We live in a very unusual time - for many work and your residence are thousands of miles apart. Over the past several years the concept of the ‘digital nomad’ came into being - people who earn their living online, and decide they want to leave their home country for housing, but not for work.

Often digital nomads make their money through social media, and they capitalize on their lifestyle. Blogs, YouTube channels, and Instagram are all ways these nomads publicize and profit from their travel. But during the pandemic a new type of digital nomad has developed - remote workers. They have a job in their home country, maybe even a desk in an office, but their employer didn’t require them to be present in person. So rather than shoveling the driveway during winter they took their laptop some place warmer, and logged in remotely. In many cases if you can do a job from home, it doesn’t much matter where home is.

I’ve been living this way since well before the pandemic. While I return to the country of my birth in the summer months, my winters are spent in warmer climes. I still have clients for my main business, and they are all very happy with the service they receive. The countries I travel to don’t object either - earning dollars and spending pesos, or lempira, or or East Caribbean dollars benefits the local economies. When not handling client business - for clients in my home country - I am just like any other tourist. I spend money on tours, go scuba diving, go shopping, go to the beach.

This is important. Snowbirds - what Canadians call people who head south for the winter - generally enter countries on tourist visas. So it is good to be a tourist. Maybe it doesn’t matter legally, but it seems important to me. If I say I am a tourist, I should be involved in tourism. (Now, I might argue that I am more of a traveler than a tourist, but that is a distinction that likely isn’t too important to immigration authorities).

Some take the concept of nomad further - instead of choosing one country as a home base, they wander from country to country. Some countries even have ‘digital nomad visas’, which specifically contemplate this sort of wanderer.

It is a great way to live, detaching earning a living from geography. It does have its challenges though. In the next article in this series we will consider some of the challenges, and how to manage them.

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