Should you help your Online Filipino Specialist financially? - Practical Advice

Should you help your online Filipino specialist financially? So I got a question the other day. It was really good from someone who said, hey, John, my OFS emailed me and said, sir, I'm wondering if you can lend me $60 because I don't have money to pay my medical bills. He said, I sent her $100, but I don't know if that was the right thing to do. But how do you judge when you should help someone? And I think he did the right thing and he used the right word. The right word is judge. So when someone asks you for help in the Philippines, which if you've done this for a while, it's gonna happen, someone's going to ask you for help, because the Philippines, it's an emerging economy is what they call it. It's a third world country, and life's hard there. And so when they're working paycheck to paycheck in the Philippines, there's no government recourse to fall back on. And it's possible that maybe they have been struggling without a job right before you hired them. And so when you hire them and you start paying them, they're catching up on debt from before because there is no recourse there. So when someone comes to you for help, depending on the situation, you obviously have to judge. It's really important to them. So here's a couple situations and how I judge. Number one, if someone comes to me right in the beginning, like, I just hired you in the first week, you're asking for money. No, I'm not going to send you money. I've seen too many times where that's a scam. And this includes, like, saying, like, right off the bat, day one, my laptop is broken. I need you to buy me a new laptop. Don't do it. My sister is sick. I need you to help pay for my sister. I need a cash advance for this right up front. I'm not going to do it. If we're a couple months into the relationship, this is a different situation. And now it depends how much are you asking for? Are you asking for $50? Are you asking for $800? That's a big, big difference. And for me, I'm only willing to help once I trust someone. And so when you start to work with someone, you'll start to gain their trust or you'll start to trust them pretty quickly. And if they ask you for money after the first week, that means they probably have started to trust you, and that's a big deal. So sending $100 or less in the first couple months isn't that big of a deal. Sending $500 or more is a really big deal. And it's not something I'm willing to do in the beginning. Over time, after someone has worked for me for a year, two years, five years, when they ask me for help, I'm likely to help them. I'm also likely to ask more about the situation rather than just saying, okay, here's some money. So I might ask like clarifying questions about the individual situation. The medical bills, what are the medical bills? Can you show me some copies of them? Who's sick? What's going on? Are you getting better? And then I might go further and ask questions like, hey, can you talk to me about, like, what's your rent cost and what are your monthly expenses and how much I know how much you're making. Do you have another job? Do you have another source of income? Do other people in your house have another source of income? I might talk with them through like their whole financial situation. I've done this multiple times and they're willing to do it because maybe they don't have another way to get this money. Getting a loan in the Philippines is sometimes easy and sometimes it's really hard. And if they've been turned down, like there are no friends and family with money to go to. So here's another situation where you need to be careful with this. So I've had on occasion this turn into a thing where it was like every other week they're asking for more money and it was someone I trusted. And yet it still came to like, you need more money, you need more money, you need more money. And became a real burden to me. So I think it's fine to say yes the first time after that when they come back and say, hey, I need, can you lend me some money? Then maybe it's time to evaluate and say like, well, why are you doing this? And I'll give you an example of this. I hired someone one time who she was really sickly and I didn't know that. And she actually was asking for $100 a month for full time work. And this is probably 13 years ago. And I was like, wow, $100 a month for full time work. I don't even care what she does for that. Yeah, I'm going to hire you. And I gave her some simple tasks and it was great. It was totally worth $100 a month. And after a number of months she asked me for some help for some money and I was like, okay, I can do that. I mean, I've paid you, you know, you don't make that much. She was very appreciative of just having a job. Like, she would send me stuff once a month about, like, thank you so much for my job. I am so appreciative. I never thought I would have a normal job. I never thought. And this continued. So then she started asking for more money, and then she was sick and she needed prescriptions and she had hospital bills, and it turned out that she only had one arm and she was. She struggled as she worked and she was very sickly. And it got to a point where, like, it was so much and I had given so much money and it wasn't worth the amount of work that she was able to do to continue to do this. I knew I had done a lot of good with her. I'd helped her stay alive, and that was good for her and good for her family. But it got to a point where I just said, hey, I don't have any work for you to do and I can't keep employing you anymore. And so I finally let her go. And so to me, the situation of, like, starting off, sending money was good and fine, but then as we moved down the road, they became more and more and more. So just be aware of the first time, it's okay. The second time, start to question it. And that's happened to me a couple times. Other people, they still work for me, though. Like, I've helped them over and over and over and over again, and they still work for me and I love them and I will continue to help them. And we got to the point where it was like, I don't think I'm paying you enough, so let me just raise your salary and let's take care of this. So should you help? Yes, you probably should not in the beginning. Not high amounts when. When they've worked, haven't worked for you for a long time. And then over time, just judge, like, be careful with sending multiple amounts. My name is John Jonas, and I wrote the book about how to hire people in the Philippines and all the cultural things you'll deal with. It's titled the Outsourcing Lever, and it's available free@outsourcinglever.com so I recorded the rest of this video yesterday. And then today I got this email from Mikayla, and she says, I'm in a dilemma with my va. Her mom needs hospital care because she thinks she's going to die. And my VA is asking for 2 months salary, paid in advance. I want to help her, but of course I know that she would be in too much debt with me. She'll probably never pay it back. What do you advise for the situation? So I realized I didn't cover loans at all. And so I asked my business partner, Dan, all about this, and he gave a whole bunch of really good advice. So over the years, we've given quite a few loans to people where we loan them money. And ahead of time we talk about, like, how are you going to pay this back? And so I'll pay it back in $50 increments each month. You can deduct it from my salary. It'll take this long to pay it back. So here's the advice that Dan has to give. So, number one, you're under no obligation at all to provide a loan to someone or to help them out or like, you don't have to be a bank. This is not. It's not part of your responsibility, unlike the 13th month is something that you need to pay. Giving loans is not something you need to do. However, like any other benefit, giving a loan could be something that really creates a lot of loyalty or you want to create a good work environment. And really, you're providing a lifeline to someone who maybe doesn't have another way to. Another way to solve this problem. The problem is that with a loan, it puts you, the employer, 100% at risk, and that can be really difficult. On the other side, there's some really good benefits that can come, like loyalty and hard work from that worker. Filipinos generally do not want to rip you off. However, you don't want to get scammed. So here's what we look at when this is happening. A scam almost always happens at the very beginning of a relationship, like in the first week or the first month after that, it's unlikely. Like a scammer is not likely to stick around in a relationship doing good work, working hard, order to build trust, only to take a chance of, am I going to be able to get a loan from this person and not pay them back? Right, it's not likely. However, it is possible, or it's possible that the problem that they have gets worse and then they can't work for you anymore, and it didn't intend to be a scam, but that they just can't pay you back now. So Dan says, as an employer, you got to make these decisions, like, do you loan or do you not? This is part of being a boss, is you have to make hard decisions. So here are some considerations that we make. So the big one is, how long have they worked for you and how good have they been? So if they've, we would say that, like, in the first six months, we're not going to loan more than $100 or going to give more than $100. It's just too risky. From six months to 12 months, I wouldn't give more than a month of salary, and then I'm certainly going to have a plan for how to pay that back. And, you know, if someone makes $600 a month, then they could. If they get a $600 loan and we take $100 a month, that'll take them six months to pay it back. Or if they're paying $50 a month, it takes them a year to pay it back. So that's, that's a reasonable amount. You can't really, you can't just continue to take money out of someone's salary to pay it back because they still have to live after a year of someone working for me, if they're a good worker. Now if someone's not that great, that's a different story where, like, I might let someone go at some point and then, then it's just on me. But if they're a great worker, then I'm willing to loan a larger amount. Like we've loaned $2,500 to someone once and that took two years to pay it back. Basically, it was $100 a month deducted out of their salary every month for two years. So here's another thing to consider. How big of an emergency is it? Like, is it preventing your worker from working like that? That's a different thing than your sister's in the hospital, right? So it's still a problem for them. But if they can't work for you now, it's a problem for you. So we've never really seen someone say, like, hey, I need a loan because I need to buy a new tv. So that's, you know, nobody's ever going to say that to you. If that's what they're getting the loan for, that may be a different story. So just take what the emergency is with a grain of salt, unless it's affecting their ability to work for you. So in the end, should you help your ofs in the Philippines or when should you help? Really, it's a matter of time and quality of work that they've done and trust. How much do you trust them? For me, I really like to extend a lifeline to someone. And that's a part of the consideration that I will take in when we do this again. My name is John Jonas. I've done this since 2005. I've had people in the Philippines since 2005. I've seen a lot of situations, not everything, but in my book I describe a lot of these situations that I've been through and how I solved them and how I treat different situations. My book is available for free@outroundinglever.com.