Picture this: You're sitting at a quaint café on the streets of Paris, sipping espresso and enjoying the bustle of a moonlit evening. Suddenly, your cell phone rings; it's a client calling from back home. You field the call, using your laptop's wireless connection to surf the Internet for some supporting information you need in real-time. For the duration of the call, the client has no clue where you are, because it simply doesn't matter.

Not long ago, the idea of telecommuting from abroad might have seemed more like fiction than fact. Today, however, it's pretty real. According to the International Telework Association & Council, an organization that charts telecommuting, 45.1 million Americans worked from a home office in 2005, and at least some of them worked from a "home" office in a faraway place.

By its nature, in-country telecommuting is liberating--there's no commute, no office politics, and no chatty colleagues. Telecommuting from abroad is liberating in entirely different ways. You soak up new culture. You travel and earn an income. You can't help but be creative. Mike Field, a web programmer and designer from Toronto, Ontario, picked up and hit the road nearly three years ago. Dozens of countries later, he's still going strong.

"Since I was a kid, I dreamed of living in different countries for one to three months at a time, making enough money to afford the next leg of the trip," he writes in an e-mail from somewhere in Australia. "I wouldn't describe this whole work-travel thing as a permanent state that I've comfortably gotten into and am keeping up. It's a constantly changing scenario. But it works."

"Phone"etics
Telecommuting from abroad isn't without its challenges. For starters, the strategy hinges on having a phone so you can talk to clients back home. Today, thanks to a technology known as Voice over the Internet Protocol, or VoIP, many telecommuters make phone calls over the same Internet connection they use to send e-mail. (Two examples of VoIP services are Vonage and Skype.)

Beyond a monthly service charge, unlimited international phone calls with both of these services are free. Still, the services require speedy Internet connections, and these aren't always easy to find outside the U.S. For that reason, David Silberkeit, a career coach from Stamford, Connecticut, who recently worked during a three-month bike tour of Scotland, stuck with a technology he knew: the cell phone.

"Because of the unpredictable nature of what I was doing, I wanted to be as mobile as possible," he says. "My office was a mini laptop and a cell phone and a bike, and I didn't miss a beat."

The journey wasn't without its hiccups. During one portion of the trip, the cell phone had difficulty obtaining a signal and dropped six consecutive calls with the same client. During another portion, the phone couldn't get a signal at all. As a fallback, Silberkeit traveled with a phone card. He fondly remembers a few rainy nights where he was holed up in a phone booth in the middle of nowhere, advising clients on their careers.
Out of the zone
Another challenge to telecommuting from abroad is managing time differences. Unless you're working elsewhere on the American continent, your new home likely is hours ahead or behind your old one. Clients don't care what time it is; when you're dealing with potential business, you need to improvise, and be flexible enough to rearrange your entire schedule around an important call.

Tuba Coskun, Internet manager for Engender Health, an international non-profit organization based in New York, handles this problem all the time. Coskun works out of a home office in Ankara, Turkey, which is seven hours ahead of headquarters back in the Big Apple. For her, the set-up has required flexibility on both sides of the Atlantic, both in scheduling phone calls and setting work schedules.

"New York respects the fact that I have a family and, other than some urgent matters, I don't get phone calls late into the evening," says Coskun, who moved to Turkey nearly two years ago. "I usually check e-mail at night, but this is not really expected."

For Coskun, a seven-hour time difference is manageable; for Philip Marshall, who telecommutes from Auckland, New Zealand, to his office in Boston, the difference is much more formidable. New Zealand is 16 hours ahead of the Eastern U.S., meaning that Marshall, vice president with the research firm Yankee Group, starts his days at 4 a.m., or 10 a.m. the previous day in the U.S.

Financial complexities
In addition to managing his schedule, Marshall says another challenge to working overseas is managing salary. Because Yankee Group is a U.S. company, Marshall is paid in U.S. dollars. He accepts these checks electronically, and accesses them through an online banking account via his bank back home. This, however, is only part of the mix--in New Zealand, which has its own dollar, one must exchange money to live.

To do this, Marshall says he also has foreign currency and local currency accounts at a New Zealand bank. For large currency transactions, he uses OzForex Foreign Exchange Services, which converts U.S. dollars to New Zealand dollars electronically at good rates. Finally, Marshall says he has an assistant back in Boston who banks expense checks and pays some bills on his behalf.

A stateside assistant seems to be an essential ingredient for working abroad; Silberkeit, the career coach, hired one to handle his finances during his bike trip around Europe last year. He communicated with this person largely by e-mail, and would call her when time permitted just to make sure all of his finances were running smoothly. For her, the job was easy--basic bookkeeping. For Silberkeit, having a helper gave him peace of mind.

"Knowing there was someone to manage the finances let me breathe more easily knowing that I could focus on the experience and on helping my clients," he says. "It would have been a challenge to deal with bills and expenses myself."

Technological glitches
If you've figured out how to access this website, the power of technology certainly isn't lost on you. When you're alone in a foreign land, however, technological glitches sometimes can be hard to overcome. Field, the web designer, says that international telecommuters usually have to troubleshoot most of these problems themselves. Depending on the problem, this scenario can become quite a burden.

Luckily, Field hasn't experienced any major technical problems so far on his journey. Sure, every now and again his laptop crashes. And yes, sometimes, depending on the wireless access in a particular Internet café, he may need to troubleshoot network connectivity. For the most part, Field says the biggest challenge has been keeping his anti-virus software up to date so it will protect the machine from the latest threats.

"It helps to keep software updated as much as possible," he writes in an e-mail. "I like to make sure the computer is running smoothly, but I'll do that even if I'm not traveling."

With this in mind, Field's advice for those who wish to follow in his footsteps is simple: back-up. The 29-year-old says he copied his hard drive before he hit the road, and copies important files at least once a week now to make sure that if anything happens to his machine, he'll have critical files in no time. Field admits this approach might be overkill. But when you are telecommuting from abroad, there's no such thing as being too careful.

Matt Villano recently spent three months living and working in Lima, Peru. Thanks to VoIP and the trusty Camino Real Internet café, he was able to work as he does normally from his home in Half Moon Bay, California.