Who has made a move to a new location due to remote working? Who has considered it?
I’ve managed remote teams around the world. I know this violates the popular narrative, but remote hires generally either stayed exactly where they were or moved to bigger, expensive cities. We paid them more than they made locally so they often used the new income to move up.
I’ve only known a few people who used remote work to move to the mountains or countryside, but about half of them have moved back. It’s easy to glorify remote locations from watching movies or scrolling Instagram, but unless you have some specific draw to those locations it’s likely not as idyllic as it may sound. You could be replacing your work commute with an extra long commute to everything else you need to do, like grocery shopping.
Why did they do that? Did they share to you a main reason? Is it access to groceries, as you mentioned? or better schools for their kids? medical care?
I find it hard to justify the increased rent and general cost of living.
Rent sucks, yes, but I live here because I like it here, not because I need to for my job.
There is the occasional outlier, that is someone who prefers to freedom to work from anywhere and keeps on the move, hopping about the globe whilst working remotely, but they are rare.
I have not had good luck with most (though not all!) digital nomad types, either as contractors or remote employees. My sample size is small because they are rare, like you said. However, the few that I’ve worked with felt like they needed extraordinary management attention to extract even moderate amounts of work relative to anyone else on the team.
And of course their peers and teammates hate it the most because they’re forced to collaborate with someone in changing time zones who seems to be working hard at avoiding work.
Three things stopping me from moving that haven't been mentioned yet were:
(1) I had to run out my lease (had signed a 1-year a few months before getting the job) (2) Friends and professional network (all in the city) (3) Fear of losing the remote job / not being able to get another one and having to move back into the city for a job
1 & 2 are fixable with time, but 3 always felt like too big of a risk. Granted, this was pre-pandemic so finding remote opportunities that paid well was harder. Not sure if I'd feel the same way if I had a similar choice in front of me today.
They get to evaluate and inherit the infrastructure density too.
Density of humans means density of networks of humans. This decreases the cost of having many things available. You want to be around other people that have justified those things and didn’t find it hard to, because you inherit their superior networks too.
If you view a city as nothing more than rent and groceries and you get most of your entertainment at home, then big cities probably don’t feel like a good value proposition.
But if you enjoy going to events, eating out, socializing with a wide variety of motivated people, and otherwise experiencing everything a city has to offer, a big city is the place to be.
Neither answer is “right” for everyone. It’s an individual preference.
Live in the country … “I need to be in the city where I can access more events and people to fulfill my life. The countryside is boring and making me feel x.” Live in the city … “I need to be in the country where I can have more solitude and enjoy nature to fulfill my life. The city is overstimulating and making me feel y.”
Some of us are nomadic by nature and simply want some place different every few years. Others want stability and remain in places for decades.
I used to fantasize about new places, expecting the change in environment alone to be impactful. Now I realize that changing locations will not by itself impact my life for the better, but the act of searching for a new home, discovering new places and meeting new people is exciting and invigorating.
Moving physical things sucks though, so minimizing physical possessions makes this lifestyle much smoother of course.
You are right about one thing - my grocery shopping is now 15 minutes away instead of 5. As I sit at my desk, looking over the countryside and watching my boys play in the snow while the birds flit about my window... I'm 100% satisfied with that trade off.
I’m not going to lie, it was a pretty eye opening experience going from the Bay Area to a small town. The pace was more calm and I realized I could still get access to 80% of what I had in the Bay Area. Walking by the lake and having people say “good evening” was a nice change. Being able to drive 10 min and be in the middle of nature was great.
I eventually returned to SF, and I’m not sure right now in my life is a good time for a permanent move, but it certainly had its appeal.
I feel like a mid-sized town - has most amenities, some places to splurge and access to an airport would be ideal - the best trade off between what SF offers and what smaller towns offer.
I think the problem is the travel disruption has reall LT thrown things off. If I were to be stuck for 12 months in one place, I’d take SF (or another big city). If I knew I could easily jump on a cheap flight, the smaller cities start to seem much more appealing.
Also, might just have been the places I lived but I missed having peer in tech or who were similar. Just not interested in hunting and sports,
But the tech things rings true. However, my only counter is that having a strong community that has nothing to do with work is pretty cool too.
White is not a culture. Skin colour is orthogonal with cultural diversity.
Amsterdam is also 80-90% white but is incredibly diverse with all sorts of people from all sorts of places and backgrounds.
Let me refine by saying my neighborhood in SF is 90% white, Democrat voting, can’t-get-off-the-hedonistic-treadmill culture, love to talk about progressive ideals while voting for restrictive policies that hurt residents.
I lived in a swing state a long time ago and it was actually nice interacting with people from a lot of different backgrounds, none of which dominated the culture. You could go to a rave with some anarchist one weekend and go deer hunting with an evangelical Christian the next.
This has been closer to my experience in most cities that aren’t SF, NYC, or a few other notable outliers. SF / Bay Area is fun in some ways but it’s very much a weird bubble
Scottsdale does have a lot of things going for it, don't get me wrong: 1. Lots of cool restaurants/activities (I used to go to ifly once a week for training) 2. Airport is very accessible 3. Good nature spots just a short drive out of the city (mini vacations for a weekend are great) 4. Lots of disc golf parks which I've taken up as another sport I can mostly participate in despite my vision loss 5. Rent is affordable compared to the other big cities
Lots of good reasons to move to Scottsdale, don't get me wrong. If it weren't so hot I probably wouldn't have left as readily.
My partner and I are based nominally half in London and half in Amsterdam. He's Dutch so we've had a house right in the centre of Amsterdam for years.
At the start of last year, we rented a wonderful office there. Even though I'm only there half the time, it feels like a wonderful getaway, perfectly set up for tech-oriented careers.
What makes it so special:
* It's on a canal, facing an island with beautiful 17th century warehouses.
* The office is three minutes walk from home, and accessible only by foot.
* It's also huge, 90m2, with a main room (with our two desks, a lunch table, a couch/relaxed sitting area, and a gym/yoga area) a meeting room, a kitchen and a toilet.
* I keep my bikes and kayak there. Most mornings at 6:30am, I do an hour long bike ride, through parks, with just four traffic lights.
* Plus it's only ten minutes' walk from Amsterdam Central Station.
All the advantages of being in the middle of a real city. But it feels like the countryside.
As my live situation changes over time I will continuously revise my/our priorities and thus place to live, but for now I'm happy where I am.
So the permanent home wont change for a while likely, but unlike pre-pandemic I spend days or weeks at the time on the countryside working from there and from some point on next year I want to spent more time, couple months per year, back in Europe to be closer with family/friends and some aspects of European culture I miss. New work policies definitely make this plan easier. But if I'm committed I would find a way to do this pandemic changes or not.
Since then I've been bouncing around different countries but have found I really like Porto, Portugal. My cost of living is roughly 33% of London (for example: rent, housing taxes and utilities costs in London were £1100 - I'm paying £350 total in Porto). At the same time, the quality of life here is superb.
Why not move back?
Is there an expat community you could mingle with?
you've missed a whole country named Ireland which is in EU
We stayed there from June to October, and after going home to DC for a spell came back to the Cape for Thanksgiving and then again for some long stretches in '21, including during the winter. It has been a great retreat from the city during these pandemic years.
My partner has an aunt and uncle who have lived year round in the same town on the Cape for something like 30 years. I also have an aunt who has lived there year round with her family for a similar amount of time in the neighboring town. I grew up visiting the Cape most summers and always loved it, but only ever thought of it as a summer place.
I've always thought of myself as a city person, but now we're planning to buy in one of these towns and move there permanently. I couldn't be more excited.
The company I work for has been very progressive in our work model over the past year and a half, and we've now gone fully distributed -- I plan to work remote forever.
The main challenge for us now is that the housing market on the Cape is a mess. In '20 prices skyrocketed. By '21 demand had cooled somewhat, but there has been no inventory. We'll see what things look like come this spring. Fortunately we can temporarily live in our family's houses while we search and prepare to sell or lease our condo here in DC.
The pandemic's normalization of remote work enabled this move (which otherwise would have been deferred until retirement) to occur with minimal risk to my existing W2 income stream, which made what would otherwise have been a somewhat fraught transition largely worry free. I am also grateful that the pandemic in its first 9 months also removed one of my primary pre-move daily-life stressors: a heinous twice-daily commute on massively oversubscribed south bay roads and highways (which was far from being the worst possible).
We had worked together for years at this small company. He moved to northern CA and still worked for us but was the only remote employee. He was a founder though so no one was going to question it. Anyway, after the company sold, I got a remote manager job at a SV company (not FAANG) and lured him to join me. Once his daughter graduated college, he moved to a house he had bought in Spain and worked from there for most of the year. Our team was mainly East Coast and Europe so it worked better having him in Spain anyway.
He spends roughly half the year in Spain. He owns a small cottage on a lake in NH and will spend a couple months of the summer there. His daughter lives in DC so he will spend a month or so with her. His wife's family lives in Atlanta area so he will spend a month or so with them. Before Covid, he also listed his Spain house on a house sharing site and used that to spend a month here and there in lots of cool places like Paris, Nice, Croatia and the Canary Islands among others.
It obviously helped that I was his manager and knew that this nomadic life would not impact his work but other than that I think it is a model for what a lot of people would like to do, especially in the back part of their careers.
Sorry, should have made that clearer.
But, my dog loves that I live within 5 miles of at least 5 different dog parks, and that's a real factor. I also have an extra bedroom I use as an office, so, I'm all set up to WFH here in my rent controlled apartment, even if I don't move anywhere. In another 3 years, I expect my rent will be significantly below market. For now, I've decided that my life is here, and I like it that way.
That might change when my lease is up in February. However, I'm also currently on the job market, so, there will be the additional factor of "is my employer going to pay me less if I move, and, if so, how much?" I also have a hobby that's somewhat difficult to practice in a less populated locale, so, it's not going to be strictly a case of "run the numbers, look at the bottom line, and pick the place with the bigger number." I'm going to have to do a serious quality of life analysis in a couple of months.
- I save the equivalent of a Tesla payment in income taxes each year, and thus save more money
- I bought a new construction, 5 bedroom house for the price of a condo in my old city
- My new location has fast, inexpensive fiber-optic internet with lots of ISP choices, which ironically I didn't have in the big city
- World-class skiing and hiking, off-roading, camping, deserts, etc. Obviously California has some of those things but they always seem like a 4-5 hour drive away
- I'm a 20 minutes away from a great International airport with direct flights to most of Europe, 1-2hr flights to anywhere on the West Coast (LAS, SF, SEA, LAX)
Because of the reduction in personal burn rate, I was able to leave my soul sucking job and join a tiny startup to get back to my roots.
It's hard to make friends as an adult during COVID, so there's times when it's lonely for sure.
It's wild, I had to move 20ish miles outside of Indianapolis to a town of 200~ people where the closest gas station is 8-10 miles away and I don't get residential mail delivery while being surrounded by corn and soy fields to actually have access to gigabit internet for the first time in my life... scratches head
OP: you should stay near your parents as they sound important to you. You’re not missing out. I’d say look for ways to benefit.
You've got me a little curious now. Any additional details you'd care to share?
The house itself is small but we both have our dedicated 8m2 "office" which is key in my opinion. Internet is 4G only so I built a Linux router with a good modem and high gain antennas, it has worked wonderfully for remote work even if the latency is not amazing.
We both love nature and the ability to just step outside and go for a walk in a nice landscape whenever we feel like it is amazing. Back in the big city we needed to drive one hour to get away from the concrete.
Living in more remote areas is less expensive and perhaps a healthier life style. When I go to places like NYC for business I probably walk an average of an hour a day, at home I probably average 1 1/2 hours a day.
Anyway, it is a difficult decision for you to make because there are advantages to both options.
I lived there a number of years ago and split my time in a tech job 2 to 3 days a week in the office and the remainder back home working remotely. It was a struggle - Slack etc wasn’t a thing at that point and the communication was always strained while I was remote. I realised at some point that being remote was going to be career limiting and relocated close to a city with a large tech scene here in the UK. I didn’t resent the move as such, but I’d always missed being in the countryside and the town I’d adopted as home.
Now with the tech scene (certainly here in the UK) having embraced remote working on what appears to be a permanent basis I’m taking the opportunity to move back there and work mostly remotely. Luckily the company I work for has a great approach to this and there doesn’t seem any shortage of other tech companies offering it too. Of course there is always the risk that this will be limiting in the long run, but it feels like the current outlook is on the side of taking that risk. I realised over COVID lockdowns how much I missed living there, so I’ve decided it’s an important move for me personally.
COVID has been awful in so many ways, but a positive coming out of it is the way it has forced some realisations about how we work. For me the realisation has been that it isn’t about having a certain number of days or fixed times in the office - I think this is pretty old fashioned thinking. But instead committing to getting together in person with colleagues and clients for the right activities, where it really adds value.
However it’s a bit daunting to get an office or an extra bedroom there at my own expense. I’m not sure I’m up for working from my living room or bedroom.
Brooklyn is lame.
I tried to break my lower Manhattanite molding and stayed over in that part of Brooklyn for a month. I was even around some of those hardcore Brooklyners who would protest the idea of any event in Manhattan, and then every event they took me too was a lamer version of Manhattan. Or they wanted to go to Brooklyn Mirage every day. I had some other crews but its not for me. The biggest irony to me was that everything people in Brooklyn complained about, regarding Brooklyn, were the same things people in Manhattan complained about regarding Brooklyn. So I’m really turned off by collective delusion places especially when my luxury apartment dwelling friends have a choice in the matter.
The neighborhoods are nice, and the newer rooftops are mind blowing. But the classic circuit in Manhattan is for me. East Village, LES, Soho, Tribeca, Washington Square, West Village, Meatpacking.
Back in the attractive-because-its-gentrified part of Brooklyn:
Greenpoint? I dont get it. Every time you wanna go out its just walking further to Williamsburg or taking a convoluted path to Queens or Manhattan, and some really scary roads for bike/scooter.
Williamsburg? I’ll stick with visiting.
Fort Greene/Prospect Park? Beautiful, neighborly, I wish it was geographically close to other things like surrounded by Manhattan. But apparently I missed some action in downtown Brooklyn that none of my current friends do.
As a result, my wife and I were able to move, though we did the opposite of what you're considering. Having been in the burbs for the last 28 years of my life, we made the switch to move to the city. Sold our house during the very hot market and bought a condo in the city. We're almost a year in and loving it.
I love this way of life. I wouldn't apply for a non-remote job nowadays.
The only things going for the area used to be nice weather and tech jobs. But now that summer and early fall are filled with smoke and the jobs can be worked from anywhere, why stay? My wife agreed to move out as soon as we had a child, so I'm pretty excited about having the opportunity for an escape.
At the moment I am mostly stationary but I still have projects and/or goals in at least 4 different countries.
You can apply for residency in places like Mexico which require very little physical presence to maintain/renew a visa for the first few years. After 3 years (I think) you have to live there for the last 18 months before applying for citizenship.
Chile is the opposite in where you must spend the first 18 months in the country but after that you only really need to be there once a year.
Other countries have generous tourist visas like Turkey. If you rent an apartment for one year in Turkey (anywhere, for any price) you can get a 1 year tourist visa.
Wikipedia has a list of all countries visa policies as well. You could find out about where you are allowed to stay for longer than 90 days somewhere by searching for "visa policy of $COUNTRY".
Then there are places offering visas for remote workers but requires you to live there for at least 6 months of the year (making you a tax resident of that country). This includes places like Portugal, Estonia, Georgia, and the UAE.
I believe in Georgia and the UAE they will not charge income tax for the first year as well but I may be wrong.
If you have deeper pockets there are Golden Visa programs for places like Portugal, Greece, Malta, Cyprus (might be wrong on this one), New Zealand, Georgia, Montenegro, and many Caribbean nations.
Lastly, most every country in the world has some sort of business owners or startup visa. If you're entrepeneurially minded and have sufficient startup capital, you can get a visa pretty much anywhere in the world.
EDIT: I use travelingmailbox.com for snail mail and OpenPhone to maintain US-based communication for whatever reason.
Working on tourist visas isn’t legal in 99% of places and doesn’t satisfy tax authorities in Canada.
There are pros/cons because life is always full of trade offs, but was the right decision for me and my family.
Before COVID I used to commute 30 min each way morning/afternoon. I was close to a city 30 min. The airport was like 1 hr. Living in small apartment no to much space for living just sleeping.
I recommend to evaluate your current situation and chose what is best for you and family. Also make a list of pros/cons of possible places to relocate/move if you thing is moving out is a good option.
I made the jump to remote work nearly 20 years ago, specifically so that I could have the freedom to live anywhere. First stop was the beach, in places like Thailand and central America where the climbing and surfing is good and living is cheap. Eventually to Fontainebleau, where they keep all the best bouldering.
That's the biggest perk of this gig: that you can do it remotely. Find the place you'd most like to live on the world, then find a bed and internet there. Sorted.
It's baffling, watching the entire world get handed this dream that took so much time and effort to arrange back then, and seeing people complain that they miss their commute.
Longer term, I'm planning on moving to another country (from Eastern Europe to most likely one of: Scotland, Netherlands or Finland) and, from what I gather, my company will allow me to work from abroad. Even longer term, I'm planning on simply starting my own company, so place is not going to be a constraint.
Given the housing crisis in Canada it was not possible for me to buy in Toronto. Seems I was ahead of the curve because the insane housing prices seem to have expanded out from the city to pretty much everywhere but I was lucky enough to manage to get something for a reasonable price.
PROS:
- Can rent a house > renting a studio - More time outside - More outdoor activities like biking, hiking, etc - Get to have a car
CONS: - Limited food options (esp for vegans) - Less city walking (which was hardly ever less than 10k steps) leading to being very sedentary some days - Have to maintain a car and have no access to public transportation - Less diverse friend groups
OVERALL - Worth it for now
Being far from family hurts a bit; covid didn't help either.
I've been here for about 3 years now and can't imagine ever moving back. The snow / crappy weather, the slow progress on building up downtown / the waterfront, the super high taxes, no beaches, no sun, etc...
(edit - lived in Buffalo since I was born + 38 years)
It's December 29th. I'm in a t-shirt, shorts, and flip flops. Saturday we'll be going to Clearwater Beach and setting off fireworks for NYE.
Completely different way / quality of living. Show birds don't know how to drive and beaches this time of year are packed with tourists but I'll take that any day over the dark and gloomy almost year round weather. We're right in the middle; 1.5 hours to Orlando, 3 hours to FT Lauderdale, 4 hours to Miami, 7 hours to Key West. Still have yet to explore 1/4 of this state.
I love it here.
I didn’t like WFH at first to be honest. But I’ve grown used to it and appreciate the flexibility especially with kids.
Once the kids are off to college, I can imagine we might move around some or split our time, but for now remote allowed us to be consciously happy about our choice of residence.
high tax, dry/cold, unsafe, expensive, crowded
to a location that is:
low tax, wet/mild, safe, normal price, not crowded
Still contemplating a mobile office/camper van though.
Another interesting development along with the rise of remote work is the rollout of starlink and the plummetting cost of solar.
I think in a few years you'll be able to work from just about anywhere on planet earth.
But we’re established here. Family and friends are close. Jobs we like. Own our home.
We might buy a second home in the mountains and split time. But we were considering that before Covid and holding off now because inventory is low and prices went insane.
If you live in a city and all you do there is go to work, you’re kinda missing the point imho because you could do that much cheaper elsewhere.
I was able to keep my existing job and continue remotely, while my wife was able to take a relocation opportunity in another city.
I'm now considering all the possibilities.
It also makes working while traveling a much more open thing to do. I'm considering getting an RV for extended traveling.
Basically remote work opens up massive lifestyle changes for me.