Remote Income Strategies for Expats Masterclass

Moving Abroad Resources:

👉 Moving Abroad Relocation Roadmap Guidebook that walks you through the five phases of moving abroad ($27): https://www.entrepreneurexpat.com/relocate

👉 Moving Abroad Relocation Blueprint Course which offers step by step guidance on everything from choosing the right country to immigration to taxes and everything in between: https://www.entrepreneurexpat.com/blueprint

👉 Want us to handle the details of your move abroad? Apply for our white-glove relocation services here: https://www.entrepreneurexpat.com/consult

👉 Free Moving to Mexico Guide: https://www.entrepreneurexpat.com/mexico

👉 Free Moving Abroad Checklist: https://www.entrepreneurexpat.com/abroad 

Remote Work and Online Income Resources:

👉 Expat Income Accelerator course which shows you the multiple ways you can make money globally based on our 15+ years of experience in online business, investing internationally and living in multiple countries: https://www.entrepreneurexpat.com/income

👉 Get Your First High Paying Client Online Bootcamp which walks you through the first four foundational steps of creating and monetizing an online business based on 15+ years of experience in online business: https://www.entrepreneurexpat.com/firstclient-yt

👉 YouTube Mastery Workshop which shows you how we’ve built two YouTube channels that bring clients and passive income from digital course sales (including turning Entrepreneur Expat into a six-figure business in six months): https://www.YouTubeMasteryWorkshop.com

👉LinkedIn Mastery Workshop which shows you how to use LinkedIn to find remote work, clients and connect with recruiters based on Justin’s experience building a six-figure business and finding remote work on LinkedIn: https://www.entrepreneurexpat.com/linkedin

👉 Free Make Money From Anywhere Guide: https://www.entrepreneurexpat.com/money-guide 

V I D E O S    T O    W A T C H    N E X T :

Online Business Tips to Working and Traveling In Mexico: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zGH0voCyOc&list=PLh3xKhkMgH_IA6s3KvB_g9Cc9Ze1eji8j&index=2

Moving to Mexico: 10 Reasons Why We Chose to Live in Guadalajara https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dK23vD8_xjc&list=PLh3xKhkMgH_LAY7UV78YMgms-f2e1UcwN&index=23

Tips for Moving Overseas: Top 5 Remote Work Skills That Make Money: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFzjCrlNAL8&list=PLh3xKhkMgH_IA6s3KvB_g9Cc9Ze1eji8j

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Inquiries: community@entrepreneurexpat.com

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#livinginmexico #movingtomexico #digitalnomad #makemoneyonline #expatsinmexico #digitalmarketingtraning #geoarbitrage #moveoverseasfromus #digitalmarketingcourse #guadalajara #costoflivingmexico #digitalnomadvisa #digitalnomadnews #workandtravel #locationindependent

Transcript

0:36

If you could earn in dollars while living on pesos, how quickly would your runway grow? In this video, I'm gonna give you the exact remote income strategies that work for entrepreneur expats in Mexico and other countries right now, plus the tax moves that keep more of it in your pocket. Of course, we work all the time with founders and remote professionals to build a location, independent income, and set up compliant cross border lives. But this video is not to be construed as anything other than education. In our opinion. This is not legal advice. This is not professional advice. If you do want some help working with professionals like ourselves and like actual accountants, CPAs, attorneys. Both in the US and Mexico and other countries to figure out the details of your tax and business situation. You definitely wanna schedule a consult below, or by going to entrepreneur expat.com/consult. We can give you the personalized attention that you need in order to help figure this out for you. I'm Justin Keltner and on this channel Entrepreneur, expat. We talk about everything to do with moving abroad, starting a life and potentially even a remote location, independent business in another country, and how to actually make business work for your life, not have your life constantly just be working and making money. You want to actually enjoy life. That's why so many people, including many of our clients, have moved abroad. If that's something you're interested in, make sure to subscribe to this channel, hit that notification bell. Give this video a thumbs up so that YouTube recommends more videos like this. And you see all of our ongoing content. And like I mentioned before, book that free consultation. If you qualify, we can help you with the business aspects of things. With the relocation, taxes, accounting, and everything else. We've got professionals all over the world that are ready and eager to help. And if you're just looking. At moving abroad, you can also check out a free moving abroad checklist below this video or go to entrepreneur expat.com/abroad. So the first thing we're gonna talk about with regards to your remote income stream is you want to pick your remote income lane. So specifically, there are a lot of different ways to make money, especially money that is made with a location independent. Outcome, right? You wanna make this money without having to necessarily be tied to one physical location or a job that does not let you work remotely. So there's actually six lanes that work really well that we've tried, that our clients have tried, and all of these are gonna be based on your independent needs in terms of your skills, your capital. As well as your risk tolerance. So the first one is high value services. This includes things like consulting, fractional roles like a fractional CMO or CTO or something to that effect, creative and technical, uh, roles where maybe you're doing design, you're doing graphic design, you're doing websites. Uh, you're doing some type of website maintenance or coding or building things on a freelance basis. If you're doing one of those high value services like that, the best way to do it is really to niche down to one painful problem that you help your clients solve. Select premium pricing, right? You wanna also get retainers as well, because retainers are always much better than one off projects. If you have somebody pay you on an ongoing basis, or at least, Hey, we're gonna work together for three months, so pay me for that period of time, and then that renews, it's ongoing. It's always gonna be better than just doing one project for a few thousand dollars here and there, because that's kind of unsustainable and you constantly. Have to be marketing. Number two, you wanna look at doing productized services. So that's fixed scope, fixed price packages with tight, so ps. So for example, maybe a podcast with a 10 clip social pack in 72 hours. You can then not have to just deliver all of those things yourself, but actually be able to hire people and then scale this out as a real business. Number three, digital products. So we sell a lot of digital products every week. We've got hundreds of dollars coming in on average from digital products that basically sell themselves, and that covers most of our living expenses here. It's kind of awesome. We've got other higher value clients and projects and things that we work on as well, but this is kind of the quote unquote sleep money, the semi-passive income, obviously. Results. You know, our results are not typical. It's gonna be based on your own experience and what you're able to do. But if you can create courses that people actually enjoy that they like that, that move them forward in a given area of their life, then you can certainly make revenue from that, and it's not tied to a specific number of hours that you work. This can include things like courses, templates. That are bundled together with those courses, paid communities or even cohort programs. Amanda and I have run masterminds where we've charged anywhere from one all the way up to about$5,000 US per month. And we were running those masterminds from other countries, including Mexico and Columbia. So you wanna use your client work to harvest repeatable framework. So look at all of the things that you've done for clients in the past and try to figure out what your framework is based on that. Number four, affiliate and content. So these are things like niche media, SEO, or short form funnels to affiliate offers. You wanna always build one money page at a time, optimize that, fix it, get it going, but you can promote other people's offers. So an example is we have people approach us all the time for things like sponsorships, and we don't do too many because we really value. The integrity of our channel, but occasionally for something like a mobile data provider, uh, that worked with us when we went on our honeymoon cruise last year, we were able to get free data as well as a sponsorship from that company just because we have that channel. Uh, that's something that is, is kind of related to affiliate marketing because we do also have an affiliate relationship with them. Or every sim card, every every e sim card that we sell, every plan on that sim card that we sell, we get a small kickback. So affiliate marketing is very similar. You build an audience, you'll typically build an email list, you'll sell other people's products to that list so that you can get revenue from that list without necessarily having to sell your own products. Most of our revenue comes from our own products and services, but like I said, we do have occasional checks in the mail. Like, Hey, here's$400, here's$200, here's$300, uh, that we just get randomly every month or two. And it's kind of awesome because all we really had to do is refer either directly or through our list people to products that they could benefit from. Number five, micro SaaS and automation. So this is where you solve one expensive workflow problem for a narrow niche. So these are things like, uh, a small utility maybe that you're, you're, uh, integrating with a platform like Keap and you've solved a, solved a problem that that email marketing platform has where maybe you're getting extra data into somebody's CRM. Maybe you're making that process or workflow more efficient. You can always pre-sell something like this with a wait list. So if you're like. You did a survey, you talked to your audience on Facebook, on LinkedIn, they said, Hey, I'm having this specific problem with this software or these groups of software. You can build something for them and in some cases you can even do it. No code you can use no code platforms. No code DB is one example, although that's more, more targeted towards databases. But you could easily build like a mini CRM for a certain niche in something like no-code db. Uh, you could also use ai, they call it vibe coding these days. You have to be kind of careful with that. Uh, for sure you gotta kind of know what you're doing as well, or at least hire somebody, uh, to help supervise the AI or to refine the code. But they're very simple SaaS and other software things that you can build relatively simply in charge of subscription fee. So one example, and this isn't quite a SaaS, but we do a lot of infrastructure for our clients. So we've got about a thousand to$1,500 per month in revenue on average coming in from things like web hosting and web maintenance that for the most part, it's set it and forget it, right? We have to get the client, maybe every month or two they'll send us a request that our team takes care of and it. 20, 30 minutes to handle. But otherwise, it's mostly pure profit and we're selling them the peace of mind that if anything comes up, then it will be taken care of right away. And if a company is doing six or seven figures in revenue, it's not that big of a deal for them to pay three, four, or five,$600 a month for website hosting, maintenance, uh, email deliverability and things like that. That's kind of similar and sort of fits into that micro. SaaS, uh, category as well, right? Or maybe it's just the hosting service and you get a hundred clients at$50 a month. That's not a bad chunk of change, especially to fuel a location independent lifestyle where perhaps you're only spending 30 or 40% of what you might have been spending, uh, back home. Number six, e-commerce or print on demand. This is especially useful if you already own a channel, so maybe it's an email channel, it's a YouTube channel, or you're planning on building something like that and you want to. Be able to monetize that audience so you can sell products. Uh, like it could even be something like fulfilled by Amazon where you're selling other people's products or having them, uh, ship your products. Maybe you're drop shipping, maybe you've got, uh, print on demand or mugs or, or clothes or things like that that match your brand. That would be great for your subscribers to have. They'll pay you money for that. Uh, you can make money selling those items, and you really don't have to do too much other than put the designs together and then promote them to your audience. Now we're gonna talk about money flows and tools that won't break abroad. So typically businesses will have a merchant account, something like Stripe or perhaps PayPal, uh, or another more formal merchant account that maybe has. Better fees and arrangements and things like that. And they're gonna use a tool like wise or wise business to transfer money both to themselves if they're living abroad, and also to vendors that might be in the country that they're residing in, the country their business is in, or perhaps another country. So we've received money from Canada via wise, we've sent it to countries like India, we've sent it to ourselves in Mexico. We've also sent it to, to vendors and people that we have in Mexico and other. Countries because they do a really good job of not charging you too much of a currency conversion fee compared to doing things like international wires where the bank kind of decides what to charge you, and they're typically not very friendly about charging you. A good rate. Uh, if you are living in a country like Mexico, for example, you also want to consider the tax system here. You do need to have an RFC or a tax ID number, and you typically will issue invoices called uras, where you're, you're charging an EVA or, or a VAT if you're familiar with the value added tax. In Europe. Um, and depending where your buyers are from, there might also be other taxes, whether that's sales tax or anything else that they also have to pay. We also recommend having multiple merchant accounts, potentially separate merchant accounts, depending on what line of business. You're selling from and always, always, always have, uh, a backup. I say this a lot on these videos because I have an IT background, I just can't help it. But they always say that two is one and one is none. So if you only got one of anything, uh, you are very close to being totally shut down or canceled or whatever. You always wanna have. Different types of backups and of course, keep the books clean, right? Avoid mixing your personal and your business spend because that can save you a lot of sleep at night. Uh, complexity in your accounting, and of course things like audits as well. Now let's talk about some of the 2025 tax numbers that matter. And of course, this is gonna apply to later years as well, but we're gonna talk a little bit about what the numbers look like today, especially for us. Expats to make sure that you are staying compliant because no matter where you are, uncle Sam wants their money, so us expats, no matter where they're currently living, still always file taxes Annually. You can exclude up to about$130,000. Of income from federal taxes, that's active income. So like the salary portion of your income if you're running an S corp, like we are, uh, not the passive dividends or anything like that. So be careful. So you can, as of 2025, exclude around 130 K from your income. Uh, from federal taxes, you do still have to pay things like fica, so the social security and Medicare, that still is part of what you're paying yourself. Via payroll, just so that you know, and you also in some cases are able to get a foreign, uh, to get a tax credit for your housing. It's called the foreign housing tax credit. And there's a base, which is a minimum, uh, at which you can actually start to write that off, which in, uh, 2025 is approximately$21,000. It's$20,800. Exactly. That's the base. So you can only write off anything above that. If you're living somewhere like Mexico and you're only spending maybe six or seven or$8,000 a year. On rent, you're not even gonna qualify for that, but that's okay.'cause your housing's cheap. Not a big deal. This is if you're somewhere like maybe in the UK or somewhere else where rent is really expensive. And then the general housing cap is 30%. So the base is typically 16% of the FEIE or like I mentioned, around 31 k and the cap is 30% of the FEIE or$39,000. So any amount between that, you can also, uh, get as essentially a tax. Credit. And then the way to qualify for these sorts of things is by either being a bonafide resident of a country, for example, we help people get residency all the time. We just had a couple come down here, stay in our, uh, beautiful community here in the Lake Chip Paul area. We help them get their Mexican residency because they're gonna wanna qualify for things like this. They're also gonna wanna be able to access investments here in Mexico, which in some cases might pay up to 17% per year or more. Compared to the three or 4% that you see, uh, playing the market or putting'em in a savings account or a CD or what have you in the us. So if you qualify through bonafide residents, maybe you work with us, uh, you go to entrepreneur expat.com/consult. You book that call, within three to six months, we can help you have your entire residency sorted out and be a Mexican resident. Now you've. For the most part, got bonafide residents. If you have that and you're living here, you're pretty much Gucci, right? Uh, you can also qualify through physical presence. So if you're living in another country or if you're outside of the US at least for 330 days per year, then that will allow you to qualify for the physical presence route. Uh, it's also important to note, and of course, always report your income no matter where it's received, but there's some interesting changes that have been made in the last. Couple years. For example, in 2025, Congress rolled back the form, uh, Congress rolled back the form 10 99 K threshold to$20,000 and 200 transactions before it was higher. And in 2026, it's gonna be as low as$600. So if you're using a platform, for example, like Venmo to receive payments or Stripe or PayPal, it used to be that you would need tens of thousands of dollars per year. In income in order for'em to send you that tax form and report that to the IRS now, it's getting much, much lower. So it is really important to be aware of all of those little details, and there's another few reporting requirements as well. So there's one called F Bar that you do have to do as an expat if your foreign accounts in aggregates. So like the total of all of your checking, savings, investments and whatnot are over$10,000. At any time of the year, you're gonna have to file that F bar report, which is the SEN one 14. And then there's also something called fatca, the F-A-T-C-A, which is IRS form 89 38, and that's higher thresholds for those living abroad in terms of. Money that they have in different accounts, which typically can be around 200 to 300 K if you're single or four to 600 K if you are married. So you want to consult your tax professional. About that. It's very, very important that you comply because the fines are like super hefty if you do not, and you also wanna look at things like tax residents in another country. So using Mexico here as an example, because we're super familiar with it. If you do spend 183 or more days per year in Mexico in a 12 month period of time, or you have your center of center of vital interests here, then you may be treated as a Mexican tax resident on your worldwide income, which means that you may have to pay taxes in Mexico. On that US based income, they do have a simplified regime, which is called, uh, which potentially could fit solo consultants depending on how you're billing and invoicing your clients. So if you've got under three and a half million Mexican pesos, which you can convert that to USD, but it's, but it's pretty hefty, like it's over a hundred thousand dollars, of annual income us, then you only have to pay around one to two and a half percent on your receipts. As long as you're charging the EVA as well. That tends to be more for people working here in Mexico, potentially with Mexican and some foreign clients. But it's important to look at that, as well as your eligibility before you switch over to that. The good news in terms of all the taxes, and I know this is kind of like stressful and maybe boring stuff sometimes. I mean, believe me, it drives me crazy, uh, to, to read a lot of these international tracks, tax treaties and things like that. Uh, Amanda wonders how I even get through it, but I'm just sort of a nerd. So I like to geek out on this kind of stuff. Uh, but there are treaties that exist between the US and Mexico so that you're at least mitigating your double taxation, but it doesn't erase the filing obligations you always have to. File in most cases in both countries, and you're typically just gonna pay the greater tax rate. So if you would've owed, for instance,$5,000 or$10,000 or$20,000 in tax. In the US and maybe you owed slightly more in Mexico, typically you're gonna pay that initial amount to the US and then the difference you would pay to Mexico having received a credit for the taxes that you did pay to the us. I know. I know. There's nothing in life. That's absolutely for sure. But death and taxes, right? So part four here we're gonna talk about simple and proven setups. So there are a lot of different ways that you can structure yourself, right? Option a. Maybe you're a solo service professional with foreign clients. The easiest way to do this might be to just keep a US LLC for payments and contracts, take owner draws. And if you are a Mexican tax resident here for tax purposes, report your income in Mexico, but also use, use the US foreign tax credit and FEIE. As appropriate and of course, align your books. Make sure your books are clean to make tracing easier. Now we have an S corp just because that happened to be how we had things set up and it didn't really make sense to transition off of that. And they're also a little bit more audit proof. They're a little bit more structured, uh, for certain things, and they make it in credit a little bit easier than, for instance, an LLC. And there's other benefits if I had to do it over again. Perhaps I would've just kept an LLC if I knew that I was coming down to Mexico, because it does make things a little bit easier. And since you're not paying a lot of federal income tax anyway, it's almost a wash, right? Like between the LLC and the S corp. Option B is if you are a Mexico resident and you're serving Mexico clients, the simplest thing to do might just be to register as an individual under that plan or that. Simplified tax regime. You issue your CFDI invoices, or here we call those factus, and you charge and withhold eva, which is that value added tax correctly, and then you make sure you keep the merchant accounts clean between Mexican and non-Mexican sales. Then option three, if you're a content or an affiliate operator, then you kind of keep the back office light. Most likely you're gonna want to use a US entity for platforms and ad networks because they're typically easier to work with internationally versus like Mexican banks and, and companies and structures. There's a lot of red tape here, believe me. And then you track your 10 99 Ks and your other 10 99 forms, but don't rely on them for, uh, all of your records. You wanna look at your own personal income ledger, which maybe is in QuickBooks or some other. System that keeps track of those as your single source of truth. Now we're gonna talk about offer design. So what you sell and how you wanna always start off with an irresistible promise. So that's one metric that matters, one avatar and one timeframe. Here's an example, we'll get you three qualified business to business demos per week without cold calls in just 30 days. If you wanna be clear on your delivery model. So typically the easiest way to do it is to start high touch, especially as you're learning, as you're, as you're first getting into this business, you're understanding clients, then. Get, get your feet, you know, kind of under you, like figure out what the steps are, how it works, make sure clients are happy. Then you can productize it into different tiers and then you can add a do it with you cohort as well as a low ticket asset. And you've got a lot of wins there. So. You transition from just doing the really, really hands-on one-on-one work to now, hey, we're gonna do this process with you, potentially even outsource some elements if you still, for whatever reason, like we do relocation services. So it's not something where we could just do it with you.'cause there's so many layers of complexity and legal matters and things like that. Uh, we do it for you, but we can also. Outsource a lot of those pieces to attorneys and other people so that we're not responsible for all of the delivery. And we've got our low ticket offerings as well for people who just want a little bit more information, or perhaps they wanna try to piecemeal it and do it themselves. On that note, if you like what you're hearing, if you're like, Hey, I really want to work with you guys, either for relocation or you want some more support, understanding your personal, uh, business. Set up and the types of offers that you can come up with based on maybe your experience in the corporate world or based on your experience running businesses that perhaps were not quite what you wanted, you know that you've got the skills and you could level up and build something that is a six or seven figure business that you can run remotely, then you can definitely book a call with our team. Apply for that. Call at Entrepreneur. Apply for that call. Apply for that. call@entrepreneurexpat.com slash consult. So pricing, you wanna lead with your outcomes, not your hours. Nobody cares how long or how hard you worked on something. What they care is that they're getting the result. So you can offer like some type of performance bonus or kicker if your fulfillment's really airtight, but you want to be clear that you're selling the results you're buying. Get this result in this time, right, without other, uh, potential. Hardship or, or challenge, right? You, you're trying to make this simple. Typically, we recommend that you start with one channel. For us, YouTube is the primary channel. It's the primary method that we get business. We build a lot of inbound traffic through YouTube, by people downloading our lead magnet schedule and consults and whatnot as well. For business services, maybe you're gonna focus more on the outbound, maybe you're going to go to LinkedIn. That's a really good one. Uh, for products, you're, you're talking typically about content and emails, so you're building a ton of content. Maybe on YouTube, maybe on Instagram, if it's like a physical product business, maybe on TikTok, you're getting people on your email list. Then you're emailing them, you're sending them offers. Perhaps you're sending them offers via text message as well. You capture those phone number leads too. And for SaaS companies, a lot of the time you're gonna start off with founder led sales, and then maybe have a partner program, figure out who can sell this for you, uh, for a commission, just like the affiliate thing we talked about, but from the reverse side. So now we're gonna address risk control and don't do this lists. So these are the things that you want to make sure that you absolutely do not do, especially if you're trying to have a business and an international lifestyle. Number one, you don't wanna commingle your personal and your business funds, especially across borders, really dangerous. You have compliance issues, you've got potential, uh, other issues. You just don't want to do it. Don't promise specific outcomes on the internet. You always have to make sure that people understand that their facts drive their outcome. Their own unique situation is what actually drives the results that they're going to get. And don't ignore, tax residency counts. So if you're in a country for typically more than about 180 or 183 days. That's when a lot of countries will consider you a tax resident, whether that's Mexico or Columbia or other countries. So you want to track the days you're in a given country and keep your receipts. Make sure that if they ask, you've got that proof later. Look at your exit stamps, document absolutely everything. And also don't assume, uh, if you're getting like platform tax papers, like those 10 99 case, don't assume that just because. Let's say Airbnb or Stripe or Venmo did not send you a form that you don't owe taxes on it. That's super dangerous. You wanna always report your income, especially in the us. If you did not get a 10 99 K, it doesn't matter that you received it or that you did not receive it. It is still absolutely reportable. I know we covered a lot of ground here. I'm trying to give you guys a ton of value and and cover every detail when it comes to making money online. Moving abroad, how to really just create this holistic kind of enterprise that works well and that doesn't burn you out just like the businesses that we have here. So, as always, make sure you like this video. It helps us a ton with our mission of reaching a million entrepreneur expats and aspiring expats. Give it a thumbs up that helps, uh, the algorithm a lot, hit that notification bell and subscribe so that you don't miss a single video. And if you want to take things. To the next step. Definitely book that call with us@entrepreneurexpat.com slash consult. And we're also gonna include some brand new recently released programs that we have, like one that's called the Expat Income Accelerator, where we talk about some of these things more in depth and we te we walk you through. Here are the ways that you can actually make income as an expat. It's currently on sale for just$97. You can get it right below this video. Thanks again for joining us and we'll see you again next time.