I’ve had a pretty unconventional past 5 years. I resigned from my big shiny corporate job after a month long expedition in Alaska changed my perspective on life. I then left the UK to travel as a digital nomad for 6 months and then ended up settling in Singapore.

At the time I boarded my plane at Gatwick airport in July 2018 I had built a small legal consulting business and had a number of clients across Europe. I was earning enough money to get by and save a little each month. I was working from my study in a cute village in London’s Zone 4. All I really needed was my trusty MacBook Pro and a good internet connection. It slowly dawned on me, once I was single again, that I could choose a different path. I no longer needed to be in London for my job or for that of my partner. I did some googling and came across the digital nomad lifestyle and something immediately clicked.

What is clear to me now that I’ve discovered the FIRE movement, is that the digital nomad lifestyle could be a useful tool or choice for people on the road to FIRE. This is particularly true for those pursuing CoastFIRE or are almost at traditional FIRE.

Table of Contents

As with my other longer posts, I’ve included some quick links to jump to the areas you are most interested in:

1. What is a Digital Nomad?
2. Who are Hacker Paradise?
3. Where Did I go?
4. What are the Pros and Cons of a Digital Nomad Lifestyle?
5. Can being a Digital Nomad help you reach FIRE?
6. An Ethical Word of Warning
7. What I do it all again?

What is a Digital Nomad?

A digital nomad is someone who works online whilst travelling. Usually on a freelance basis or (increasingly) as a remote, salaried employee of a multinational.

In the early years, most digital nomads were coders or other people in tech who worked for companies with a more progressive approach to the 9-5 grind. This is not now the case. Digital nomads work in many, many fields. The ability to work remotely has now exploded due to the COVID-19 pandemic. What was once fringe, will become mainstream in a post -COVID-19 world.

Who are Hacker Paradise?

Hacker Paradise is a company which facilitates the digital nomad lifestyle. In their own words:

Combining work and travel creates a unique opportunity. It opens up your mind and connects you to a brand spanking new network of global citizens.

It’s why we design our community around trips the way we do, with an ambitious program of location-based events, professional learning, and personal development, combined with amazing work, travel, and living experiences.

Sharing big ideas with people from across the globe matters to us. We want to live more, do more, be more. 

https://www.hackerparadise.org/why-hp/

Hacker Paradise deal with all of the infrastructure of a remote work / travel experience and run a number of long term trips each year to various awesome places (see here for their coming adventures). They arrange for your accommodation, your co-working space, SIM card and most importantly, a group of awesome, likeminded people who will become your besties. Each trip is for 4-8 weeks and you can go for the whole time or for as short as a couple of weeks. The prerequisite for joining is that you are working in one way or another as this isn’t a holiday. You’ll need your own projects too as Hacker Paradise don’t provide you with work.

Each trip has between 20-30 people who join. The really unique part is that, although there is a slight USA skew, people are from all over the world. There were authors, coders, content writers, lawyers, accountants, graphic designers, creators and everything in between. It was truly awesome to get to know such a diverse set of people on each of my trips – I’ve found that this is quite a rare thing as an adult. Hacker Paradise connect everyone via a slack group for each trip; this is ridiculously helpful and fun. Its cool to see all the crowdsourced local knowledge that’s assimilated through slack throughout a trip!

Hacker Paradise trips include all of the following elements:

• Themed programmes (sustainability etc.);
• Professional and personal development activities;
• Cultural and travel adventures; and
• A group facilitator who acts as ‘mom’ or ‘dad’ for the group.

I was really attracted to the development opportunities. This was a key difference with some of the other remote work companies which offered a similar programme. I even gave a talk in Bali about HIV prevention and safe sex!

Just as an aside note, I genuinely love Hacker Paradise and I am not being sponsored in any way to write this post.

Where did I go?

I travelled with Hacker Paradise over 6 wonderful months in some of the most amazing places around the world. My only real regret is that I didn’t continue for longer. My first trip was to Mexico, then to Argentina and finally to Indonesia. If you are interested in these destinations for a possible stint as a digital nomad, read on. If not, click here to skip to the pros and cons of the lifestyle.

My first stop was Playa del Carmen in Mexico. I remember when I packed up my things in the UK and got on the plane I was ridiculously nervous and excited. I’d travelled alone before, but not having packed up my entire life back home and with no definitive ‘return date’. I bought a cool sarong from Gatwick airport as I left – there was no going back now!

Before I went to Mexico I did an 8 week crash course in basic Spanish. This was a BIG help so I could order basic meals and drinks and interact with the locals without coming across as totally ignorant! It’s always good manners to learn some basic phrases in a foreign language before you go on a trip. When it’s a longer trip the benefits of doing this compound massively.

Playa del Carmen was a great place for digital nomads, though it was a little bit on the touristy side. Sometimes I found myself having one too many cervezas rather than working. There is also a bad seaweed problem at the moment which make the beaches unusable at times (which actually really diminished our experience here). Play del Carmen is a big destination for American nomads who like the laid back lifestyle, inexpensive living and good amenities. I joined Evolve gym which was both cheap and very good.

As a digital nomad destination I would rate Playa del Carmen as:

Top Tips

• Best Coworking: Nest
• Top Restaurants: La Cueva del Chango, Alux (cool restaurant in a cave!), ChouxChoux Cafe (awesome breakfasts) and Trujillos (a treehouse style restaurant with great cocktails)
• What not to miss: do a weekend trip to Holbox, Tulum, Isla Mujeres and be sure to visit a cenote. We coupled that with a trip to a temazcal for an ancient Mexican healing treatment. There is a turtle sanctuary about 40 mins away from Playa del Carmen at which we volunteered (Xcacel Turtle Sanctuary)

Ever since I saw Evita in the London West End in 2007 I wanted to visit Buenos Aires (BA). This huge mega city in Argentina really lived up to the hype. I was very busy with work for this leg of my trip so I didn’t see nearly as much as I wanted too. It was also a bit of a troubling time for the country where cash machines would regularly run out of money. When credit cards are generally not accepted, this can be a huge problem!

I stayed in an area called Palermo Hollywood which was teeming full of hipster cafes, restaurants and bars. Everything was just a walk away from our apartment and the co-working space (Maquinita Co.). Life in BA was relaxed and living costs were cheap. I felt very safe in our neighbourhood but I had read stories about foreigners being targeted in other areas. however, no one in our group ever had a safety issue.

One weekend a group of us from Hacker Paradise went to Iguazu Falls which was about a 90 min flight away. This is an absolute must if you are in this area of the world. I’ve seen Niagara Falls a couple of times before, but this just blew me away. Its huge! The falls as a whole are made up of a whopping 275 individual waterfalls.

I also had a weekend trip to Santiago, Chile where my brother was (he was doing a much more adventurous 6 month’s of travel through latin America). This was a great weekend away and it was interesting to see the difference between two major capitals in Latin America. Santiago was certainly more developed and felt generally a lot safer.

As a digital nomad destination I would rate Buenos Aires as:

Top Tips

• Best Coworking: Maquinita Co.
• Top Restaurants: La Cabrera (Palermo)
• What not to miss: Iguazu Falls, Giant Steaks, the Museo Evita (Evita Museum)

Canggu in Bali is my ultimate happy place. It has a hippie, surfy, hipster vibe and is super relaxing. The facilities for the nomad lifestyle are second to none. When I first heard about remote work / nomad lifestyle in a wet, rainy and cold London, Bali was the one that jumped out at me. Exotic and super far away from the UK, it called to me instinctively.

Bali was on the of the first locations which embraced digital nomads. The co-working spaces are excellent, with super fast wifi, air-conditioning, pools and great coffee. A lot of people who were working in Bali seemed to be of the ‘influencer’ types, building blogs, YouTube followings and podcasts. I was always a little jealous of all the people doing much more fun work than mine (I was freelancing as a lawyer).

The food is generally very inexpensive and high quality. You can get awesome local food from Warungs and there are hundreds of hipster style cafes with delicious and very instagrammable dishes. I got a lot of great work done, whilst going to CrossFit, eating very healthily and regularly surfing. It was just awesome!

Quite simply, Bali is a great place to be a digital nomad. There’s lots of local culture to get involved with. Hippie ceremonies to enjoy and magical sunsets to watch. Out of my three locations, it was by far the best destination. The sense of community at the co-working site (Outpost) was also great – people know you by name and make you feel at home. They put on lots of talks and extracurricular activities. I learned everything from some basic Bahasa and island history to how to mix an EDM music track!

The two complaints I have about Bali are us expats, and also the traffic/infrastructure. A lot of people come to Bali from the West and treat it like a playground without respecting the local people or the amazing nature. It’s become a bit of a victim of its own success. Traffic is generally horrible, with hundreds of scooters everywhere with lots of inexperienced riders on holiday. Its fairly typical to get into little scrapes because the roads are so congested! That being said, I’d go back in a heartbeat (and have done 3 times since my Hacker Paradise trip).

As a digital nomad destination I would rate Bali as:

Top Tips

• Best Coworking: Outpost, Dojo
• Top Three Restaurants: Nude, Nalu Bowls, Shady Shack
• What not to miss: make sure you take a trip to Ubud and if you have time, Nusa Penida and the Gili Islands (Gili Air is my favourite for a chilled desert Island vibe). Omnia in Uluwatu is ridiculously OTT but is a lot of fun in a big group.

As I love Bali and the people who live there so much, I will do separate post on my experiences there and include all my recommendations including for my favourite Warungs.

What are the pros and cons of the digital nomad lifestyle?

In a post COVID-19 world, where remote work will be even more accessible the digital lifestyle will be open to many more people. It has some amazing pros and a couple of cons:

Pros	Cons
Experiencing lots of interesting culture in unique destinations around the world	Can be tiring living out of a suitcase for extended periods
Building your own income source and being independence from a traditional 9-5 job	Being away from family and friends for long periods of time
The general feeling of freedom	Constant need to find the next project or freelancing gig can be draining. Don’t underestimate how difficult this can be
Meeting interesting people from all walks of life who are trying to do things differently	The never ending hunt for good wifi!
Sometimes being able to earn more money but working much less	Scary spiders in tropical countries
Increasing your savings rate if you are on a fixed salary but can geo-arbitrage so your living costs and expenses fall massively

For me I got a little tired of living out of a suitcase constantly and missed my home comforts. There’s the normal ups and downs of freelance work to deal with (unless you are a remote employee) but otherwise there are limited downsides.

Can being a digital nomad help you reach FIRE?

As this is a financial independence blog, its good to look at the digital nomad lifestyle through our FIRE goggles.

I hate to break it to you but unless you are able to earn a significant amount of money whilst living the digital nomad lifestyle, then it’s unlikely a choice that will accelerate your FIRE journey. That being said, don’t write it off yet as it has huge potential in a few other situations which you may find yourself in:

1. As a Lifestyle Choice or Career Break

It’s quite possible that the digital nomad lifestyle may be able to provide you all you need in life (especially if you are younger and have no kids). It opens up amazing experiences around the world, interesting project based or freelance work and the ability to live life your way. Your burning desire to reach any sort of FIRE may be extinguished (or possibly just subdued) if you become a successful digital nomad. It ticks many of the boxes of the RE part of FIRE, the only niggle is the requirement to continually work. For me this is not a big issue if I can control how the work part can be done but for others, dropping the work part is also important.

I don’t know many people who have continued a digital nomad lifestyle beyond a couple of years however. So its unlikely to be a real option long term.

2. Traditional job with a remote work option

If you have a traditional job with a nice salary which lets you work remotely, then living as a digital nomad and working that job may pour rocket fuel on your FIRE journey. Your living costs will decrease hugely by moving from say the USA to Bali and your expenses will also drop enormously. In turn this will increase your savings rate to levels you may never be able to achieve back home and accelerate your FIRE journey.

When I was on my Hacker Paradise adventure, I was quite jealous of those who were not having to chase down the next freelance gig!

3. If you are at CoastFIRE already

For those who are aiming for CoastFIRE (which is where you’ve already got a significant amount of money invested and now just seek to cover your day-to-day living expenses whilst your investments compound), a digital nomad lifestyle could be an ideal option. You get to quit your boring / stressful day job, travel and only need to earn a fraction of what you used to to cover your expenses (assuming you harness the power of geo-arbitrage and live in a cheaper country such as Indonesia, Thailand or Philippines). You then just wait it out, living the good life until your investments compound enough to reach traditional FIRE (i.e. 25 times your expenses).

4. If you are only a couple of years away from reaching traditional FIRE

If you are seeking traditional FIRE (i.e. 25 times your expenses) the digital nomad lifestyle could be an interesting option for you in two ways:

• The first is if you are almost at your FIRE goal but not quite there with a couple of years to go. Instead of working full time for those two final years, you could work for three or so as a digital nomad and essentially “coast” to traditional FIRE. With the potentially lower living costs and geo-arbitrage opportunities open to you, this could be a great choice; and
• The second is if you want to live on a longer term basis is lower cost countries such that your expenses are drastically lower than your home country. By becoming a digital nomad, you can test out various countries whilst working remotely to find your happy place. If you end up wanting to settle in Indonesia for the long term, your FIRE number is going to be much lower than it would be if you wanted to stay in London.

An Ethical Word of Warning

Digital nomads have built themselves a bad reputation.

In Bali locals are sick and tired of drunk Westerners treating their home land like garbage. Its important to be sensitive to the local culture, give back to the local community and generally try and leave a place in a better condition to that which you found it. Some simple thoughtfulness and courtesy goes a long way.

Please have a read of this blog post on “how to be an ethical nomad” for a deeper dive.

Would I do it all again?

Absolutely, 100% YES!

My 6 months with Hacker Paradise was just amazing. The people, the infrastructure and the personal development opportunities are second to none. I loved every minute of it. I loved having an instant friendship group when I arrived, and I’m still close to a lot of the people I met. The added benefit is that this network of friends stretches the whole world. I always count myself lucky that I had a taste of what “early retirement” could be like, and believe me, its awesome! Travel has always been a big part of my life and I hope it will be even more so when I reach financial independence.

Would you consider becoming a digital nomad (post COVID-19)? Do you think it would help you path to FIRE to hinder it? Comment below.