Welcome!
Here's the story of why I decided to try becoming a digital nomad.
Hello! Welcome to my digital nomad blog. If you’re reading this, you’re probably a family member or friend of mine, but in case you’re somehow not, here are some facts about me that may or may not help contextualize this post:
My name is Allen, and I’m 25 years old
I’m from Ann Arbor, Michigan
I graduated from Yale in 2019 with a degree in statistics and almost 2000 hours of gameplay in Smite, a third-person multiplayer online battle arena video game
I lived in Germany for about 8 months after college on the Congress-Bundestag Youth Exchange for Young Professionals
I work remotely as a data analyst for a startup called Snackpass
I’ve played the piano since I was 4 and enjoy it very much
I’ve played the clarinet since I was 10 and have a complicated relationship with it
I like eating food
In May 2022, my apartment lease ended, and I became a digital nomad
So why are we here?
In March 2020, my exchange program in Germany was cut short because of the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. I spent a few months at home in Michigan before moving to the D.C. metro area in November to start my job at Deloitte as a consultant.
Given the COVID situation, my first full-time job started off completely remotely, and for better or for worse, I soon began to test the limits of what I could do without the constraint of having to go into a physical office. In March 2021, I flew to Fairbanks, Alaska, with a friend, where we worked remotely by day and chased the aurora borealis by night. In May 2021, I went to Puerto Rico with a group of friends and did a mix of vacation and remote work. I switched to my current job, which is still fully remote, in August 2021, and continued taking “workcations” with friends: Tampa in December 2021, and then Denver and Norway in March 2022. At this point, I was pretty firmly sold on the remote-work lifestyle, and I was spending a fair amount of time researching potential next destinations.
Meanwhile, my lease was set to end in May 2022, and, given that I was no longer working for Deloitte (plus the fact that Amazon HQ2 was moving in next door, increasing my rent by 25%), I didn’t particularly feel compelled to stay in D.C. I also, however, didn’t really know where I would want to move to, especially with my job not requiring me to be in any one city — I didn’t want, for example, to commit to paying New York City rent if I didn’t have a good reason to be there.
This combination of “Where should I work remotely next?”, “Where should I move?”, and my general wanderlust eventually led me straight into the internet rabbit hole of digital nomad life. Instead of living in permanent residences, digital nomads move around to different cities and countries while supporting themselves with remote jobs. They spend longer amounts of time in their destinations than they normally would on vacation, allowing for a more laid-back and immersive way of seeing different places.
I spent a few hours reading through posts on the digital nomad subreddit and watching YouTube videos, and I very quickly took a serious interest in trying out the digital nomad lifestyle for myself.
Geographic arbitrage and opportunity cost
One of the most important things I had to consider was the cost of traveling around all the time. Traveling is normally something we save up for, so I was surprised to find out that a lot of people choose to be digital nomads in order to save money. Here’s what I learned about how living nomadically can reduce your living costs or at least not increase them:
Many places have lower rent prices than big cities in the United States. Your U.S.-based salary from your remote job can go much further, for example, in Colombia or Thailand than it does in San Francisco. This is especially true when you factor in Airbnb’s monthly discounts, which can be as high as 30-50% for medium-term stays.
By not living in a permanent residence, you no longer have to pay rent, which frees up some amount of money each month. Essentially, the opportunity cost of renting an apartment is $X worth of travel expenses per month, where X is your rent. (If you own a house and have not fully paid off the mortgage, you can now rent out your home to cover the monthly payments — same idea with extra steps.)
The combination of 1. and 2. allows remote workers to “travel” indefinitely by putting their income towards Airbnbs and plane tickets rather than rent. To take an extreme example: if you’re a tech worker in NYC who pays $3000 in rent each month, you could instead take a $500 one-way flight to Bangkok, pay $1000 for a luxury apartment in the center of the city, and still come out with an extra $1500 at the end of the month — and you could do this every month in a new location. You can save more by not flying across the Pacific on a monthly basis (most digital nomads don’t) and by living in less fancy housing.
Quantifying savings from a nomadic lifestyle is actually pretty difficult to do comprehensively, but you get the idea. Here are some other ways digital nomads save money:
Food can be much cheaper in other locations. Pad Thai in Seattle? $15. Pad Thai in Bangkok? $1 (and it tastes better). If you’re like me and enjoy eating out, these savings can add up very quickly.
You may be able to claim tax exemptions/deductions. You can, for example, exclude a large chunk of your income from federal income taxes if you’re out of the U.S. for enough days in a year. Some digital nomads work as freelancers or entrepreneurs and are able to write off some of their travel/living costs as business expenses.
Your vacations might cost less depending on where you’re currently based. For example, if I’m living in Bangkok, it is much easier and cheaper for me to take a short trip to Chiang Mai than it would be if I were in Boston. If you were planning on traveling anyway, you can now string together a lot of destinations that are near each other and save a lot of money on return flights to your home country.
An obvious but important takeaway from all of the above is that, from a financial perspective, there are some places that are more feasible for digital nomads to live in than others, and these places may or may not line up with traditionally popular vacation destinations. It was honestly a lot of fun just reading about places I hadn’t really heard of before and thinking, “Hey, I can actually just go live in Thailand for a month and spend less money than I would’ve sitting at home in D.C.”
Where to?
May 2022 rolled around, and although I had created several Airbnb wishlists and was ready to start using the word “geoarbitrage” in day-to-day life, I wasn’t quite ready to pack up and leave the country. First, my parents were moving from Michigan to Seattle, and I wanted to be around so that I could see the new house and help move my belongings. Second, I needed to prepare some administrative things before traveling full-time: namely, I needed to get residency in the state of Washington (shout-out to 0% state income tax), since I no longer had a home in D.C. or Michigan, and I needed to renew my passport. Third, I wanted to try being nomadic in the U.S. for a bit just to make sure I wouldn’t hate moving around all the time. This would also give me an opportunity to get a taste of different big cities that I hadn’t spent much time in before.
My initial medium-term plan, geared towards exploring the U.S. rather than optimizing for cost, looked something like this:
May 2022: move back to Ann Arbor and organize/pack for a nomadic lifestyle (i.e. stuff all my essentials into a backpack and a carry-on)
June 2022: spend a month in San Francisco and meet a bunch of my Snackpass coworkers
July-August 2022: move up to Seattle while my parents look for a house
September 2022: fly to Ann Arbor to help move out of our old house, and then fly back to Seattle to move into the new house
October 2022: spend a month in Hawaii
November 2022: finally go abroad
I’m currently writing this post from Bangkok in November 2022, and I was able to more or less follow the above plan — I’ll write a few posts later about my experience as a nomad in the U.S.
As I moved through my first couple of cities within the country, I continued my research into international destinations I’d want to try working from. I gathered from Reddit that the Canary Islands are a popular hotspot for remote workers, as are a lot of the Balkan countries and certain cities in Latin America like Mexico City, Medellin, and Buenos Aires. I joined Nomad List, which allowed me to see where other digital nomads were living, and that gave me some ideas as well. It was really helpful to see what other remote workers had to say about different cities around the world as I refined my criteria for potential cities to work from. The most important criteria boiled down to the following:
Affordability: I wanted my average monthly costs as a nomad to not exceed what I was spending in D.C. I was fine with spending a bit more in a particular month if I balanced it out with a cheaper destination the following month.
Safety: I didn’t want to have to worry about walking outside at night. In particular, my bar for safety was a bit higher than it normally was for vacation spots, since I’d be living alone for an extended period of time.
Internet: I needed to pick locations where I could actually work remotely.
New experiences: I wanted to prioritize countries I hadn’t visited before.
Given these criteria, a few Southeast Asian countries became obvious candidates, particularly Thailand, Vietnam, and Malaysia. After some more browsing on Airbnb and Google Flights, I came up with a short list of Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, and Da Nang as the cities I’d try first. I’ll write more about each of these choices as I visit them.
The purpose of this blog
There are two main reasons I’ve decided to document my travels. First, I want to force myself to document some of my thoughts while I’m living abroad, working remotely, and experiencing new things. Second, I’d like to keep friends and family updated on my whereabouts.
This blog will not be a comprehensive travel or food blog. There are several reasons for this: I’m too lazy to document everything I eat and every location I visit, there is already tons of existing content for the places I’m visiting, and I personally don’t think it’s that interesting to just list out everything you do every day. I will instead try to focus on topics more unique to the digital nomad experience, such as working from weird time zones, meeting new people, navigating foreign languages, and developing a routine in a new city. That being said, I will do my best to post pictures of cool places and yummy food.
Thanks for reading!
If you’ve made it this far, thank you for humoring me, and I hope you’ll follow along as I try to figure out life as a digital nomad. See you in the next post!
copped