You think that the overseas price for a is lower than anything you can get in the United States or Canada, right? Well, let’s check that out.

Overseas Virtual Assistant $8-10/hour Charge by the hour
North American Virtual Assistant $25-30/hour Charge by the minute

At first obvious glance the Overseas Virtual is the better deal, but let’s just say you have a task that takes 10 minutes to complete:

Overseas Virtual Assistant Charges 1 hour at $8-10
North American Virtual Assistant Charges 10 minutes or $4.16-$5

Already we see that it costs less to use the American Virtual than the Overseas Virtual, and while this example is obviously one example, the average task a Virtual does only takes 15 minutes. Take that into account, and challenge the assumption that the Overseas Virtual Assistant can even get the same work done within one hour (Overseas VAs typically take 2-3 times longer to do what their American counterparts do), and you end up with a penny wise and hour foolish equation. All of this assumes that you will not have to rework everything the overseas virtual did because s/he did not understand what you wanted. But hey, it does look like a good deal otherwise.

Going to a ‘perceived low price’ overseas company to get a is being ‘penny wise and hour foolish.’ If you look at the unit price, it appears to be a deal — $10 versus $25 per hour; of course the $10 is better right? Not necessarily. When you take the monthly cost into account, you soon discover that the language barriers, the time difference, and the lack of cultural understanding amount to an expenditure of your time that wasn’t there before. Additionally, you miss out on the tacit knowledge (aka intuitiveness) of your virtual assistant, which a homegrown VA can provide. What appears to be a deal, isn’t really the deal you thought it was.