I spent most of my time in Barcelona, but I was in NYC, London, Bangkok, Shenzhen and various small spots throughout Southeast Asia, mostly in Bali and Thailand. I never changed residency officially. I am Danish so I could certainly have saved a lot in taxes, but I just didn't bother.
These days there is a lot more infrastructure (like https://nomadlist.com/) which is great but I imagine also takes some of the excitement out of it. If you are able to work remotely, it's quite easy to make it work in cheap places, depending on your expectations. There is a certain type of loneliness associated with it in that you make lots of temporary connections. There were times where that got to me. On the other hand, I made many true friends that I still speak to frequently. Today I am happy to have an international network of people that always offer me a place to stay when I am in their region.
I haven't been aware of nomadlist.com before - is it worth the fee? I'm somewhat hesitant to sign up. The signup starts with some bullshit 50% discount from $218 to $109, while apparently $99 is the regular price anyway. Looks a bit sketchy in my eyes, but I might be too critical.
Eh, depending on what you want to get out of it, I'm not so sure it's worth it.
A lot of the information I've come across on things like cost of living and average internet speed I've found to be pretty inaccurate.
Like, it's saying $64 a month for a 1 br studio in the city center in Buenos Aires right now. That's nowhere close to what you'll be paying and it's not useful information. It's similar to some of the stuff you find on Numbeo, which makes you think "where are they getting these numbers??"
It does seem like it would be pretty good for meeting people though. I happened to note in my profile that I was currently in Bali and had nearly half a dozen people DM me over the span of a couple months just looking to make friends or connections in the area.
It does also offer access to some pretty active chat rooms where you get to share information with other digital nomads which can be pretty useful.
~$100 for access to what could essentially be a free discord server, or be replaced by the countless free expat Facebook groups you'll find based in any destination you'd like? Eh.
Thank you for the reply! Being an introvert, I don't care much about the people :) but rather about the information. If it's not accurate, it's probably not worth the $$.
While an EU citizen can at least roam in the EU fine, and a US citizen can roam the 50 states, seems that roaming outside of that would be exceedingly difficult and expensive to get appropiate visa (if they exist)
> an American could spend years just traveling the United States
Yup. I actually imagine a Californian could probably spend a LIFETIME roaming California and still not see everything that's worth seeing. The late Huell Howser did just that, but he only scratched the surface of the amazing places to visit in CA.
> Also it's an open secret that enforcement is poor to nil on the above setup.
OK, but what happens if you have a medical emergency? Googling suggests there are dedicated "digital nomad" insurance plans, but does a sizable fraction of digital nomads actually have insurance that provides cover for people who are doing illegal remote work?
Most developed countries (especially EU, but even USA) require that hospital take care of actual medical emergencies regardless of ability to pay or immigration status.
This is different than getting a doctor checkup or a scheduled surgery. For that you need to go home. But if you get into a car accident in the UK while a digital nomad, the process is probably the same as if you were a tourist.
E.g. NHS would take care of you, and sort the billing out later. And tourist insurance would probably even take care of you. For insurance underwriting purposes, being a nomad is a plus (other than customs law), because you spend all day in a library or WeWork, not bungee jumping or safari riding.
Of course, your point is correct that being on a tourist visa vs (say in the USA) a green card does cause a lot of headaches. Landlords will not rent long term to you. You cannot get a local job in case your main employer fires you (and you fall in love with the place). You'll have a hard time getting utilities, a bank account, etc.
I would assume you either are young and gambling you don't have an emergency, or you accept that you'll be treated by whatever is available, hopefully stabilized, and return to your country of origin.
You may be able to survive on "tourist insurance" or whatever, if you keep your working down-low (if it's all laptop work, maybe nobody will know or care enough to investigate).
What about the tax aspect of it? Or do you simply pay tax as resident of the place you last properly lived?
Maybe this is a more relevant question for non-Americans, since most other countries don’t tax their citizens on their worldwide income. Eg UK definitely doesn’t. But often it requires the employer to be comfortable with the HR situation you put them in. Often easier to contract via a company (intermediary HR entity or your own).
Many people just keep "working" for wherever they "officially" live and stay on the down-low. You get a lot of cash/barter happening also, and try to stay out of the attention of the authorities.
Many places have tax treaties that allow you to pay taxes to your "home" nation (and/or state/province) as long as you don't stay there/away more than a certain number of days each year. That also assumes you have the right visa to work there legally, and I don't mean work for a local company... I mean do any work that you get paid for such as remote work.
Traveling the US misses out on different cultural experiences though which are the most interesting parts of traveling I think, esp making friends and dating.
Just like “illegal immigration” in the US, you probably add more to the country economically than you cost. If you’re working remotely, it’s not like you’re taking a job away from the locals.
I can attest to that, my wife and I are planning the digital nomad lifestyle later this year. But we are doing it only in the US, staying in one brand of hotels (Hilton brands -- Homewood and Embassy's mostly) to take advantage of loyalty programs for free nights, the consistency over trying to stay at an AirBnb and just for comfort, and flying everywhere.
It's going to take us at least 3 years to hit all of the places we want to stay. Depending on hotel prices, we plan to stay at each place from 7-21 days. It's definitely on the "expensive" side. But we are renting out our house and selling our cars to make it more affordable.
Of course The whole credit card churning and earning points won't hurt.
Every hotel has mini fridges they can put in your room. These are for people who have medicine that needs to be refrigerated. You can request one of these fridges if your room doesn't have a fridge. I always let them know that I don't need it for medicine and that they can have it back if they need it. I did this every week and only once was a hotel ever out of fridges; never did they request to have it back.
Bring your own router and network cables. Sometimes, I should say often, the wifi signal is weak in your room. If there's an ethernet jack then you can setup your own access point. If you can only get one connection, then the router can help share that connection. A nice router will also have multiple ethernet ports of course, so you can both be wired in when you have important calls, etc.
Bring your own streaming media device. If you like roku, or firetv, or whatever, bring your own and plug it into the hotel TV when you want video entertainment. If you bring your own router it also makes for easy setup on their network. Roku, Amazon, Apple and Google all have models with ethernet support if you want extra stability.
Bring a small toolkit with basic tools and a flashlight. Sometimes your things or the hotel's things are broken and it's so much faster to get up and running with a couple turns of a screwdriver than waiting for a maintenance guy who may never show up.
The flashlight is also very useful if you're renting cars. They're often parked in dark airport garages and it's nice to walk around the car first so you can properly report damage before you take responsibility of the car. Never rent from low priced local car rental agencies, they are known to milk the same damages for money from every customer.
Bring a good bluetooth speaker. If you enjoy music, decent sound is a simple luxury that punches above its weight. In a jam, you can cut a rectangular hole in the bottom of a hotel paper cup to make your phone speaker a little more directional. Having that toolkit is helpful here.
Check the tax laws. If you stay in any one place too long, you'll owe income taxes there. 21 days shouldn't be a problem, but probably good to check.
All Hiltons at least have mini fridges. Homewood Suites and Home2Suites have full refrigerators. Homewood suites has full kitchens with stoves. Home2Suites allows you to check out “burners”.
I have a Roku stick for traveling. It has a feature that lets it log in to captured networks where you have to login. Some hotels have remotes that don’t allow you to change the source. I travel with a couple of “universal” brand specific remotes
TMobile has a “secret plan” called Global 15 that gives you unlimited high speed hot spot data in the US (not 3G) for $50 a month. I signed up for that.
I travel as a consultant occasionally and I visit my parents decently often and work from there. I’ve optimized my travel setup:
- I have a portable USB C powered display for a second display
- I use my iPad as a third display using Duet (the native Mac screen sharing doesn’t work on my corporate laptop)
- I have a Roost 3 laptop stand
- I have the largest airplane legal Anker battery pack that can charge a laptop and other devices
For context: A "point" can be worth from $0.005 to $0.009 depending on how you use them.
When I stay at a Hilton, I get points per dollar spent not including taxes. But including hotel restaurants.:
- 10x - base points everyone gets
- 10x - Diamond status for having the Amex Hilton Aspire card
- 14x - every dollar spent at a Hilton including taxes and fees..
So that's 34 points per dollar that I usually would say is worth $0.17 to $0.23 per dollar in points.
Also with Hilton, if you pay for four nights with all points, you get the fifth night free. You also don't pay taxes and fees when you pay with points. We are planning to stay for free at least 40 days next year in various big cities across the US.
You also get 10K points for each 10 days you stay over 30 and an additional 30K points after you stay over 60 days. Hilton is usually running some kind of special. For instance from May through September, you get an additional 20 points per dollar when you stay more than 3 days. That's 54 points per dollar or almost 38 cents per dollar toward future stays.
Airlines aren't nearly as generous - ever.
I travel maybe 6 times a year for business and collect points using "other people's money"
What makes you say that? Admittedly most of my backpacking-like travel days are long behind me, but border crossings typically aren't that difficult or expensive. EU is probably the hardest (almost certainly needed the visas before you arrived). Most of SE Asia and Africa you'd just hand over a few USD at the border, get a stamp, and keep moving.
Probably depends a lot on your citizenship. As an American it’s easy to get at least a 3-6 month visa basically anywhere except for embargo nations; many other countries that have visa holiday systems make 6 month stays pretty easy too. not so for my Indian friends for instance.
It does, German passport rate apparently under the most visa friendly ones. Not that I will ever have the luxury to actually try that... Never say never, I hope!
I as a UK citizen can temporarily visit the US, or Japan, or Thailand on holiday.
I could also go to meet my colleagues there, go and sell something, go and buy something, go to a convention, etc. That's counted as "doing business"
I can't work there though, unless I have an appropriate visa. Doesn't matter if I'm working remotely for a remote company that doesn't even have a presence in the country, it is still doing work.
You can easily get year-long visas to Australia and New Zealand if you're young enough and from an "approved" country (look for working holliday visa).
I think countries like Thailand and Indonesia (Bali) also allow foreigners to stay quite a generous amount of time... South America is also an option for up to 6 months, I believe, without much hassle... if you fancy China, they also have not-so-difficult-to-get student visas from what I've seen (lots of Europeans were going to study there for some reason when I was a "traveller" myself, around a decade ago... and it can be to study silly things like dance or a language, nothing too serious) so that's pretty much most of the world already?
Would anyone want to nomad to China now with their harsh lockdowns if you test positive for Covid? This isn’t an anti-China political statement by any means.
Your chances of being hit by a lockdown in China are very tiny, specially given you have freedom of movement and can easily get away from a region that's being affected. Why do you mention China while you could be hit by a harsher lockdown in e.g. Australia and many other countries?
A bit of an anti-globalist perspective IMO. With an EU or US [1] passport you can freely visit 100s of countries with no visa - or "visa on arrival" which is usually still relatively cheap for most countries.
I other words, you are willing to commit insurance fraud (or shoulder the risks of being uninsured) and violate visa laws and hope nobody finds out. But at least no one will accuse you of being of an "anti-globalist perspective".
(For what it's worth, I think it would probably be a win for many countries to make it feasible to get some short-term-ish remote work visa if you are unlikely to burden them or drive down local wages).
> Kansas has policies that could deter remote work and are deterring greater interstate work with our neighbors. Kansas requires employer withholding for people working in the state just for one day, which creates an annoying hurdle for companies trying to operate even in a small capacity in Kansas. In 2020, the Kansas legislature considered a bill that would have extended the withholding requirement period to 30 days, but the proposal died.
These days there is a lot more infrastructure (like https://nomadlist.com/) which is great but I imagine also takes some of the excitement out of it. If you are able to work remotely, it's quite easy to make it work in cheap places, depending on your expectations. There is a certain type of loneliness associated with it in that you make lots of temporary connections. There were times where that got to me. On the other hand, I made many true friends that I still speak to frequently. Today I am happy to have an international network of people that always offer me a place to stay when I am in their region.