I lived in India for awhile and had female friends go though a bit of what is described in the story it brings back situations I was in and I empathize.
I've gotten three of these in the last two days from three family members on different sides of the family who all use Yahoo. I thought the first two were just idiots, but after the third I started to wonder how widespread this was.
I have lived outside of the US for 6 years and can hands down recommend Charles Schwab Bank. All ATM fees in the US and abroad are reimbursed and there are no foreign transaction fees.
That shady private ATM in the bar charges $5 per transaction? You are totally insensitive to it.
When was the last time you walked into a bank with a checking account question? You are here on HN so I assume it is rarely or never
But...it's a debit account, so if you need a credit card this may not fit your use case.
Seconded; not sure how easy it is to get one if you don't already have a brokerage account, but no annual fee, no foreign transaction fee, and no ATM fees is great. It's a debit card, but that's better for international travel, as you'll need to take out cash, and I don't think you can get credit cards that won't charge a fee for a cash advance.
(As an aside - never never change cash for travelling abroad, the commissions/spreads are ridiculous)
As for bitcoin, I feel that the volatility with respect to regular currency make a debit card not that useful unless you're an ideologue or want to speculate/easily get cash out
I think the bigger problem is still iOS's webview from within native apps, not that it has to pull most of the assets from the server. If you go to m.facebook.com in Safari it is much faster than using the native application and most of it is the same HTML5 code that is running within the webview of the native app. The twitter app is also painfully slow when clicking a link and it opens up the resulting page in a webview.
I've noticed this as well, and it seems to be a recent phenomenon - it's gotten to the point where I just open links in Safari when possible. Any idea why?
"...performance of UIWebViews is less than in mobile Safari. This has a lot to do with the absence of the new Nitro JavaScript engine in UIWebViews, apparently for security reasons. I ran some tests on my iPhone 4 with iOS 5.1.1, the JavaScript benchmark Sunspider running in Mobile Safari was 3 x as fast as running in a native app with a UIWebView. Also, to communicate from the UIWebView to the native app, a JavaScript bridge is needed. This is tricky stuff, slow and not really thread safe."
IIRC, the reason is that the Nitro engine compiles directly to native code, which is then executed. This requires writing to memory as data and then executing the data. However, Apple doesn’t allow third-party applications to execute data for any reason. This would violate security policies. Thus, any and all third-party scripting—be it JavaScript in a Webkit view or something else—must be interpreted. The best a third-party application can do is compile to byte codes and then interpret the byte codes.
Do you know anything about the tax implications of the $40k? I assume you pay taxes on it down in Chile, but does it count as earned income in your home country (specifically the US if you happen to be from here)?
I am from the US and I have not heard anyone paying taxes on the $40k as a US citizen. I can not say if this is the correct way to handle it or not. Since the money is split up between the team it is a bit complicated if you have more than one team member, but the money does get reimbursed to the head team member so if someone was responsible for paying taxes on it, it would be the head team member. All charges that you submit for reimbursement must be made from an account of a human team member on the contract or a Chilean company, and not from a US entity such as an LLC.
You can elect to draw a small salary from the grant money here in Chile (which most do) and you must register with the tax office here, but the salary is not high enough to require you to pay taxes here in Chile either.
I'd say have $5-10K for out of pocket business expenses after "getting to Chile" expenses. The things that you need to begin the program - plane flights, visa costs, mandatory 6 months of travel health insurance - can easily eat up $5K all by themselves, depending on where you're coming from. The visa fee for UK citizens is almost $1500, for example.
If you don't have enough money to pour in up front, cash flow will drive you crazy. Put together a six-month budget, even if it's loose. Put every expense you can think of in it. Reimbursements can only happen once a month and you absolutely need to plan things out to get the most out of the funding.
Yes, they make it pretty clear that you should have $5k per person to get you on your feet. I took it pretty lightly but it ended up being quite accurate and we ran into some cashflow issues.
As for time on program overhead, minimum probably 2 days a month. Much more if you want to be more involved with the community. You are not forced to do much more than the reimbursement process and finding some ways to give back to the Chile. You could go to meetups and such 3-4 days a week if you wanted, a lot going on.
I'd say 10k would help, a lot. If you have this quanta of money in the bank, you can cover all initial expenses via debit cards, and not using credit cards will immensely speed up your reimbursements.
Great point. I initially thought I would float everything on my credit card until I got reimbursed. I found out it doesn't work like that unfortunately. You have to show that the credit card has been paid off for the transactions you are submitting.
