Pressing Pause On Digital Nomading

After spending almost 2 years travelling the country spending one month at a time in a different city, today I'm pressing pause on Digital Nomading for the indefinite future. My girlfriend and I signed a 19-month lease on an apartment in Miami, which starts today.

The experience was pretty incredible. My journey:

Why the pause?

Nomading has gotten really expensive in a few ways.

At the start of 2022, I wanted to stay in 10 different countries this year. We started with Mexico City in January, and later went to Antigua, Guatemala in March. While cost of living at both places were cheap, the flights to get there basically made the total cost equivalent to any AirBnb in the US, which has also soared dramatically over the last two years. In August 2020, my "monthly rent" was about $500. In December 2021, it was close to $2K. Most people leave their apartments if the landlord jacks up rent by 4x.

The fiat cost of nomading, however, is small compared to the time cost I was experiencing.

When you visit a place for a month, you are only really there for 3 weekends since 1 was spent travelling and packing. So there is an internally and externally motivated pressure to "make the most out of" each weekend because when else are you going to visit said place.

Now that I'm managing several projects for work, I want all of the nights and weekends I could get to return to a sustainable place revenue-wise. This pressure has made it too distracting to do so.

There are various other "hidden costs" associated to not having a fixed home that are hard to predict until you are actually doing it. AirBnb wifi is unreliable. Nearest gym this month is a 20 min Uber round trip instead of down the block. Spending 8 hours on laundry because the drier the month is too shitty to dry it in one cycle, until throwing your hands up and saying "fuck it I'm not doing laundry for the last three weeks of this stay."

All of these hidden costs are a byproduct of not being able to invest in your home. A pain I've started to palpably feel over the last 6 months.

I have a theory that the ideal state of being is having one part of your life chaotic, while all other parts stable. When I started digital nomading, I still had my cushy startup job which was very stable and was yearning for some chaos elsewhere. This is what led into my initial excitement for Digital Nomading. But now that work is feeling very unstable, I'm yearning for stability in all of the other areas in my life.

Why Miami?

On one of our roadtrips between cities, I was explaining to my friend how I was using this journey to figure out where to eventually settle down one day. He responded by saying, "Yea you say that, but you're probably going to just end up in Florida". I hated how much it felt like he was right.

With family in Tampa and Orlando, I've spent several Christmas's and New Years in Florida growing up. I love it here. The weather has a pretty outsized impact on my mood and I love that it's always amazing outside. "Yea except for the summer" - no, I love the heat and have loved summers I've spent in Florida. I also suspect that a good chunk of my family will be migrating down here over the next few years.

We chose Miami specifically for a few reasons. It has a lot more going on than Tampa or Orlando. I'm hoping to practice my Spanish more. The tech scene is growing its presence which will hopefully be advantageous for our careers. But most importantly, everyone I knew who lived here is just so happy.

The plan is to start out with the 19 month lease, while saving in the interim to eventually afford buying a home here.

So What Do You Mean By Pause?

I will probably never again spend years straight travelling with no fixed home. So by that definition, my time as a digital nomad is over.

However, one of the more counterintuitive reasons I want to settle down is to make just plain traveling easier. Having a "HQ" as I like to refer to my future home, makes it so that I'm able to make weekend trips without the previously mentioned pressure of making the most out of my current home. Before I started nomading, there was an 8 week stretch that I spent visiting different friends and family each weekend. That number has been effectively 0 since I started. Counterintuitively, nomading made me less flexible with travel.

Stabilizing my home will also allow me to grow my wealth. This in turn will hopefully allow me to afford doing one month stays in more unfamiliar places in Europe and Asia in the future. I have a goal of one day owning multiple homes in the future, ideally 4 in 4 different countries, cycling between them and always avoiding the winter.

So while some aspects of being a digital nomad are ending, I'm hoping this move allows me to unlock being one in others.

I still highly, highly recommend anyone considering digital nomading to just do it. I've learned so much over the last two years, from small nuisances in my preferred routine to progress on larger questions surrounding what I want to be focusing my time on.

I'm thankful that I've had this opportunity, and even more excited about what's to come 🚀.