It isn't hard to get paid if you've done any sort of expenses for a big corp, but this is government which operates in a different language, so lots of red tape

It isn't hard to get paid if you've done any sort of expenses for a big corp, but this is government which operates in a different language, so lots of red tape and (when I was there) regularly changing rules. I'd think things would have settled down by now. You only get back business expenses, and a small amount to recover your living costs. Chile is not as cheap as you might think, it isn't like living in South East Asia on a few dollars a day. You need to have $10k to give yourself some breathing room so you don't run out of money within the first two months when you start get the reimbursements. The salaries scale based on the number of founders, so that you are somewhat covering the costs of having more people on the team. However, it all comes out of the same $40k, so that leaves you less to spend on the business, if you have larger business costs. I have some friends who were caught out significant $$ due to paperwork that wasn't accepted by the gov't, when the REALLY should have been reimbursed. At the same time, there were people who worked the system and got reimbursed for things they shouldn't have. One thing that is good about the difficult reimbursement process is that it teaches you to keep an eye on your balance sheet, which is something you're going to need to learn to operate a business anyway.