The digital nomad dream has a dark side
Sophie Rucker had been living and working in London for five years when a trip to a yoga training school in Bali presented her with an alternative to the rat race. Despite enjoying life in London, witnessing digital nomads balance work with sun, sea, and relaxed vibes in the Indonesian island province prompted her to pursue more freelance work.
At the start of 2020, having set herself up as a communications strategist for NGOs and social impact organisations, Sophie quit her permanent role and moved to Bali. Despite the uncertainty of the progressing pandemic, she found the space she needed to grieve her mother, whom she had lost not long before. And to Sophie’s delight, the digital nomad lifestyle has fulfilled many of her expectations.
She soon noticed, however, a distinct bias against her choice of location. Some potential clients wouldn’t even entertain a conversation, because she was based in Bali. “I couldn’t make sense of it — it felt so stupid,” she explains. “I’m working with organisations like Greenpeace and the UNDP to instigate positive global change, as well as being a somatic trauma counsellor, so when people assume I’m not doing ‘serious work’ out here, it grinds my gears.”
Now she has greater control over the projects she pursues, Sophie tells employers she lives in Indonesia, and is transparent about exactly where once she’s secured a contract. It’s the same for many of her remote working friends in Bali, who don’t disclose their location to remote employers for fear of losing work.
Getting snubbed from projects, haemorrhaging your savings on basic living costs and constantly edging on burnout are usually the hardships associated with full-time home-based working in a metropolitan centre like London, New York, or Amsterdam.
Despite the dominant utopian narrative presented in the media — think bossing it at the beach, bottomless cocktails, and a perennial tan — the reality of balancing global travel with remote work has always been hard. And it’s only getting harder: surging costs, political turbulence, and fickle visa rules are pushing digital nomads in new directions.
Forking out for freedom
New research from the Dutch neobank Bunq has revealed the hidden financial, emotional and mental toll, with its survey of 5,000 workers across Europe who identify as digital nomads and/or living internationally. Indeed, just one in five say that working internationally has positively impacted their career, with Britons in particularsaying their career has actually suffered as a result of being a digital nomad.
It’s certainly not the picture that wistful salaried employees conjure when daydreaming at their desks. For experts in the field, however, the tough reality is widely known. “Many of those experimenting with the lifestyle can’t sustain it,” says David Cook, an anthropologist and researcher at University College London who specialises in remote work. “Maintaining self-discipline, staying productive, and finding the space to focus gets worse over time, not better, alongside all the other external circumstances.”
Managing the finance side is an area of particular concern. Bunq found that 17% of study participants feel less financially secure, while 14% are spending more than expected. Although this cohort isn’t weighed down by a mortgage or a huge rental deposit, they do have to factor in local taxes, medical bills, nomad visa costs, insurance claims, legal assistance, and banking fees.
Sophie boarding a flight from Bali to visit family in Australia. Credit: Sophie Rucker
The top unforeseen expenses, according to Bunq, include medical expensesand local taxes. Less common, but equally unsettling, is that 5% of nomads across Europe have had to pay for emergency evacuation costs.
All that is before budgeting for the rise in everyday living costs, which have impacted home-based and remote workers alike. Everyone is feeling the pinch, with the majority of Europeansnoticing the rise in food and beverage prices in the past 12 months, as per data from the Dutch firm Innova Market Insights.
Day-to-day budgeting trumps a laundry list of other anxieties too. In the first quarter of 2025, McKinsey’s ConsumerWise research found that Europeans ranked rising prices and inflation as their number one concern over issues such as job security, international conflicts, climate change, and political tension, to name a few.
Geoarbitrage — decoupling life and work from a specific location to make your income go further — has long been a practice employed by digital nomads. Coined by Tim Ferriss in his 2009 book The 4-Hour Workweek, the tactic is now often being reconsidered due to increased outgoings.
“Accommodation has always been the biggest challenge, but in the last few years, after COVID-19 and the war in Ukraine, it’s significantly more expensive, sometimes €200 extra a month for the same place and conditions haven’t changed,” says Anna Maria Kochanska, a strategist who advises governments on digital nomad policy, and has been nomadic since 2017.
Anna Maria tends to avoid Airbnb, negotiating directly with apartment owners for midterm rentals, but even so, her rental outgoings are much higher in 2025. “I’m based in Barcelona at the moment, and of course, one solution is to go to new and emerging destinations, with fewer tourists and nomads, but my travel costs are going up too, so I’m moving around less frequently.”
Popular digital nomad hubs like Barcelona, Lisbon, and Mexico City are losing their affordable edge, as available housing dries up, prices rise, and neighbourhoods are transformed to meet the needs of itinerant knowledge workers. Local residents are tiring of the impact remote workers are having, and have been protesting against the influx.
The souring of once-beloved hubs is leading nomads to look elsewhere and decamp to more off-the-beaten-track destinations. According to 2025 data from Nomad List, which tracks cities, locations and remote workers through the trips booked on its platform, cities like Sarajevo, Portimao, and Varna are emerging as some of the most popular among nomad, with 46% of them staying in one city for less than seven days, and 33% staying between seven and 30 days.
Fatigued by visa strategising
While some digital nomads are travelling less and avoiding established hotspots to mitigate rising expenses, others are turning their backs on location independence entirely. Kach Umandap has been nomadic since 2014, originally starting as a virtual assistant, then moving into blogging and e-commerce.
“For a Filipino like me, there are a ton of limitations on the places I can visit visa-free, but I was determined to visit every single country in the world,” says Kach. “I had to be really strategic about planning and already figure out where I would go afterwards, which is perhaps not the carefree image you have of digital nomad life.”
During certain weeks, Kach would spend more time arranging visas and doing travel admin than her actual job. She often had to do expensive visa runs to neighbouring countries to reset the clock. For example, when based in Vietnam, she needed to travel to Laos every 30 days, pay for transport, a hotel, and a booking agent each time. Having achieved the goal of working from all 193 UN member states and spending thousands of dollars each year on visa applications, Kach has returned to the Philippines to slowly establish her base there.
Kach in Turkmenista, one of the 193 UN states she’s worked in. Credit: Kach Umandap
Although new digital nomad visas are being rolled out constantly — the latest include Taiwan and the Philippines — many are launched hurriedly, so governments can have a horse in the race in the global talent tussle. Each one has wildly different eligibility criteria and often high minimum income requirements. Iceland, for example, requires a monthly salary of. Few digital nomads actually even engage with these visa programs.
Grappling with a messy landscape and muddy definitions of “a digital nomad,” those eligible are being deterred. For nomads who do try, an application can take months to process, and putting one in only to find out you aren’t eligible due to poor signposting is hugely stressful.
“We have the best lifestyle in the world, yet the worst ecosystem,” says Gonçalo Hall, CEO of NomadX, a global platform for digital nomads and president of the Digital Nomad Association Portugal. “Nomads have the numbers, energy, and economic force, but the cohesion is missing.”
What’s more, nomads with ”weaker” passports, such as those from Syria, Pakistan, and Nigeria, have a hard time travelling compared to those from the EU and North America. With ongoing conflicts, political instability, and changing immigration laws, crossing the next border for a period of remote work is getting more intimidating by the day.
People drop off from full-time digital nomad lifestyles for many reasons though, from loneliness and moving too often to dealing with bureaucracy and the precarity of their careers. “It’s not for everyone, and although many people experiment with the lifestyle, they discover the real struggle a few months to a year in,” says Cook, of UCL. “It gets harder over time, so successful, long-term nomads need to be disciplined, resilient and self-motivated — in many ways, the perfect neoliberal person.”
Cook is in his eighth year of collecting data in Chiang Mai, Thailand with the same group of people and estimates that 90% of the nomads in his research give up the lifestyle in the first year or two. “They tend to start hyper mobile, but end up craving place and being embedded in communities, which is not easy to sustain while living on the move,” explains Cook. “This is compounded when their income situation is precarious.”
A strong pull, no matter the cost
With 60 million digital nomads predicted to have joined the ranks by 2030, the lifestyle — despite, or even because of its challenges — remains alluring. For the knowledge workers who are forcibly displaced due to war, climate disaster, or fears of persecution, digital nomadism offers the chance to earn, even when on the move.
For today’s remote workers, change is the only constant, and roaming patterns will continue to shift, as people adapt and find ways to thrive amid global change. They might choose to housesit through platforms like Nomador and Trusted Housesitters instead of renting, become an e-resident in a country like Estonia to maximise profit and minimise cost, or travel less and embed themselves deeper in a community. After all, the same autonomy and flexibility that draws people to this lifestyle also enables them to overcome the hurdles that come their way.
Back in Bali, the housing and rental market is booming — and the clamour about overtourism is getting louder. To slow its development and ease local worries, the Balinese officials have floated the idea of a tourist tax, set to cost aroundper day.
In the current climate, Sophie is paying £750a month for her cabin in Bali — just £70shy of the room she rented in London — so she cannot save and is feeling the pressure to maintain her earnings. “The only thing that means I can make it work is the culture and lifestyle — for example, I work when my clients are sleeping, because of the different time zones,” she explains. “It eases my anxiety and enables me to solve problems more creatively.”
As many of her friends return home due to rocketing costs, Sophie is committed to staying put. “I’m in a privileged position to be working on some big projects, and am paying taxes in the UK and contributing to the local economy here,” she says. “I have to keep checking in on myself, but I’ve come to a very conscious decision: loving Bali and this life as much as I do, why should it be any cheaper than where I started?”
Story by
Megan Carnegie
Megan Carnegie is a London-based independent journalist who specialises in writing features about the world of technology, work, and businesMegan Carnegie is a London-based independent journalist who specialises in writing features about the world of technology, work, and business for publications like WIRED, Business Insider, Digital Frontier and BBC. Her work is underpinned by a desire to investigate what's not working in the working world, and how more equitable conditions can be secured for workers — whatever their industry.
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#digital #nomad #dream #has #darkThe digital nomad dream has a dark side
Sophie Rucker had been living and working in London for five years when a trip to a yoga training school in Bali presented her with an alternative to the rat race. Despite enjoying life in London, witnessing digital nomads balance work with sun, sea, and relaxed vibes in the Indonesian island province prompted her to pursue more freelance work.
At the start of 2020, having set herself up as a communications strategist for NGOs and social impact organisations, Sophie quit her permanent role and moved to Bali. Despite the uncertainty of the progressing pandemic, she found the space she needed to grieve her mother, whom she had lost not long before. And to Sophie’s delight, the digital nomad lifestyle has fulfilled many of her expectations.
She soon noticed, however, a distinct bias against her choice of location. Some potential clients wouldn’t even entertain a conversation, because she was based in Bali. “I couldn’t make sense of it — it felt so stupid,” she explains. “I’m working with organisations like Greenpeace and the UNDP to instigate positive global change, as well as being a somatic trauma counsellor, so when people assume I’m not doing ‘serious work’ out here, it grinds my gears.”
Now she has greater control over the projects she pursues, Sophie tells employers she lives in Indonesia, and is transparent about exactly where once she’s secured a contract. It’s the same for many of her remote working friends in Bali, who don’t disclose their location to remote employers for fear of losing work.
Getting snubbed from projects, haemorrhaging your savings on basic living costs and constantly edging on burnout are usually the hardships associated with full-time home-based working in a metropolitan centre like London, New York, or Amsterdam.
Despite the dominant utopian narrative presented in the media — think bossing it at the beach, bottomless cocktails, and a perennial tan — the reality of balancing global travel with remote work has always been hard. And it’s only getting harder: surging costs, political turbulence, and fickle visa rules are pushing digital nomads in new directions.
Forking out for freedom
New research from the Dutch neobank Bunq has revealed the hidden financial, emotional and mental toll, with its survey of 5,000 workers across Europe who identify as digital nomads and/or living internationally. Indeed, just one in five say that working internationally has positively impacted their career, with Britons in particularsaying their career has actually suffered as a result of being a digital nomad.
It’s certainly not the picture that wistful salaried employees conjure when daydreaming at their desks. For experts in the field, however, the tough reality is widely known. “Many of those experimenting with the lifestyle can’t sustain it,” says David Cook, an anthropologist and researcher at University College London who specialises in remote work. “Maintaining self-discipline, staying productive, and finding the space to focus gets worse over time, not better, alongside all the other external circumstances.”
Managing the finance side is an area of particular concern. Bunq found that 17% of study participants feel less financially secure, while 14% are spending more than expected. Although this cohort isn’t weighed down by a mortgage or a huge rental deposit, they do have to factor in local taxes, medical bills, nomad visa costs, insurance claims, legal assistance, and banking fees.
Sophie boarding a flight from Bali to visit family in Australia. Credit: Sophie Rucker
The top unforeseen expenses, according to Bunq, include medical expensesand local taxes. Less common, but equally unsettling, is that 5% of nomads across Europe have had to pay for emergency evacuation costs.
All that is before budgeting for the rise in everyday living costs, which have impacted home-based and remote workers alike. Everyone is feeling the pinch, with the majority of Europeansnoticing the rise in food and beverage prices in the past 12 months, as per data from the Dutch firm Innova Market Insights.
Day-to-day budgeting trumps a laundry list of other anxieties too. In the first quarter of 2025, McKinsey’s ConsumerWise research found that Europeans ranked rising prices and inflation as their number one concern over issues such as job security, international conflicts, climate change, and political tension, to name a few.
Geoarbitrage — decoupling life and work from a specific location to make your income go further — has long been a practice employed by digital nomads. Coined by Tim Ferriss in his 2009 book The 4-Hour Workweek, the tactic is now often being reconsidered due to increased outgoings.
“Accommodation has always been the biggest challenge, but in the last few years, after COVID-19 and the war in Ukraine, it’s significantly more expensive, sometimes €200 extra a month for the same place and conditions haven’t changed,” says Anna Maria Kochanska, a strategist who advises governments on digital nomad policy, and has been nomadic since 2017.
Anna Maria tends to avoid Airbnb, negotiating directly with apartment owners for midterm rentals, but even so, her rental outgoings are much higher in 2025. “I’m based in Barcelona at the moment, and of course, one solution is to go to new and emerging destinations, with fewer tourists and nomads, but my travel costs are going up too, so I’m moving around less frequently.”
Popular digital nomad hubs like Barcelona, Lisbon, and Mexico City are losing their affordable edge, as available housing dries up, prices rise, and neighbourhoods are transformed to meet the needs of itinerant knowledge workers. Local residents are tiring of the impact remote workers are having, and have been protesting against the influx.
The souring of once-beloved hubs is leading nomads to look elsewhere and decamp to more off-the-beaten-track destinations. According to 2025 data from Nomad List, which tracks cities, locations and remote workers through the trips booked on its platform, cities like Sarajevo, Portimao, and Varna are emerging as some of the most popular among nomad, with 46% of them staying in one city for less than seven days, and 33% staying between seven and 30 days.
Fatigued by visa strategising
While some digital nomads are travelling less and avoiding established hotspots to mitigate rising expenses, others are turning their backs on location independence entirely. Kach Umandap has been nomadic since 2014, originally starting as a virtual assistant, then moving into blogging and e-commerce.
“For a Filipino like me, there are a ton of limitations on the places I can visit visa-free, but I was determined to visit every single country in the world,” says Kach. “I had to be really strategic about planning and already figure out where I would go afterwards, which is perhaps not the carefree image you have of digital nomad life.”
During certain weeks, Kach would spend more time arranging visas and doing travel admin than her actual job. She often had to do expensive visa runs to neighbouring countries to reset the clock. For example, when based in Vietnam, she needed to travel to Laos every 30 days, pay for transport, a hotel, and a booking agent each time. Having achieved the goal of working from all 193 UN member states and spending thousands of dollars each year on visa applications, Kach has returned to the Philippines to slowly establish her base there.
Kach in Turkmenista, one of the 193 UN states she’s worked in. Credit: Kach Umandap
Although new digital nomad visas are being rolled out constantly — the latest include Taiwan and the Philippines — many are launched hurriedly, so governments can have a horse in the race in the global talent tussle. Each one has wildly different eligibility criteria and often high minimum income requirements. Iceland, for example, requires a monthly salary of. Few digital nomads actually even engage with these visa programs.
Grappling with a messy landscape and muddy definitions of “a digital nomad,” those eligible are being deterred. For nomads who do try, an application can take months to process, and putting one in only to find out you aren’t eligible due to poor signposting is hugely stressful.
“We have the best lifestyle in the world, yet the worst ecosystem,” says Gonçalo Hall, CEO of NomadX, a global platform for digital nomads and president of the Digital Nomad Association Portugal. “Nomads have the numbers, energy, and economic force, but the cohesion is missing.”
What’s more, nomads with ”weaker” passports, such as those from Syria, Pakistan, and Nigeria, have a hard time travelling compared to those from the EU and North America. With ongoing conflicts, political instability, and changing immigration laws, crossing the next border for a period of remote work is getting more intimidating by the day.
People drop off from full-time digital nomad lifestyles for many reasons though, from loneliness and moving too often to dealing with bureaucracy and the precarity of their careers. “It’s not for everyone, and although many people experiment with the lifestyle, they discover the real struggle a few months to a year in,” says Cook, of UCL. “It gets harder over time, so successful, long-term nomads need to be disciplined, resilient and self-motivated — in many ways, the perfect neoliberal person.”
Cook is in his eighth year of collecting data in Chiang Mai, Thailand with the same group of people and estimates that 90% of the nomads in his research give up the lifestyle in the first year or two. “They tend to start hyper mobile, but end up craving place and being embedded in communities, which is not easy to sustain while living on the move,” explains Cook. “This is compounded when their income situation is precarious.”
A strong pull, no matter the cost
With 60 million digital nomads predicted to have joined the ranks by 2030, the lifestyle — despite, or even because of its challenges — remains alluring. For the knowledge workers who are forcibly displaced due to war, climate disaster, or fears of persecution, digital nomadism offers the chance to earn, even when on the move.
For today’s remote workers, change is the only constant, and roaming patterns will continue to shift, as people adapt and find ways to thrive amid global change. They might choose to housesit through platforms like Nomador and Trusted Housesitters instead of renting, become an e-resident in a country like Estonia to maximise profit and minimise cost, or travel less and embed themselves deeper in a community. After all, the same autonomy and flexibility that draws people to this lifestyle also enables them to overcome the hurdles that come their way.
Back in Bali, the housing and rental market is booming — and the clamour about overtourism is getting louder. To slow its development and ease local worries, the Balinese officials have floated the idea of a tourist tax, set to cost aroundper day.
In the current climate, Sophie is paying £750a month for her cabin in Bali — just £70shy of the room she rented in London — so she cannot save and is feeling the pressure to maintain her earnings. “The only thing that means I can make it work is the culture and lifestyle — for example, I work when my clients are sleeping, because of the different time zones,” she explains. “It eases my anxiety and enables me to solve problems more creatively.”
As many of her friends return home due to rocketing costs, Sophie is committed to staying put. “I’m in a privileged position to be working on some big projects, and am paying taxes in the UK and contributing to the local economy here,” she says. “I have to keep checking in on myself, but I’ve come to a very conscious decision: loving Bali and this life as much as I do, why should it be any cheaper than where I started?”
Story by
Megan Carnegie
Megan Carnegie is a London-based independent journalist who specialises in writing features about the world of technology, work, and businesMegan Carnegie is a London-based independent journalist who specialises in writing features about the world of technology, work, and business for publications like WIRED, Business Insider, Digital Frontier and BBC. Her work is underpinned by a desire to investigate what's not working in the working world, and how more equitable conditions can be secured for workers — whatever their industry.
Get the TNW newsletter
Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.
Also tagged with
#digital #nomad #dream #has #dark
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