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.
