EchoSign lets me create custom forms with PDF documents. I created forms in OpenOffice and exported the documents into PDF format with a few blanks for me and the recipient to fill in.

You save money by not wasting money on ink, paper and telephone charges. You save time by not wasting time on writing, scanning, faxing and waiting a long time for your recipient to sign and fax the contract back to you.

Although I use EchoSign to eliminate faxing, you may still use a fax with EchoSign. In fact, you may even integrate EchoSign with eFax. EchoSign recently released version 4 of their service with a lot of new features.

I highly recommend EchoSign to everyone who needs to have contracts signed quickly and easily.

photo credit: Crissy Teena

While this is none of our business if you we don’t live in these countries, it is our business when he hire freelancers from countries like the ones above.

• eMoneyGram (For Americans only)
• iKobo
• Xoom
• MoneyBookers
• Western Union

I have used 3 of them – Western Union, Xoom and MoneyBookers. I cannot use eMoneyGram because I am not an American. I have not tried iKobo because you need to use their iKobo card to withdraw money from an ATM machine. It seems like an interesting idea but I have not tried it yet.

I would avoid Western Union because the fees are quite high and process of sending and collecting the money is a pain in the neck. You may only send money online through Western Union to a handful of countries. Otherwise, you would have to visit your local Western Union branch to do it.

The best one I have used so far is Xoom. The money goes straight into the bank account of the recipient. The fees are reasonable and the list of countries is quite extensive.

My friend introduced me to Dropbox because he wanted to transfer some songs to me. I was impressed with the download speeds and the ease of use of the Dropbox so I decided to use it to share files with my freelancers.

Dropbox Plans

The free verision comes with 2 GB of disk space. You can get up to 3GB of extra space free just for referring your friends to Dropbox. Each new friend you refer to Dropbox will enable you to have an extra 250 MB of space. What that means is if you refer 12 or more new people to Dropbox, you will get 3 GB of free space added to your free account. 5 GB of free space is quite a lot if you’re only planning to share documents and instructional videos like me.

The paid version comes with 50 GB of disk space. at $9.99 per month. The free disk space promotion applies to the paid accounts at double the size. Instead of a maximum of 3 GB of additional space, you get 6 GB. Every new member you refer to Dropbox will get you 500 MB of disk space instead of 250 MB.

How Does Dropbox Work?

You may use Dropbox purely online or you may install a program that creates a virtual folder on your computer. I installed the Windows version and I now have a Dropbox folder in my hard drive. Whenever I store files into the public folder or shared folders of my Dropbox folder, the software automatically uploads the files to Dropbox’s server.

You may generate links from the Dropbox and let your friends download the files. Another way would be to ask your friend to install Dropbox and you could invite your friend to share a particular folder of your Dropbox. The files from the shared folder will be automatically downloaded to your friends Dropbox on his or her computer. That’s how the syncing feature works.

Other Uses of Dropbox

You could also use Dropbox for backing up your files. This works okay for small files but if you prefer to create image files of your hard drive, the uploading may take forever and it might not be ideal to use the Dropbox for large backups

Anyway, I think my expectations were about right. I did not find any new information that wasn’t vaguely discussed in his free telephone call MP3. I already know where he hires Filipinos before I joined the site and I was looking forward to learning more about the ins and outs of hiring Filipinos. I wanted templates like non-disclosure agreements and sample employment contracts with the unique Filipino benefits and terms.

What I found instead was lots of information about pay per click marketing though some of his previous seminars and some simple tips on how to use the job site and some software that he recommended. Most membership sites I joined have a members-only forum but not on this site.

John recommends using eMoneygram to send payments to Filipinos but that service is not available for people outside of the USA. So that’s out for me. Most likely, I would have to use Western Union to transfer money to Filipinos.

There are 6 modules at the moment. Your $4 trial will only allow you to access module 1.

1. Module 1: Hiring Filipinos, keyword training and the “Business in a Box” seminars
2. Module 2: Adwords training (you get this with your first monthly payment)
3. Module 3: Mini-net Creation
4. Module 4: Web 2.0 Marketing
5. Module 5: Video Marketing
6. Module 6: Blog Marketing

I think it would be possible to arrange with the support staff to purchase modules that you are interested in. I am not interested in all of them so it does not make sense for me to pay for something I won’t need. They also have a package price for all 6 modules if you decide to purchase them all at once.

Maybe other people might find this membership site helpful but I certainly don’t think it is to me. I don’t think the first module has enough solid content to keep me going. If the rest of the modules are something like the first, then I guess most people won’t be motivated to keep paying $97 per month for the same type of content.

I must say this is one the rare books that I have re-read multiple times. I have highlighted the important keywords of some paragraphs in the book for easy re-reading and I have re-read the book a minimum of 3 times. I have even listened to the audio book once.

I have completed the exercises in the book and I have also implemented some of the ideas I learnt in the book.

The 4-Hour Workweek contains great information on how to work less and enjoy your life more but information alone is useless unless you apply it. Amazingly, not everyone wants to work less or maybe they are not ready to work less.

The Good…

Tim Ferris advocates a “low information diet”. That is, don’t watch the television (except for a few hours of leisure programs per week), don’t read newspapers, don’t read magazines that you are not part of your business niche or hobbies and don’t read books that contain information you don’t need to use right now.

To me this is not a radical shift. I personally do not watch television programs except for the occasional Taiwanese variety show when I visit my Uncle at his place. I prefer to rent or borrow free DVDs from the library to watch documentaries and other educational material. I have not read newspapers but I get my news from friends and the internet via RSS feeds. Therefore, I do not need to read about people getting murdered, robbed or raped when I flip the newspapers or get my fingers dirty with blank ink. Furthermore, I save money, space and lots of paper by not buying newspapers. You should try it and experience the difference it makes to your mental clarity.

Tim literally rattled me out of my delusion that I had to be a super-rich multi-millionaire to live in multiple countries for months at a time and work very little. You don’t have to be rich to live in places with lower cost of living. Tim is writing in his perspective. Since he is an American, I suppose most of the readers of his book would be people living in First World countries. Therefore, it would be feasible for us to outsource our work to people who work in Third World countries due to the huge difference in our currencies. Everywhere seems cheap once you get out of an expensive place like London, New York or Singapore. Take the same amount of money you are paying to keep yourself afloat in your country and you should be able to live a very niche lifestyle in a less expensive country.

I did that math and Tim is right. I can eliminate a lot of junk from my room to clear up space and raise some cash to fund my “mini-retirements”. Once you have very little stuff, it makes it easier for you to move freely. I am in the process of eliminating most of my junk and storing whatever that is left at my parents’ place in a few boxes when I move out of my country.

One of my biggest mistakes was to keep putting off my enjoyment activities to “some day”. Tim advises us not to do that but instead try “mini-retirements” to experience a glimpse of retirement. This is crucial because a lot of people never retire and for the lucky ones that do, they realise that their retirement idea was not so fun after all. We do not want to be part of these 2 groups of people. Let’s be the ones who really enjoy our retirements.

Tim also has great advice on how to keep time wasting people out of sight and out of mind. You will discover what to say and what to write in emails to avoid time wasting phone calls and meetings, which I hate a lot!

The Bad…

Although there a lot of things that I find agreeable in the book, there are a few things that I don’t quite agree with due to practical reasons.

1. I don’t think it would be easy for an employee to convince his boss for him/her to work at home.
2. I don’t think the examples in the book were 100% real. I think they might have been made up by Tim just like Robert Kiyosaki’s Rich Dad.
3. I don’t think it would be easy for families to try this lifestyle when you have kids. You have to consider the age of your kids and your spouse’s opinion too.
4. Tim over simplifies the process of accessing a remote computer. Tim recommends using GoToMyPC to access your office computer from anywhere in the world. However, did you know not all computers can be turned on remotely? What if the computer crashes? How are you going to restart it? There are hardware devices that can do this for you but they aren’t cheap and you will have to call your office number and enter a certain code to turn on/restart your computer.The recent developments made my Intel with the AMT-enabled mainboards should fix these limitations but this technology is still not mainstream enough. Unlesss you have someone in the office to turn on your PC for you when you need to use it, then it isn’t that convenient to do. Furthermore, remote access software can be slow.Tim talks about running expensive graphical software remotely but it will not be as fast as using it in front of the actual computer. There will be some lag time and it is very frustrating to use a computer when it lags, let alone be productive with it. I personally recommend Radmin to access your computers remotely for simple computer work like data entry, emails, internet and other non-intensive work.
5. It is going to be hard to eliminate yourself from your business if your business is a service-based business and you are the number 1 person your customers look for. If you have a business like “John’s Consulting Services”, then good luck on convincing people that they no longer need to look for John. Maybe you might need to change your business operations and name to not be the sole focus of your business or you might want to consider a product-based business instead.

There might be some other things in the book that you might find inapplicable for you. I think this book is best for a self-employed single man/woman or newly-married couple who are both committed to such a lifestyle.

Conclusion

Apart from the bad things I pointed out, I still learnt a lot from this book and I highly recommend it to anyone thinking of embarking on a similar journey of living a fun and meaningful life with little or no work.

That is where John steps in. He’s done it and he is sharing with us how he did it. I have outsourced work to Singaporeans as well as freelancers online but I have had mixed results. I have had terrible experience with freelancers from India just like John did. Singaporeans are a bit too expensive for me at the moment. John recommends hiring people from the Philippines to work for you full time from their homes for about USD $250 per month, which is a pretty decent wage in the Philippines.

I know for a fact that Filipino maids earn about SGD $360 per month in Singapore, which is about USD $250 per month. Filipino maids are on the higher pay scale of domestic workers in Singapore probably due to their superior English language skills and their higher education. A monthly salary of about SGD $360 in Singapore is still considered quite low but a lot of people are still below the poverty line in Singapore by “western standards”. If you ask me, I would pay USD $350 per month and above because I think that is a fair amount of money by Southeast Asian standards and you should be able to live a pretty good life in most Southeast Asian countries except for Singapore.

John recommends Filipinos because he likes their work ethic and their English language skills. I have no experience with hiring Filipinos but I can tell you this – Most of the Filipinos I know of in my life are great people. My dad rents his apartment to 3 Filipino guys and he says they are his best tenants ever. My parents have hired numerous maids when I was a little kid and the best ones we had were from the Philippines. I just hope that people do not try to pay them as little as possible because it is hard out there in the Philippines where most people are living below the poverty line by “third world standards”.

John Jonas recorded an MP3 about his experiences hiring workers online. I think it has valuable advice and you might find it useful if you are thinking of outsourcing work. At the end of the call, John is pitching his USD $97 per month membership site, which also has a 14 day trial period. Although, I have not joined his membership site, I plan to check it out very soon. If you are already a member, let me know how it is like inside.