Why Tim Ferriss was oh so wrong about (at least) this one thing.

Around the time we began disbursing all of our worldly possessions to embark on our work – travel adventures, Andy had already been an avid follower of Timothy Ferriss for quite some time.  Now if you don’t know who Tim Ferriss is, like I didn’t, I will share with you that he is a guru of just about all things.  If there is anything at all you want to know about, anything at all, just ask Tim.  He probably has an answer for you.  And if I sound a little snarky well, then you’re feelin’ me.

Sometimes when you make decisions in life, you do not have 100% knowledge of how that decision might impact you, particularly in the minutiae.  So when it came time to figure out how we were going to handle regular mail as we travel the Americas it came as no surprise that Tim had the answer.  The answer?  *We can uses services provided by Earth Class Mail (ECM).  This appeared to be the perfect answer. We would set up a mailing address which would even continue to be in San Antonio and have our mail forwarded there.  Earth Class Mail was the service that would receive the mail pieces, scan them automatically or by request (our preference), and then recycle or forward pieces by request.  All of our mail would be managed on line.  Even further, we could receive checks at our address at ECM and the service would deposit them to the bank of our choice.  Brilliant!

We have been using this service for about a year and a half.  Sorry Tim, things really did break bad.  This service has been such a bad experience and I am working every day to get out from underneath this obligation.  Earth Class Mail and taken front and center as my daily struggle, thorn in my side, and challenge for trying to get even the simplest things done with them.  They advertise “We digitize your mail so you can get to work”.  When in actuality, I spend some of my work week, every week, managing what they have done or didn’t do correctly, whichever the case may be.  Here are some of my issues with ECM.

1.        Crazy number system – My troubles began immediately with the first email from Earth Class Mail.  Although I was told that I would have a San Antonio address with a suite number, my new address arrived at Suite #104  ECM #610804.  So now I have 10 digit extension to my address with a firm warning that if a sender did not use the ECM number, my mail would be returned.  And they did. The extensive numbering system provided several challenges from this point forward.

2.       Always updating, never working – Almost every time I log into ECM it looks different.  I know those engineers and developers are working back there to provide more bells and whistles than ever.  But it doesn’t do me a bit of good if the bells don’t toll and the whistles don’t blow.  Buttons and options appear and disappear regularly and many times just don’t work.  Who is in charge of quality back there?

3.       Slow to nonexistent customer service - The last ticket I opened for customer service was on Feb. 1^st.  As of this writing, Feb. 13^th, I have had no response.  I sent a follow-up email this morning, again to my point of having to provide for my time to work out issues with this service provided by ECM.

4.       It’s very, very expensive – The service seemed reasonably priced for the promises made at signup.  And I thought it would be money well spent for the great customer service promised.  But after using it for all of this time, I can promise you that it feels like I am paying 10 times what the service is worth.  Over the term of my service I have worked about a dozen tickets with outstanding issues and some of them have taken weeks to resolve much like the one I am working on today.  And please don’t try to find a phone number to contact anyone.  I’ve also tried reaching management through LinkedIn and Twitter.  Believe me, they don’t want to hear from you.

5.       The process is terrible – Here’s something they don’t tell you.  When I receive a check in San Antonio it’s not scanned and deposited at my location, even though my bank, USAA, is in San Antonio.  This is the reason I chose a San Antonio address for my deliveries.  Nope, the check is received in San Antonio, shipped to the west coast where it’s scanned, prepared, for deposit, and shipped back to San Antonio.  Not realizing this extended process I paid a $30 extra fee each time I wanted to “expedite” a deposit which means I was paying to ship it BACK to San Antonio.  After several emails of digging to find out why deposits took so long, a help desk finally disclosed the process.  Incredible.

6.       The money grabs- The above is a sample money grab by ECM.  There have been others.  Back in December when one of their bells and whistles (namely the RECYCLE button) didn’t work, a whole lot of junk mail (it was Christmas after all) got moved into a “storage file” which I never once used and didn’t check.  Further, the storage folder provided no indication that there was anything in there so I never really looked.  But there all of that junk mail sat until Feb. 1^st when I received an $80 bill for storing all of that mail.  By the way, that’s the ticket I opened on Feb. 1^st.  Like I said, there have been others.

Should I go on? I literally could write ten more pages on the issues I have had with ECM detailing each ticket I opened for customer service, but I am done for today.  I just want to put this out there to save others from the hassle from which Tim Ferriss did not save me.  ECM offers pay for play which may have been the program that Tim Ferriss operates under, an affiliate program.  If so, he sure got a lot of our money.  If anyone is attempting the hard core sell on ECM, this may be your reason why.  But there is a happy ending for me.

A couple of months ago I started researching remote mail services.  Obviously it’s a move I should have made to start with all that time ago.  But I learn from my mistakes and I hope you do too.  With a lot of research I landed on a service that I liked for a new start.  I booted it up and have been running it simultaneously with ECM.  The new service, PhysicalAddress.Com has been a dream.  I have not experienced any of the headaches borne out of ECM service.  In fact, it offers and great piece of mind at a very reasonable price.  If you have remote mail needs, I recommend it and no, I’m not on an affiliate program.  But do your research.

*NOTE:  Earth Class Mail was specifically called out in the book Four Hour Work Week.  I hope that it’s updated at a future date.

Podcast Episode 2:

Click the title to launch Episode 2

Nomad Notes:

• Still in Mexico
• Went to El Diente de Oro whiskey bar. Highly recommend.
• Loving Uber in Mexico City. Come on Vancouver!
• Finalizing travel plans
• Vancouver, San Diego, San Antonio, back to Mexico City, then Playa del Carmen.
• Andy loves to grill -- Who doesn't?
• Cold weather and English -- What?
• Wrapping up our final weeks in Mexico City.
• Emergency Planning -- What goes into your bug out bag?
• Foreign Earned Income Exclusion
• Stay tuned next month for Tech Tips!
• Check out our Instagram

Music: "Something Elated" by Broke For Free

From the Free Music Archive

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How we avoided our taxes - legally!

We just completed our tax return.  We are scheduled to receive a 100% tax refund.  Here’s how it worked for us.

Andy spent a lot of time reading the statutes and regulations surrounding the foreign earned income tax exclusion in 2017.  Of course, he has made a career out of reviewing, understanding, interpreting, and reporting to government statutes and regulations.  So this wasn’t greek to him.  As he explained it to me, if a US citizen lives outside of the country for a predetermined number of days during the calendar (tax) year, that citizen is eligible for an exclusion of 100% of taxes paid for the year.  Even if the company paying you is a US company?  Even if you are being paid into a US bank account by your US employer?  Even if my business still resides in the US and all of my contractors are there?  My questions to him just free flowed, searching for the loophole that would snare us.  But the response to each question I generated was a confident Yes.

We moved to Mexico in October 2017 so 2018 would be the first calendar year we would be able to put the exclusion to the test.  My test, would be borne out through TurboTax.  Good old TurboTax.  My tax buddy for many years past would surely assist me through this new chapter in our lives and I had every confidence that whatever the case may be we will learn the outcome one way or another once it was time to file our 2018 tax return.  So during the year, knowing the travel to US had to be restricted, Andy meticulously counted his days in the states.  We actually made several trips to see family and once visit Washington DC.  But with every trip we counted and recounted his number of days in the country.

When near the end of January arrived, I completed the checklist of all of the forms that were to be received for filing purposes including a W2, 1098, 1099, 1099 INT, and so on and a so on.  I was armed and ready to accept the consequences of what was yet to come.  When I booted up my old friend TT he went to work straightway uploading all of my info from last year with a lot of assumption that nothing had changed.  But oh, it had.  We had been living in Mexico since 2017 and sold our home in the US in 2018.  Everything was different.

Turbo Tax didn’t make it simple to find this exclusion.  We had to strip away all of the income information that we normally use from year to year.  And here’s a tip, scroll down.  Among many other types of income options down the page, you will find the Foreign Earned Income selection.  This sounds confusing to me because it seems like this is where a person would report income earned from foreign entities.   But nope.  This is where a person would enter the income received while living outside of the country.  This is where all of our income, from work, was captured.  This included his W2 and my 1099s.  Next on the process was the physical presence test.  We entered the dates for each time we traveled into the US and counted the total number of “full days” we were there.  As expected, we were within the requirements of being outside the US for a minimum of 330 days.

CONGRATULATIONS!  You qualify for the foreign earned income exclusion!  said TurboTax.  And with that, my return calculator quickly rolled and rolled to the amount of our return that was equal to all of the federal income tax we had paid throughout the year.  The hard part is over.  Now we haven’t received the actual refund yet, but I will certainly keep you posted right here.  Meanwhile, here's a look at the worksheet Form 2555.

DISCLAIMER:  I am not a cpa, or even a bookkeeper, and I am only discussing our own experience. If you need tax advice, please contact a professional tax adviser.