know about you, but completing 238 suburb profiles in half an hour for anyone would be impossible.

All in all it is looking like it will cost me around $100 to complete the suburb profiles of EVERY town in Australia. Now that is something I could easily do myself, but it would likely take me a week to a month to complete. For the small cost of $100 I can regain a week to a month of my life and I can spend that time doing more productive work tasks (like finding and sourcing real estate deals) or I can spend that time with my wife (and soon my daughter).

The only downfall of outsourcing that I have experienced so far is the language barrier. Simple instructions are not so easy for people to understand when they don’t speak your language. It took a few back and forth emails in order to get my man on track, which took about 30 minutes of my time. Also posting the job and assessing applicants took a chunk of my time also (another 30 minutes). So for small jobs like buying movie tickets, it might take you 15 minutes of back and forth emails to accomplish something you could have done yourself in 5 minutes.

But for bigger jobs it is AWESOME! Spend an hour of my life simply sending emails and not having to think about it, in order to get a HUGE task achieved for around $100. By spending 1 hour and $100 I have saved so much time and I don’t hate my life (which would have been the case if I did this research project by myself).

Better yet, once this is completed I can then take all this research and create a product to sell to other people like me who want to know the populations of towns and the price points of property and rental returns. If I am smart I can get my $100 back (and more) by then selling the research onto someone else. Once this is completed I might even pay to have someone research property price points at the bottom end of the market and enter that data for me. I am also thinking about outsourcing my personal book keeping (ie. Checking statements and then punching numbers into an excel spreadsheet)

But this excel sheet will be great because I can instantly sort it in population size and I can then immediately eliminate hundreds of towns because of their population size. This gives me the tools I need to do further research and to find deals that I might be able to purchase.

All in all outsourcing is awesome and I would recommend it to anyone who has a long menial task they need to get done.