Working in Vietnam

If you work remote then you can do it legally in VN.

Hey Charlotte,

I work as an illustrator/animator here in HCMC but also have a practice as a freelance designer which means that I can do all of my work online and send to my clients digitally from wherever I may be living.

If you are working for a company here then Work Visas can be a real headache and involve Residence Cards, Police checks, an up to date medical, as well as leaving the country to re-enter again to make your WV valid, and the state will be all over you to ensure that you are making the correct Tax contributions but if you are earning any money from overseas and this is being paid into an account which is not held by a VN bank then you should have no issues at all. Just remember that dependant on your country of origin they will still expect you to pay and file your tax returns and pay off student loan fees if you are determined to do everything by the book!

Your only possible issue may be that if you take out money over here then you cannot easily leave the country with it again without specific proof and opening any kind of VN bank account for daily use without a payslip from an employer based here can be almost impossible at the moment.

Other than that you should be fine but if like me you rely on the internet to do work you'll be best getting a decent 3G sim as a back up to use as the internet sharks often bring the ISP's to a grinding halt!

Hope any of this helps!

3g would not do me any good. I have to have a steady connection at least 2 meg down and 2 up....4-5 down would be better but not essential.

What do you mean by the term internet sharks?

The hours I would be working would be between 5 am and 3 pm most of the time by Vietnam time. How is the internet during those hours?

Undersea cables have been damaged on occasion, possibly due to being bitten by sharks.  When this happens internet can slow to a crawl for long periods of time, possibly months.  Weekdays 5AM-3PM are usually decent barring technical difficulties.  I read somewhere a landline connection with China may be in the works, so things could be different by the time you move here.

^^ This

Sorry, it seems that I have been here long enough now to forget that "internet sharks" is not a standard nor normal phrase. Many of the Vietnamese locals that I know have said (very quietly) that this is simply an urban myth created by the government to make excuses for the anarchist and anti-government groups who attack the poorly secured lines that are easily damaged as they simply lay across the local seabeds.

Either way as Astronomic mentioned the internet does tend to be okay but there it is reasonably common for the odd outage.
That said you can actually achieve some pretty nifty 3G mobile speeds out here also, with peak rates of around 3 mb on the full fat tariffs, perhaps not perfect for your needs but might get you our of a bind if you are really stuck for a solution!