Bashing new myths about digital nomads
computerworld.com
computerworld.com
That said, he is wrong about Myth 3. Digital nomads are more remote than most remote workers. Most remote workers are just working from home, still likely within commute range from their jobs. But digital nomads are often much farther away (sometimes literally on the other side of the world).
If you have to mention distance from work is it still remote work?
(jurisdiction: because of handling of personal data)
We are staying exclusively in hotels (Homewood Suites, Home2Suites and Hyatt Places) when I’m working and slightly more expensive places when we are vacationing and paying with points.
As far as cost of living being lower. I made it a point for our hotel lodging on average to be the same as our housing costs before we started.
I started my DN life 14 years ago while living in the US. In my company we had a number of remote workers around the country, and servicing clients around the world. Working from home, I realized I didn't have to stay in one place with bad air pollution. So I moved to a ski resort area in Colorado. Initially it was just for a month, but then it became 3 months, and then it became 3 years.
You don't have to go to Bali to be a DN.
And using "resources and connections to wangle living someplace" is not necessary. You are free to go as long as your current boss doesn't object. Do you think this is some kind of special treatment only afforded to a certain group of people?
Even if your boss or company does not explicitly allow you to work from abroad, you can often do it without even being noticed (or as they say, ask for forgiveness instead of permission). If you do your job well, who cares where you are at the moment...
Regarding cost of living, hell yes. In the spirit of capitalism, it would be irresponsible to not live where your money serves you best. If you lived in SF, earning 250k, and paying 3k/mo for an apartment, you could instead live well on the beach in Thailand for 3k in total (less actually). Think of how much you could save if you still earned that 250. And imagine the great food, every day massages, friendly happy people! who don't shoot you, and fantastic weather!
I don't know why I'm telling you all this. It's better for us DNs if the rest of you stay locked in your US lives.
And for those who want to talk about taxes, I have to file in two countries, and I pay 45% total tax rate. Even so, when I work remotely in SEA, I get a lot of quality of life for my work (and I work only a few months at a time, then take a few months off).
And the reason companies will start to take notice (I agree they often didn't back in "the day" especially if you still returned "home") is that governments will start to take notice; if you're in Colorado then Colorado wants your company to establish a nexus and correctly withhold Colorado taxes.
And that begins to apply to other countries as well. We're still ahead of the curve and many countries can't really determine tourists vs digital nomads, but they'll start getting better at it. And hopefully that'll make it easier for people to take advantage of it.
Later when I moved to Amsterdam, I started paying Netherlands taxes.
There's no dodging, at least if you are able to setup residence somewhere. If you are unable to setup residence somewhere, then you are not really dodging as you are not able to pay if you wanted to. (But you are also not officially allowed to be working). In my view, however, if you are not taking local jobs, but you are adding consumer spending to a region, then you are not taking something away from the locals.
Hopefully it'll be more hammered out as time progresses so there's more options available.
I want to visit a number of countries and literally just wander each country over the course of 6 months to a year but I can't legally work there for my employer while doing so. I'd easily have the money to support myself and pay taxes but I can't keep my job and do this legally in almost any country.
Usually having a work visa implies that you are working for a local company.
I lived 3 years in Eastern Europe, technically working for a foreign company, which invoiced local companies (so I made pretty low pay). Every 30 days I had to go to the border and exit/re-enter the country for a new tourist visa stamp (eventually they made it max 30 days in a window of 90 days).
It also works for the US, but the border control can get suspicious if we cross the border too often.
Of course, if employers accept to have employees in a given country is another story (liability/jurisdiction).
Simple, force all landlords that have short term rentals to pass along tourist taxes like hotels already do.
The issue is with all of the illegal AirBnbs.
Of course the vast majority don't bother with the legality, knowing that they're just dicking around on a laptop and unlikely to be noticed or fined.
anecdotal as an English teacher turned programmer who lived in CDMX 2014-2017 (before large influx of digital nomads and then waves of COVID tourists)
Just totally cringing watching my mexican dj friends in CDMX complain about all the gringo tourists ruining everything in cuauhtemoc/roma norte but then posting instagram stories " hey looking for booking in USA/Germany/etc for November or December, also subletting my apartment" (also posting it in English).. It's like living in a Beverly Hills mansion and getting angry at the rich Chinese tourists spending money on Rodeo drive for two weeks.
One could argue 6 tourists each staying 2 weeks concecutively will spend more than a nomad, since they dont spend time working. So in this case the nomad would be worse, since he still takes similar real estate to host, but provides less to the economy.
Either way I think it's more useful to consider them together with tourists. Many backpackers are probably indistinguishable from nomads.
The differences between a DN and a tourist are:
1) The DN spends many months or years on the road, such that the nexus of their personal affairs stops being their home country, residency becomes an issue they have to think about, etc. - this doesn't happen with a tourist
2) The DN's primary income generating activities continue during this period, such that the labor laws of the countries they visit become an issue they have to think about -- again doesn't happen with a tourist
I agree that if someone takes a 3 month holiday and works on their laptop during it, they're a tourist. We don't need to use DN to describe those people, they are not really practicing long term travel as Potts described it. The term more accurately describes the growing number of people who are going to another level and really disconnecting from their home country.
DNs in this sense spend a lot of money in the countries they visit - it varies widely based on their income and how much of the year they spend traveling, but most of them spend somewhere between $20K-$200K/yr. Even on the low end this is way more money than most tourists spend.
They unfortunately jack up the prices way beyond the financial power of the locals, cause gentrification and push the locals out.
That's what nomadism does - bring in to neighborhoods people who are relatively far richer than the locals.
> digital nomads, and even expats are barely a drop in the bucket
Sorry, but nomads and expats are a major source of complaint in the locales they flood, and many of them are also aware of it and they complain about it.
It's not much different than histories about "influencers" who apparently get rich doing very little (regularly not showing the backstage) just accepting being tied to a platform.
That's the real "myth" IMVHO.
If we can work remotely we can WFH, perhaps a comfortable home, perhaps with savings and investments to being able to be job-less for a long period of time, to being able to choose jobs instead of living day-to-day just to eat and sleep. So such kind of workers are not that interested for modern capitalism, they are too choosy since they can, they can't be pulled much throw an economical leash and they also have a network of friends and acquaintances in the physical world so they are far less vulnerable. Good to have some "stable" high-quality professionals but not good for the lowest end of the pyramid.
I'm curious if someone is able to dismantle such "myth"... Oh, please no, do not tell about the casual billionaire who live traveling the world with a big yacht. Yes, they exists and they are nomad, but they are VEEEERY few respect of all other "digital nomads", use them as a model is like using a lottery winner as a model to justify spending on lotteries.
> What we need are real studies measuring the total economic, employment, housing and well-being effect of actual digital nomads on local communities. Such studies would show that digital nomads are very, very good for the communities where they live.
Nomads, by definition, don’t meaningfully contribute to a community. They don’t create deep relationships, families, or traditions. Instead, they bring outside perceptions and traditions that may either invigorate or destroy the community they are visiting.
Is it good for the community’s economy, probably. Is it good for anything else? Probably not unless the culture is at least adjacent to one you’ve lived in before. (IOW, if you come from one strong religious community to another one, or an artistic community to another one, you would be able to recognize what you’re experiencing and fit into your worldview; thus being able to more easily meaningfully contribute to the community)
Any community or ecosystem can withstand some external forces and pressure, but they can still get overwhelmed.
There’s also the difference between a digital immigrant and a digital nomad - the first intends to stay and begins to care about where they are; the second may care but will be gone at a whim.
You are paying taxes to your home country if you're American. If you're from another country and living abroad for enough days per year (depends on the home country), then you won't be paying taxes to your home country.
The place you're working remotely from still gets the benefit of you injecting revenue into their area, and you're not taking local jobs away.
In places which thrive or depend on tourism, working DNs are a blessing. The broke backpackers are less so, as they live on the cheap (which is totally fine for them but offers less to the local community).
Also, DNs are a tiny, tiny percentage of public transport riders in places that have public transportation. Likewise, I don't imagine DNs are using vast amounts of water... especially since we tend to buy bottled water for drinking, and we often don't cook at home (so whoever we are paying for food is getting water however they get it).
As for roads and road maintenance costs, those should be covered in part by vehicle registrations. If we rent a car or a scooter, or we take a taxi, the costs are part of the fare.
Aside from building a local dependency on foreign visitors who splash money around, I don't see much downsides to DNs existing in remote places (assuming of course that they behave like decent humans).
A country typically has a framework that determines whether you are a tax resident based on how long you spend there within some period of time. If you stay long enough to qualify and do not pay the tax the next year, you are in violation. If you work around it by moving between countries to stay just below this limit good for you, but you should be aware you are working around the law and are not a bona fide tourist no matter what you say about benefitting local economy and society and splashing money around.
And no, earning and spending more doesn't absolve you--in fact you are obligated to pay more tax in countries with progressive taxes.
The countries you seem to be talking about are likely having tough times overcoming their preexisting problems with law compliance. Try being a positive change rather than import even more of that "law doesn't apply to me" attitude, especially since it seems like it'd not cause a splash for you.
This is indeed my understanding, and I imagine that most digital nomads are abusing tourism visas.
I'm curious how many digital nomads declare their true intent at immigration. I'd guess it's close to zero.
Guess how many of those things my wife and I were doing in the suburban neighborhood where we were living before we started our (domestic) digital nomad journey?
My take is that most communities are small and have never had to deal with much growth. It would not surprise me if their little boats are getting swamped.
If you make enough money to be subjected to any sort of complex tax law (the easiest example is some form of quarterly estimated payments for high-income earners) then you either:
- have a designated home for tax purposes, regardless of questionable haven-status
- are moving around frequently enough to avoid being encumbered by taxes
In either case... a tourist? Leaving aside the nomads who do have some permanent tax residency, regardless of whether or not it is questionable, do most of any nomads actually pay the same taxes that a local would in the places they visit?
I am aware of incentivized visas that waive taxes to attract workers, but they do not seem prevalent enough to correlate with the digital nomadic movement on the whole. Outside of one person I know who ended up staying in their destination for a very long time and effectively de-nomading, all the nomads I've met use literal tourist visas that prevent work, and about half of them are dodging taxes.
No, of course not. The rub is that 0 nomads are employed by companies in the places they visit. If they’re American, they’re still paying US tax (although there is a set aside for your first 100k if you spend 330/365 days outside of the us).
Incentivized visas are becoming more widespread, but you haven’t really presented a clear case that nomads _should_ be paying tax. It’s by-and-large legal to not pay tax on the income you earn while on vacation in a foreign country and there are clear prohibitions against working for local companies.
If the country your passport is from doesn’t require you to pay income tax when you aren’t residing there, then you haven’t met the requirements for tax in any country that you visited this year.
Now you could argue that it makes sense for a baseball player to be income taxed in Canada when playing there (as his job is to play the game that is being played in Canada) but it wouldn't make sense for the laptop jockey who could work from anywhere.
As an employer, I am legally in hot water if my employee works for a majority of their employment outside of the legal jurisdiction in which I'm employing them. I'm not an expert on US tax law (nor am I American) but I would imagine that I'm remitting employment income tax on behalf of an employee in a given state and they are claiming spending 330/365 days out of the country that an auditor would be very interested in speaking with both of us.
I'm not aware of any scenario where you can simultaneously be employed in a given county and also never present in it. Maybe this is an American thing?
Incidentally, setting up in-person business meetings with the locals is more likely to make your income not taxable in a random country you are visiting. It looks like a business visit, which are often treated in the same way as tourism. If you are simply staying in the country and earning money, immigration and tax authorities are more likely to assume that you are living and working there, unless you can prove otherwise.
Note the purpose of the trip is exactly the same as a tourist: they want to explore a foreign country, take in the sights, meet people, etc. There is literally 0 difference from this, and the one time I had an ill-timed week long trip to Cancun right before a big deadline so I ended up working most of the trip, than the length of stay.
The only lever that governments can really use to differentiate between this and most tourism is different visas based on the length of stay, unless they want to decimate their tourism industries.
Also, it's not up to you to determine the purpose of your visit. Immigration and tax authorities determine it by any means they want. If you disagree with them, you are wrong unless you can prove otherwise according to the criteria they use.
As a non-citizen in a foreign country, immigration and tax law are often areas where you are guilty until proven innocent. You don't have the same rights you are used to in your home country. It's up to you to prove that you are following the law, rather than for the authorities to prove that you are breaking it.
Some countries encourage tourism by not enforcing their laws. As long as you are a nice harmless tourist doing nice harmless touristy things, the authorities ignore you. But if they have a reason to dislike you, it turns out you are illegally in the country, because you didn't follow some overcomplicated process to the letter.
I have a designated tax home in Florida where I do have a vacation home/investment property where we stay around 3-4 months per year.
> In either case... a tourist? Leaving aside the nomads who do have some permanent tax residency, regardless of whether or not it is questionable, do most of any nomads actually pay the same taxes that a local would in the places they visit?
Every hotel I stay at adds on legally mandated government fees for tourists. Blame the government if they aren’t passing laws that require AirBnbs to pay those same fees and/or Airbnb that goes out of their way to support illegal short term rentals.
I’m mostly staying in the US. But we stay exclusively at hotels and pay we pay whatever government mandated tourist fees when we stay internationally
Working on a tourist visa is typically not allowed. At least in my experience it has always been strictly forbidden. So, I agree there are not proper visas for this, because it's not generally permissable.
This "tax dodging" thing you talk about is either misinformed or just not applicable. The US is one of two countries in the world which tax its citizens on income earned while living abroad. For citizens of other countries, such as the Netherlands (where I live now), they can live abroad and pay no taxes to the Netherlands... legally.
The catch is that a lot of countries do not allow you to work while visiting them, or if you do they require you to pay taxes as a resident. If you work "illegally" while staying in their countries, then yes you are dodging taxes.
That's the letter of the law. But in the spirit of the law, if you are working for a foreign company and spending some of your income in a remote place, you are not cheating the local country out of tax revenue, but you are providing additional economic input.