Part of my life out in the Philippines is my transient living. The Philippines can offer salaries at less than $10 a day for skilled labour.
Yet getting mobile I can earn a lot more and still call the Philippines home. The truth of the matter is the Philippines is a great tax haven for expats. As I am not a Filipino citizen and I do not earn my income in the country we offer the country a great “import” business. As living here we are an inbound part of the economy pretty much ignored.
Not ignored in the tax sense but simply generally ignored completely as to having any benefit to the economy. Adding to that the thousands of retirees and others that come to the Philippines to marry and settle down I don’t think they are even flagged up as a financial economy benefit either.
For me though I am heading off very shortly again to a sunshine nation for another surveying contract. The interesting thing is how things have tied up rather swiftly as my last project is literally a day away from completion and the next project is already starting.
The upside of being away from home though will be seeing a new country as well as financially we are hoping to buy the building next door. The call centre is still building up but is going to have to take a bit of a back burner at the moment. I have new members of staff starting tonight but luckily the other call centre nearby have agreed to carry out the training while I am away.
Adding to that looks like I have found a good call centre manager who I am hoping to recruit in the next few days as well. Just need the dust to settle on the next project and closing down the Oman project at the same time.
Its surprising how many people work in the oil industry and live in the Philippines in fact all over Asia. For similar reasons they are here as they do not have any benefit to living in the UK. For example if your doing a 4 on 4 off shift in the Middle East and flying back to Europe regularly do you really want to be paying tax on your income? For a start your only in the country 50% of the time and on top of that your already taxed on your housing and everything else even when your not in the country. So why should your earnings also be taxed as well?
I am not sure how this works with medical care either as reading up recently it appears if I am abroad more than 3 months of the year I am not entitled to UK healthcare. Which to me seems unfair when your paying into the system the other 7 months of the year, adding to that do you have an option to opt out? Of course not.
Anyway rather than complaining about what the UK doesn’t offer its citizens I will just say look forward to going out and getting back. Expecting to be abroad for at least 4 weeks but if it stretches to 8 weeks would mean we will be purchasing the new building.
[...] The transient expat fly’s again! [...]