 Hi everyone! Today I wanted to talk to you about a question I received. I received this question on my course. I received it from Cristina and Cristina asks, is it possible to set up an online freelance translation business without living in the country where you're a citizen, i.e. I'm from the States living in Spain. Basically Cristina is an American from the States and she's now living in Spain and she's wondering if she can set up a business as a freelancer in Spain and what are the problems, what are the implications etc etc. Now all of this is from a legal perspective obviously. There are there are other issues I mean obviously you need to get to the country, you speak the language etc etc but this is from a legal perspective like if you want to be a freelancer, if you want to set up a freelance translation business in a separate country then what are the problems and what are the implications and this can happen a lot with freelance translators because we do deal with two different languages which usually means at least two different countries. This can by the way be freelancers anywhere. I think I've mentioned before that I had a freelance designer friend who lived on a beach in Thailand. He had nothing to do with Thailand but that's where he lived and that's where he worked from. I also my languages are Italian to English but I've lived from Taiwan to Switzerland to the US to China to various different places. So freelancing in general a lot of people get into freelancing precisely for that reason because it means that they can be location independent. They can go work from wherever they want. Wherever they want could mean from their living room, the coffee shop down the road or a different country wherever they might be. But of course we have to deal with the rules and regulations and laws of every single country we're dealing with as well as the taxes so certain complications can come up. So how do we deal with them? Well first of all I should say that I am basing all of this on my past experience and there are probably people out there who know way more than I do. Basically lawyers know what they're talking about because they keep up to date with this stuff. So if you are a lawyer or if you happen to be friends with a lawyer especially a lawyer who specializes in small businesses or in entrepreneurship then that's the person you should be talking to. However I can just give my two cents based on my experience. The main thing is obviously you have to look into the local laws. For example let's take this example here of Christina. She's an American in Spain. If she's in Spain on a tourist visa if you're in Spain on a tourist visa you probably cannot go into business for yourself in the country. Although you might be able to do work for a job that you already set up in the U.S. if this makes any sense. So if Christina or if anyone if you set up a job while you're in the U.S. if you set up your freelancing business and you establish your credentials you have your address there you have your bank account there you know all your information is there and then you just happen to go to Spain and do some business there through upworkorpros.com so it's always online using all your information from the states and then they pay you via PayPal which is all connected to the states and you just happen to physically be in Spain while all this happens well then you might be able to get around it. This is the equivalent of a of a businessman who works for a certain company and is going with his family on vacation to Europe and while he's on you know in Spain on a beach or somewhere in the hotel he decides to open up his laptop and check emails or he website his phone and replies to a couple of emails. This is the exact same thing technically he's in Spain he's not he's there on vacation he's not there on a job and he's not there with a work visa but he's just replying to a couple of emails and this is this probably one of the most commonly disregarded regulations in the world right so but there are a couple things you should keep in mind because this businessman this hypothetical businessman is working on a laptop or or his phone and is not physically meeting any clients the moment you physically meet up with clients and you have interaction that takes place you have business that actually takes place in the border of that country then things can get a bit more complicated when you're in a certain country you're there on a visa or maybe you're there visa free but there's still rules pertaining to that and so technically you can only do what's permitted by that visa or by those rules of course there's so much gray area that pretty much i mean who who do you know who hasn't traveled and checked or applied to work email while they're traveling right but there might be some laws against this as well and in some countries in theory you can't even check your email while you're abroad there as a tourist china comes to mind technically if you go to china as a tourist just to see the great wall and stuff you're not allowed to reply to your work email and of course everyone does it and no one gets into trouble usually if you get into trouble for something like that it's because they need an excuse they're already after you someone's already after you and they want to find you and so that's why you get found out otherwise you can go travel all you want and reply to all the work emails you want and you'll be fine likewise if you're freelancing and everything's occurring online usually it's okay and someone you need to get on someone's radar first and that can be doing business in physically in the country so you encroach on someone's territory or you just make the wrong people mad i've i've seen all sides and i won't say who this is obviously or which country but i i did have friends in fact i had a friend who worked for a company not as a freelancer as an employee got married was having a kid all within this country was still there on a tourist visa he just left every three months and then came back and i asked him if he wasn't scared he's like no he's like even what he said was that he knew people who got stopped and you just have to pay the tax on what you owed and then that was it i would not recommend that in fact i've also seen the opposite i had a friend of mine in korea who was there i think on a student visa and he was teaching english as well and also teaching basketball and he got caught and kicked out of the country and the reason was he was teaching a basketball game it was a pickup game or i don't know it was something and all they had was a board with his name written his name five to six p.m and the cops came in saw his name and kicked him out but even he was saying he's like obviously they didn't just happen to be there randomly and randomly say oh well what are you doing here why is your name no obviously they were after him already and basically someone was mad at him and uh wanted to find an excuse to kick him out so you need to keep all these things in mind all this is to say that it can get very very complicated so the best solution for you christina or whoever you might be if you're in a country abroad if you're going to another country you're planning on working there and you don't you aren't sure what the rules and regulations are what to do is to find other people in your shoes find other people like you so for this example for christina does she know any americans or any other type of foreigners who are working for themselves in spain are there any other entrepreneurs any other freelancers you can probably go to bulletin boards you can go to websites you can find other people in your shoes another great place to go is meetups meetup.com or internations because there you usually find international people you also find entrepreneurs so you can talk to other people and they will give you a much better idea they will tell you what they've been doing they'll also be more current because they're there right now these laws not only are they different from for each country but they change all the time so you need you need information that's current you could go to a website and find information that's from five years ago and it won't apply anymore if you can find people who are in your shoes then that's the best option if you don't know any other people in your shoes any other foreigners living in that place or you know foreigners living in the country you are in or want to go to then what you can do is look for teachers english teachers or teachers whatever the language you might be but usually you can find english teachers anywhere and you can try talking to them very often english teachers are either teaching english for themselves or they have something they're doing on the side for themselves etc etc so they are usually pretty well versed in what's going on and what to do with the visas a lot of countries by the way make it very easy for you many places try to encourage entrepreneurship so yeah you have to register and you have to change your type of visa but it's usually a question of just announcing yourself at the local office and filling out some paperwork and a nominal fee because they always want a nominal fee but it's very often very easy to do this and so you get to stay for a while and then as long as you're earning something and it's working out then you can kind of stay every country is different though so once again try to find other people in your shoes and this is what i do usually when i go to other countries and if i don't know the rules or laws at all i try to get informed and the best way is to go to these meetups and to find other people in your shoes and see what they're doing and that at least gives you an idea from there you can keep building on your knowledge and so you can find yourself in the best situation because once you know that you can work there and you're legal then you want to keep doing more more homework because you might want to figure out what's best for you in terms of taxation remember you get taxed no matter where you live some countries like the US tax you even if you go abroad and so things can get very complicated so it always pays to get a lot of information and the best place to start getting that information is to find people in your shoes wherever you are or wherever you plan on going find people in those shoes and see what they're doing try to talk to them get information from them you can also find that information on bulletin boards but it's up to you how much of your personal situation you want to put online if you're in a country you're not sure you're allowed to be working there i'm not sure if you want to blast that out online on the other hand it's better to figure out ahead of time so if you're planning on going to a country or planning on working there then yeah find people online as well find people anywhere you can who can inform you unfortunately there is no casual answer for every place in the world because each country is completely different and so the best thing you can do is find people in those in your shoes once again so anyway this is what i replied to Christina and this so this is my reply to you in general i hope it helps and just know that there are a lot of other people in your shoes there and there are always more and more people so you will find other people you can talk to and other people who can give you advice on this my suggestion is to do that and you'll figure it out from there i hope this was useful and i hope this gave you a sort of right direction to go into when you find yourself in this situation because local laws can be a real bummer and local i mean nationalities borders these countries i mean honestly it can really get in the way sometimes of you just wanting to go where you want to go and do what you want to do so anyway you can figure out figure it out and work for yourself regardless it's always helpful and hopefully you will be able to do so and the fact that a certain country has certain laws or rules won't stop you from going there because it shouldn't stop you if that's i don't see why countries don't allow people to just come and work there because at the end of the day you're contributing to society if you're working there as a freelancer as a business person as an entrepreneur so i think it's in everyone's interest anyway that's just me i obviously don't work for any government but there you go i hope you found this helpful if you did please don't forget to subscribe we get more videos talking about freelancing and also don't forget to click on the little bell next to subscribe so then you know automatically when a new video comes out and you don't have to check if there's a new video or not and if you did like this video if you found it useful please click like that always helps i'd appreciate it and otherwise that's it i'll see you in the next video thanks bye