Mikro Business

Three months status in Prague

Skrevet af Femi og Michael

So we’ve already been in Prague for 3 months so why not try and make some kind of status of what it’s been like.

Cost of Living
Cost was one of the primary reasons why we moved to Prague. Copenhagen is one of the most expensive cities in the world to live in so the first target is easily acquired. Prague is not super cheap, but it’s still a good deal when we are bringing money earned in Denmark. A rough estimate is that our money lasts one quarter to a third longer here when we consider rent, food, clothes and socializing. The quality and selection of supermarkets, restaurants etc. in Prague is just as good (if not better) than what you get in Copenhagen.
In a later post I will write more specific about what we pay here.

Social relations
We have used a number of different channels to meet other people and make new friends. As a blogger the first thing I looked for were Danes blogging from Prague and I found a couple. We went to an industry conference were we met a lot of Czech people we still keep in touch with. We used the virtual networks of CouchSurfing and Hospitality Club to meet other expats in town. The network we’ve used the most so far has been the student organization IAESTE that was the organization that brought us to US and we’ve stayed in touch with since.

Adventures
Another of the primary reasons for moving to Prague was simple for the adventure of living in a foreign country. And The Czech Republic has been good to us in terms of adventures. As mentioned above we’ve made a good circle of friends so every other week night and almost every weekend there are social activities or trips to attend. Go to my private blog if you want to read more about our adventures.

Running the company
Our company is still registered in Denmark so it’s still Danish VAT and tax we are messing around with. It’s not an enjoyable task at all but when it’s put into system skat.dk and other sites makes it easy to sit far away from Denmark and do the books.
We haven’t ventured into setting up a Czech branch or company and will not do that either. From what we hear there is a lot of red tape especially when you are not fluent at speaking Czech. Likewise we haven’t tried to work out if it would make more sense for us to pay Czech income taxes instead of Danish. In a not so distant future we will probably be setting up a limited company in UK in order to move more of our international work into that company.

Costumer relations
We still have the Danish cell phone numbers we used in Denmark so I don’t think all of our clients know that we are actually sitting in Prague rather that somewhere in Denmark. To our established costumers most of our interaction has been over the phone anyway so that hasn’t really changed. Other clients have been from UK, Germany and USA and all communication has been through Skype, IM and email so that hasn’t changed either.

Extending our stay
The first plan with our Prague stay was to stay here for six months and then go back to Copenhagen or try a stint somewhere else. But we’ve come to like Prague in our short say so far, so we just extended our plans to span a total of 12 months. That will give us enough time to focus on the project we are running now and really get to know the city.

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Opdateret d. 14. september 2007 i kategorien: Bloggerhverdag,In English . Andre indlæg af Femi og Michael