I'm Ready To Move

[cje702]

So I know I am going to see people trying to convince me not to move there for what I am about to say. I have done my research for quite sometime now, I have been kept up to date about almost everything going on in Buenos Aires. I have been contemplating for a long time to move to Buenos Aires for over a year now. Yes, I have been there before; I was there last July and fell in love with the place and someone there. I currently live in Canada, I am a permanent resident of Canada, and I am a French and an American citizen. I currnetly have over $15,000 in CAD&USD saved up. I speak English and French fluently and my Spanish is intermediate, I can hold a conversation in Spanish but might have a few gramatic errors. Being a French citizen I could go there under a working holiday visa which is where I can work as a foriegner (en blanco) there in Argentina, or I could just go there and go work (en negro) without the visa. I see that quite a few people on here get paid in dollars by doing work from home. I currently work in a call centre here in Canada where I answer the phone in English, French, and in Spanish. I make more than enough to get by right now, I was wondering if anyone has had experience doing a call centre job from home (but abroad). So like say I am getting paid by an American/Canadian/French company but living in Argentina. Is there any suggestion you could give me on how to find work or anything at all? If you are going to say not to move there, save your time because I have made up my mind. I just want to have some advice on what to do once I am there.

 

[hillbilly]

As long as you rent a place with a phone line already installed, since waiting for the phone company to come and install a new line can take months.

 

[LostinBA]

Ok so you're convinced....so here's some tried and true advice.

You can get a VOIP number which would give you US and/or Canadian phone numbers that your company could forward calls to for very little cost. As long as you get a decent internet connection, you can work from anywhere even a temporary office of which there are several now where you can rent a desk space. You can also use the VOIP system to call out on without any long distance charges. I use ring central which, for about 30-40 USD/month provides me with a local US and Canadian and a toll free number with unlimited calls in and out. There are other options but the call quality is dubious....Skype-out doesn't work well for business calls. Vonage has gotten some good reviews. They want a US or Canadian address and will bill your cc/debit card automatically every month. Works like a charm.

You'd still probably do better here on the same money your current employer is paying you. If you can get them to pay your salary into a US account and trasfer it via Xoom and you'll get nearly 40% more pesos for each dollar from them then from the "official" rate. It's completely legal. Your other option is to have them deposit it to a USD Canadian account and find a way to get the USD here then you can exchange them for the "blue rate", current 8.3 pesos/USD versus the official rate of about 5.6 pesos/USD. This is "not so" legal but everyone does it. Your other options are: open a local USD bank account (can be difficult and noone trusts the banks as they can arbitrarily invent new problems and do so routinely) or withdraw money from ATMs which is highway robbery since you'll be receiving the official rate, paying a currency conversion fee of about 3%, paying 20 peso withdrawl fee on this side and probably 5-6 dollars on your side and be limited to 1,000 peso withdrawals (aboiut 200 USD) per transaction meaning that if you need to pay rent for example, you'll be paying 5X these fees just to get 5K pesos out.

One last piece of advice....you can bring up to 10K USD without declaring it to customs. You can bring more but you'd have to declare it which shouldn't cause any problems but it might...you never know about anything here. Anyway the peso is devaluing rapidly so you could exchange about 1K/month for the blue rate and live quite awhile on that....just buy a good apartment safe when you get here and don't trust anyone...not the maid, not the portero...noone. If you rent a place, immediately change your locks. Don't trust anyone here.

There's my good deed for today....is it too early to have a pint?

 

[hillbilly]

If you depend on the phone for work I wouldn't recommend tying it to your internet. I did that at the beginning and was unable to call my clients in Europe when my internet went down for several weeks and each time the power goes out. It happened too regularly to be feasable.

 

[LostinBA]

If you depend on the phone for work I wouldn't recommend tying it to your internet. I did that at the beginning and was unable to call my clients in Europe when my internet went down for several weeks and each time the power goes out. It happened too regularly to be feasable.

I agree but only to an extent. It's just not feasible to make and/or receive daily (ie. constant in the case of a call centre) long distance calls to/from just about anywhere from here. Argentina has some of the highest long distance rates in the world. VOIP is the only answer. If he is staying long term them he can get both cable (Fibertel) and phone (Arnet) and run both simultaneously and then just switch between the 2 options if one goes down temporarily (or if one suddently loses call quality). If he decides to rent a desk in a temp office space then they'll have a more reliable business connection with a backup cable modem. Of course, the ultimate backup would still be the good old fashioned phone system. I too, have lost entire days of work and had to find cafes with internet access many times...it's one of the constant fustrations of living in the 3rd world. But as the OP stated....he's convinced that he wants to move here (and suffer the slings and arrows of living with the crappy infrastructure and services that one find here).

 

[hillbilly]

For me, the only way to work was with a landline telephone and two internet service providers. I got quite good rates using international calling cards bought online, and I also use the call-back service "call2" from time to time. In my case they are out-bound calls and teleconferences and I am able to invoice the cost of long-distance back to my company. I don't know about in-bound calls or how the OP's company operates, but the unreliability of the technological infrastructure is something to think about.

Also, I can comment on the working holiday visas. I have had 2 such visas in 2 countries and in each case I could only apply from my country of citizenship and had to provide proof of residence in my country. Since you live in Canada and would like to apply under the French-Argentine agreement, you may have to fly to France to do it.