Should you sell or rent your house?  After analyzing the renting cost, maintenance fees, taxes, fees to the management company (we will not be here to handle the tenants and their needs), repair after the tenants, etc., we calculated that, for example, our house will give us 2-3% return of its cost.

Well, 2-3% is better than what you get in a bank these days, but does it worth to see our house destroyed by tenants? If you are not ready for that, then you should sell it instead of rent.

When you do not have a physical house, you need to establish a virtual one, a.k.a “Virtual Home Office”.

The first think what we did, we went “online and paperless”. Actually, we did this many years ago:  online banking, on-line billing, established electronic reoccurring payments for insurances (live, house, cars, etc.), car payments, on-line brokerage accounts and managing investments on-line.  We also established automatic withdrawals from the bank accounts for credit card payments, phone bills, and utilities.   No big changes for us. The last three month we just monitoring what occasional papers or letters come so we can go completely paperless.

I also maintain the list of all our contacts and accounts, so I can inform them and update our mail address as soon as we ready. We plan in September we’ll use our new mail forwarding address.

Currently, we are researching the mail forwarding services.  This takes some time because some features that we take for granted could cost extra.  We’ll report on that later.

In summary, for the Virtual Home you need the following:

• U.S. address (mail forwarding service)
• email address (I need to reduce number of my email addresses)
• on-line banking and brokerage
•  laptop
• cell phone (I read that my Android can be “unlocked” so I can use the SIM card from any country in the world – still researching)
• Skype account to stay connected
• valid passport
• valid driver license (we plan to renew our licenses before the departure)