I'd love to travel and work but I work for a U.S. employer and need to keep a U.S. address, which is an expensive requirement if one doesn't already own property!
No.
> I'd love to travel and work but I work for a U.S. employer and need to keep a U.S. address, which is an expensive requirement if one doesn't already own property!
How much of a resident do you have to be in the U.S.? Just an address you can receive mail at: https://www.postscanmail.com/. They have a ton of locations, if you want no state income tax + high CoL (for employers doing adjustments): Seattle. Note there's some issues with using these types of addresses (specifically those designated as Commercial Mail Receiving Agencies by the USPS) with some banks and credit card issuers. Probably your employer would be fine with this.
Bona fide South Dakota state residency if you spend a night there: https://www.dakotapost.net/south-dakota-residency-services. Probably not necessary.
Mail receiving services scan your postal mail and you can see it online. You can decide to download it, trash it, or forward it to another address. They also receive packages and will forward them. Some will even deposit paper checks for you, though I found I could download check images, add my signature with a photo editing program, then deposit with my bank’s mobile app by photographing the check on my laptop screen (I had clients who paid with paper checks when I was traveling).
Regarding taxes, you will likely need to a hire a tax professional in the area that you are working from. If you are a US or Eritrean citizen / permanent resident you should also hire a tax professional from the US / Eritrea in order to handle their citizenship based taxation.
I went to Asia to visit a friend from university. The weather and living conditions were excellent, so I decided to stay 6 months. I was already working remotely before.
> what do you do if you work for a U.S. employer?
I say up a small company that I use for billing my employer so that they don't have to care about my current/changing address.
In general you won’t qualify for a work permit/permanent residency in most countries. And in general nomads travel on tourist visas (or visa waiver/visa on arrival), and those visas almost never allow you to do any kind of work, even online for a foreign employer. It varies by country. Some countries (and more ever year) offer so-called digital nomad visas, which are actually aimed at entrepreneurs, remote workers, and people who earn passive income in some other country. Those may or may not have local tax obligations, you have to look at every case.
Unless you go around telling everyone you are working remotely there’s little enforcement or attempt to round up nomads pounding on laptops in coffee shops, so digital nomads just fly under the radar working remotely and breaking the local immigration and labor laws. You can’t pay local taxes if you aren’t allowed to work and earn an income in the country in the first place.
https://typicalprogrammer.com/how-i-work-as-a-digital-nomad
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Keeping an apartment while traveling seems like an expensive idea.
Even if you have to give a street address that checks out as a real residential address (services/databases exist to check that) you don’t actually have to live there. I doubt your employer sends someone to that address to check on you.
There's some rumblings about hotel chains or housing networks that will let you stay among their various properties, but I haven't checked into it.
That said, hotel wifi is routinely terrible (often a total of 5mbit for all rooms or highly latent), particularly in hours when lots of people are in the hotel (Thursday and Friday, all day, and other days of the work week before check-out and after check-in).
When I'm working remote from a hotel, I often find myself on my hotspot and would suggest you have backup solutions for connectivity if you plan to do this on the regular.
To avoid state income taxes establish residency in a state that doesn’t have an income tax — Texas, Florida, Nevada, Washington, etc. That can be as easy as getting a new driver’s license. I stayed at a small bed & breakfast in Washington for two weeks (key thing: residential address, not a hotel or mailbox) while I got a WA license, then changed the address online to my mailbox. If you’re unlucky enough to live in California or Virginia now be aware that those states particularly try to hang on and tax you as a resident even after you move out.
Unless you’re breaking the law or otherwise attracting attention no one checks if you actually reside at the address on your license. Presumably you aren’t living in the US anyway so you’re not going to get tickets where your address might matter.