“Outsourcing your Life”- awesome article on yahoo finance

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Last thanksgiving, my buddies and I were having a discussion on outsourcing and how there is some serious money to be made by implementing an outsourcing type business and trying to streamline it to enable people in the US to take advantage.

Yahoo finance writes an excellent article on “outsourcing your life” - basically, the premise here is that you are able to find much cheaper alternatives to doing things yourself or hiring someone local. This really sucks for the US economy and small business here, however, what it does is increase competition and drive down price of goods and services. As a consumer, I think its a great idea but I guess if it starts to affect my own work and my ability to find work myself…then it would suck.

Financially, Ms. Gamerman calls its “labor arbitrage” meaning that there is an imbalance in the cost of labor locally vs. the cost of labor elsewhere and you can take advantage of that. For example, she writes that if you want a math tutor here it would range from 20-40 dollars an hour vs. 2-3 dollars if you hired someone in india. You need to take into account though, there is no personal interaction except maybe that of emails and phone calls.

The three freelancing sites mentioned includes
1. www.elance.com - They serve as “internet staffers” facilitating bidding for a project that you have with others willing to take the job. they take about 7% cost of the project as a fee which supposedly is less than the cost of a standard staffing company. They can help you with website design, programming, writing, consulting on various financial things as well as marketing. You can also provide your own services by signing up.
2. www.guru.com - Guru has a more comprehensive list of services that they offer and include things such as legal and engineering.
3. rentacoder.com - This service website is specific for program coders that work on things such as software and websites.
4. www.getfriday.com - a virtual personal assistant from india that charges from 15 dollars per hour to 7 dollars depending on how much you purchase from pay as you go to 160 hours a month. I wouldn’t be too comfortable though to have someone thousands of miles away in another country has access to bank accounts to pay my bills and other various things that you would want a personal assistant to do for you. If you go under services…some of the more unusual services include = “reading bedtime stories to your kids on the phone”

I guess the thing is that there is still only a limited amount of things that you can do online and there is something to be said about having a person there face to face vs. on the internet.

So how does this apply to you and I? Well…if you need a personal assistant to do stuff that you would not want to think about..then getfriday might be for you. If you want to design a website for your new business or practice, you can save yourself money. If your child needs a tutor then you can save some money. All in all, anything you can think of wanting to get done that can be done over the internet or over the phone without direct human contact can be had by these outsourcing websites.

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