thelastknowngod

Don’t know about the UK but I’ve been doing this for ~8 years… I make an American salary and live in places that have a MUCH lower cost of living.

It’s been my experience that my colleagues never care. However, HR is a nightmare to deal with. It’s literally their job to find out how to pay employees less. Every time HR has found out what I’m doing it’s been a problem. This is the main thing I have to be aware of when interviewing for new positions… I keep my mouth shut until after onboarding is finished and I never have to talk to them again.

On the tax front, the Americans have an exemption you qualify for if you are out of the country for 330 days or more per year… Basically the first $120k of your income is not taxed and anything you make above that amount begins to be taxed at the lowest tax rate. I don’t have to mention this to the employer at all because it’s part of the paperwork I file with the government at tax time… It has nothing to do with the job really… My tax rate has been 1% or less for nearly a decade now.

You should talk to a tax strategist. They may be expensive up front but they will save you MUCH more than whatever they charge in the long run.

EDIT: If someone knows a good place for finding contract work, I’m looking for SRE gigs.

It’s just Scott’s Cheap Flights with a rebrand? It wasn’t that great ~10 years ago… Back in those days I used airfare watch dog pretty often.

It doesn’t really matter where you get fare notifications… You just need to watch the prices often enough to know what a normal price is so you can recognize a good price when it comes around.

Way back when I was finding round trip flights from NYC to Tokyo, Hanoi, etc… I wouldn’t pay more than $400 round trip. These days I’m only travelling to see friends or family so I don’t track it as closely.

Ok so I’ve been doing the nomad thing for years and I’ve spent ~4-5 years in Japan. Basically you have two options in front of you.

1. You can apply for the business management visa. I was going this route just before covid hit. To get this you have to invest $100k USD into whatever company you form (could be the consulting/freelancing stuff). You may need to hire a few locals at some point too… If the freelance work is really going well you might be able to expand how much work you’re capable of taking on. That would take care of the employee hiring.
2. You can hire what’s known as an employer of record (or EoR). An EoR basically exists for companies who are outside of Japan but want to hire someone inside Japan. The EoR basically hires that person locally and takes care of everything from pension contributions, health care coats, tax payments, etc. They can also sponsor work visas. I haven’t found any info saying it was impossible to just hire yourself though… It seems like you could just pay the company directly and they’d sponsor the visa.

They charge a fee to the foreign company to do all this of course and I only learned about this after leaving Japan so wasn’t able to test it for myself. I don’t know how viable it is as an option but I haven’t been able to find anything specifically telling me it’s not possible.

As far as the costs to do this, consider your salary minus the cost of contracting an EoR company. If that total is equal to or higher than the average income levels for a local person, working for a Japanese company and earning a Japanese salary, you don’t actually lose anything… You’re still coming out on top.

You’d have the salary without having to deal with mandatory overtime or minimum N2 Japanese for professional level jobs or needing $100k for the business manager visa.