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Good news! The documents have safely arrived at my lawyer’s office in Kyiv! It took exactly one week for the envelope to travel from me to the other side of the planet! That is incredibly fast, considering that Kyiv is the capital city of a country at war!
Now, the real work begins. The attorney now has permission to act on my behalf and register my company in Ukraine. Getting everything done will only take two to three weeks. That includes tax registration and opening a business bank account! However, then I would need to apply for a work permit, and THAT will be an expensive and involved process, and the longer I delay, the more expensive and involved it will become. I have it on good legal advice that I should go over on a tourist visa first and get an idea of what I’m in for, and then get the wheels going on the business. That is fair, and I have until March next year for that!
That said, ten months isn’t a very long time and a lot can happen, so the sooner I get my “stuff” in order, the better! I also need to prove to myself and my immediate family that this isn’t just a bit of craziness that will soon pass. I sincerely doubt that that will be the case, though, as too many arrows point me in the general direction of Ukraine, and the more I learn about the country, its history, and the general living conditions, especially in the rural areas, the more I realize that the skills that I have been acquiring over the past few years have equipped me particularly well for the new challenges that are before me.
This weekend will be spent cleaning and decluttering as much of my apartment as possible in the allotted time. Frankly, the less stuff I have to begin with, the less effort it will take to keep everything neat and tidy. I am lazy when it comes to matters of domestic maintenance (which is a polite way of saying that I absolutely loathe housework!), but some things are necessary and need to be done whether I want to or not!
So that’s the first order of business… but what next?
I need to get my current novel polished and published within the next month. I will also need to have written the complete first draft for a follow-up to that one so that the series can continue quickly. The reason for that is simple. I need a passive income as soon as possible, that I can channel into my new life in Ukraine and that will sustain the company until I can set up new income streams on that side. I won’t need a lot of money, but the basic non-negotiable expenses of company taxes and accountants will be between 3600 and 4800 UAH per month. That’s a lot of overhead to cover, not considering anything else! Remember that I am going to go over with the absolute bare minimum of resources, not because I am a glutton for punishment, but because I simply don’t have much, to begin with!
I also need to start the process of setting up a blog for my new life on that side. Don’t worry – nothing will happen to this one. I just need something that I can SEO the h*ll out of so that it can be seen and monetized quickly. I am not sure how I feel about SEO, frankly. To me, it seems to be a very contrived writing process, and a flashback to my early school days, when the assignment was to “make a sentence with” whatever word the teacher gave in class.
The same goes for the YouTube Channel that I need to set up. Maybe I should look at the “buzz-words” that are used by other bloggers and vloggers, and see how I can accommodate them in my own work without making it look like an elementary school project. That will be the challenge, won’t it?
And maybe I’ll change my mind about the process once I understand SEO better. It can’t be all that bad, can it, if it helps thousands of bloggers make decent money? I don’t want to be a choosy beggar in this case. And if other writers turn up their snobby noses at the idea of incorporating buzzwords in their work in a way that makes it look casual, then there would be more pie for me. And gravy. Lots of gravy… Hehe.
Anyway, now I know what I need to do. It’s not much, nor is it particularly difficult. And being busy with all this will keep me out of trouble, at least!
Slava Ukraina!
Ps. You know what you need to do, too. Click HERE and send me some small change, won’t you? Literally every cent will help, in this case.
