Hey,
Most people hear "hire overseas" and think outsourcing, cheap, low quality, a gamble. That's the wrong mental model entirely.
This is arbitrage, the same thing we've talked about with currency and cost of living, just applied to labor instead of money. Same skill, same quality of work, a completely different price, because the cost of living where that skill lives is different than where you're used to paying for it.
◆ // THE PLAY
Why the Same Skill Costs Different Amounts in Different Places
A US employee's salary isn't priced on the value of their work alone. It's priced against the cost of living where they live, rent, healthcare, taxes, everything. Someone with the exact same skill living somewhere with a dramatically lower cost of living can do the same work for dramatically less, and it's not because the work is worth less. It's because their monthly costs are different.
That's the entire mechanism. Not cheaper labor, cheaper cost of living, passed through to what the work costs you.
WHY MOST PEOPLE GET THIS WRONG
The mistake is treating it like a bargain hunt, find the lowest price, hire whoever's cheapest. That's how you end up with the outsourcing horror stories everyone's heard. The actual skill is the same as hiring anywhere: screen for real ability, check real work samples, run a real trial period. The arbitrage isn't in skipping that process, it's in the fact that even after doing it properly, the cost is still dramatically lower than hiring locally back home.
WHAT ACTUALLY TRANSFERS WELL
Not everything works remotely, and pretending otherwise is how trust gets broken. Anything that's primarily computer-based, bookkeeping, virtual assistance, customer support, specific technical skills, design, translates cleanly. Anything requiring physical presence obviously doesn't. The sweet spot is skilled, computer-based work that a US business currently pays a premium for purely because of where the person doing it happens to live.
THE REAL STRUCTURE
This isn't usually one person doing everything. It's building a small team, each person handling a specific function, the same way you'd structure a team back home, just priced against a different cost of living. Someone handling the books. Someone handling client communication. Someone handling the actual deliverable. Each role priced fairly for where the person lives, and still coming in at a fraction of what the equivalent team would cost hired locally in the US.
◆ // THE NUMBER
$0.20-$0.40 on the dollar
That's roughly what a skilled, well-vetted remote hire in a lower cost of living country ends up costing compared to the equivalent role hired in the US, once you actually run the comparison role for role, not bargain-bin for bargain-bin.
That gap doesn't come from underpaying anyone. A wage that's genuinely low by US standards can still be a genuinely strong, above-average wage locally. Both things are true at once, that's the actual definition of arbitrage, not exploitation, a real gap in what the same value costs in two different places.
◆ // THE TOOL
Screen the Work, Not the Resume
Before you hire anyone remotely, give them a small, real, paid test task first. Not a full project, a scaled-down version of the actual work. It costs you almost nothing and it tells you more in one task than any resume or interview will. Anyone unwilling to do a small paid test isn't someone you want handling real client work anyway.
◆ // THE MOVE
This week, pick one task you're currently doing yourself that doesn't need to be you specifically.
Not the whole business. One task. Something computer-based, repeatable, and clearly defined enough that someone else could learn it without you standing over their shoulder.
Write down what that task actually costs you in hours per week. Then ask honestly whether your time is worth more doing something else, or whether handing that one task off, even to start, buys you back hours that are worth more spent elsewhere.
If you get to the point where you know what you want to hand off but don't know how to actually find and vet the right person, that's something I can help with directly. Finding, screening, and placing the right VA for a specific role is part of what I do now → expatbuildr.com/consulting
DM me on Instagram @ExpatBuildr if you're thinking through this, happy to talk through what actually makes sense to hand off first versus what should stay with you.
◆ // ONE MORE THING
This is the same lesson as every issue in this series, currency, moving, timing, runway, skills. There's always a gap between what something costs in one place and what it's worth in another. Learning to see that gap, and use it honestly, is the whole point of everything we cover here.
— Galaxy (Tony Long II) 🌏
Building from Cebu. Earning in USD. Sharing the math.
P.S. — Free forever → newsletter.galaxyarbitrage.com/subscribe
P.P.S. — New here from the viral post? Start with the playbook → go.expatbuildr.com/PHPlaybook