Living Nomadically: My 80/20 Guide
I’ve been living nomadically for three years, and I’m often asked what my advice is for people trying it. Here’s the 80⁄20 of all my advice:
Work out of restaurants and 5-star resorts. They’re gorgeous and if you pay for a meal, ~99.9% of restaurants and resorts are fine with you working there.
Ask ~20 different AirBnBs for a 40% discount if you stay for a month. ~5-10% will say yes, then you’ll get to stay in way nicer places for cheaper.
Travel with a folding bike. It will help you get around and really see the cities.
Use NomadList.com to find the best places to stay. It allows you to search cities by cheapness, safety for women, weather, number of nomads, etc. Nomad List is the best and I wish everything were Nomad List.
Social contact is the main reason people stop nomading. To fix that a) travel with at least one friend/partner and b) become excellent at location-independent friendships. The main way to do this is to set up recurring calls. Make it the default to talk to people. If you have to choose to hangout with people each time, you will just forget to. You should probably already be doing this. Full short article on how to do this well.
Some of the best places to nomad, according to Nomad List / me
Bali (particularly Canggu and Ubud). Tropical paradise, tons of nomads, insanely cheap and beautiful living arrangements.
Thailand (particularly Chiang Mai). Same as Bali.
Istanbul. The Mediterranean with mosques and cats. (So many cats!) Very safe for women, filled with history. First world infrastructure and third world prices. Better time zone for working remotely in Europe.
Buenos Aires. European style city, very cheap and safe. Better time zone for working remotely from North America
Medellín. Jungle in a city. Cheap and gorgeous. Better time zone for working remotely from North America
Other articles you might like:
How to maintain long-distance friendships without losing touch
App and book recommendations for people who want to be happier and more productive
Cross-posted from my personal blog
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Hm, for lower-cost counter-service places maybe but it sounds like you are talking more about higher-end places. Those types of places I would feel awkward sitting and doing my work the whole day. Thoughts on that? Can you point to any examples, say on Google Maps?
Have you run into concerns about it getting stolen? Or do you bring it into places with you? What do you think about a scooter instead? How do the logistics of this work if you are not living there permanently? Bring it on the airplane?
I visited Chiang Mai about two months ago and seriously fell in love. I hope to spend 2-3 months per year there moving forward. My biggest hangup though is the heat. Do you have any thoughts on that?
I also heard that for ~6 months of the year the farmers do some sort of burning-of-crops-thing which produces really bad smoke. Have you found that? That combined with the heat seems like it’d make long term living there difficult. Maybe you could focus on staying indoors and take Grabs places.
Is this a problem in other (southeast Asian) countries?
I’ve been doing it for years and it’s fine. Not for the whole day, but if you come for lunch, you can usually stay until a bit before dinner and they’re fine.
Think of it from their perspective. They just don’t want you to be taking up valuable real estate that could be filled with paying customers. Between lunch and dinner most restaurants are pretty empty, so you don’t have any counterfactual costs for the retaurant.
Before lunch you can either get breakfast and do the same thing, or come between breakfast and lunch and order a coffee or two, and the same logic applies.
If you want to stay all day, you’d definitely want to order three meals, which could be a lot, depending on your budget and the country.
For the bike, since it’s folding, I just take it into whichever place I’m working from. ~99% of the time, it’s fine. ~1% of the time they ask you to keep it near the front desk, where somebody’s watching over it.
And since they’re so small, you can put them in your luggage, so you can travel with them just fine!
Gotcha, that makes sense. I think you’re right about the socially acceptable period being something like the timespan of a breakfast/lunch/dinner service rather than the whole day.
Makes sense.
Oh wow that’s really cool! Thanks for pointing this out, I’m considering a folding bike now. Something about traveling with a bike, even a folding one, just didn’t click in my head before, sorta like a round peg in a square hole. It makes sense now though.
Two things for heat:
Have a small portable fan that you carry around with you. I love this one because its legs allow you to attach it to practically anything.
You might adjust after you’re there for awhile. I grew up in Canada and used to go around in shorts and t-shirt in10C/50F weather. Now, after being in >26C/80F for the last 3 years, I get cold if it goes below 26C/80F. (Not sure if I’m allowed to call myself Canadian anymore) The key is to avoid A/C. If you’re in air conditioned places too much, your body will never adapt. (Of note, this is just me and I don’t know what percentage of people this happens for)
How confident are you about this in general? And how much do you think there are individual differences? Personally I grew up in NY and later on lived in Vegas for about six years and never really adjusted to the heat at all.
I did notice that certain people are much more tolerant of it than others. My girlfriend’s family would always have barbecues in the summer in 100 degree weather and say it’s not that bad because we’re in the shade or because the sun is down. I’m not sure how much of that is selection effects vs adjusting vs whatever else though.
Good question! Not at all confident. I’ll adjust the claim there to make it more clear this is just an anecdote.
I see. Thanks for clarifying.
I’m not sure myself but it feels like the sort of thing where maybe what happens to the average person doesn’t matter. People interested in living nomadically should probably try it out for N months first and see how they personally adjust.
Idk though, maybe months is too short a timeframe, maybe it takes years. But if it takes years that feels like too big of an investment to be worthwhile for most people, especially if there’s also a risk that you never actually adjust.
Just based off of my experience, I adjusted to living in southern India (high humidity, >30c/86f most days) in about a month. The first month I was dying and having to drink water constantly, and then about a month in I’d adjusted almost completely.
I’ve been RVing full time within the US for a little over a year, so not quite as nomadic as this :-). But for internet I’ve been relying on Starlink (too big for what you are doing, and only usable under open sky), and a Solis hot spot for cellular data (https://soliswifi.co/pages/solis-lite) (switches among all the major wireless carriers based on strength of signal, unlimited plans are available in the US but global plans seem to have more stringent throttling rules). Do you use any kind of hot spot, or rely only on finding wifi places?
To the passing-by reader, not so much OP, though not not to OP either:
General reminder to make sure to meet the poor locals and see if you can network with them or provide direct aid. If you do, also make sure to meet them with an air of humility; to them you’re a rich person’s guest, don’t just pay for your presence, listen soberly to what they need and see if you can find ways to have an impact from your nomadship on making the places you visit permanently on a better trajectory. Break the power of the malicious rich by thoughtfully scoping out ways to invest towards pay-it-forward.
Of course, this might not compare well to givedirectly’s effectiveness. But you should, if you possibly can, at least try to build a causal model of the dynamics around why the places you visit are so swanky for you, because usually they’re pretty slummy a little ways away. Try to avoid funding crushing the locals with the weight of the economic activity your visits’ trades create. It’s okay to enjoy nice things, if you ask me, but it’s important to try to make those nice things available for the people down the road who are currently suffering from the incentives created by the visitor-class’s desire for those nice things. If you just try to offset your own impact, it won’t have that much effect—I say this to bring it to mind how to spread the idea that this sort of caring for the locals is important, not to demand you do all of it~
That unfortunate state of reality aside, I’ve also been thinking of becoming a nomad. I’m pretty close to being able to fit all my stuff in my car. I’m not sure where I’d go—I’m not super well off myself at the moment. Probably just somewhere cheap in the US.
Your comment seems to assume that visiting poor countries is bad for locals, but isn’t it good to have rich foreigners spending money? (Or just in general, having customers is better than not having customers)
No, I don’t think it’s inherently bad to visit. However, I think it easily can be, depending on which people in the country your money goes to. If the people who get customers are owners who don’t live there or who are going to refuse to share money with non-owners down the road, it’s not likely to make the country better for the non-owner locals.
What are some examples of this?
I can provide low quality examples later today, or high quality examples later this week; since I know you in particular have very high standards of evidence, I’m inclined to stick to the latter. However, I can summarize what I’ll be looking for: examples of economic situations in the carribean islands area where there is a business that presents itself as locally owned but which is not, and which is right next to a poor area; in particular I’d be looking for situations where the ownership dynamics have resulted in a much greater proportion of gains from trade going to investors, rather than to locals. If I were doing this for the goal of arguing more general properties of the impact of being a nomad, I would try to assess how common it is, rather than looking for exemplars.
There’s certainly no rush.
I’m not sure I agree, but I appreciate your saying so.
Well, hang on. This seems a bit different from what you said before, which was about the locals not benefiting at all (and you even implied that the locals might be made worse-off—or at least that seemed to be the connotation of “funding crushing the locals with the weight of the economic activity your visits’ trades create”).
But here you’re talking about the locals merely getting some relatively small proportion of the gains from trade. This seems very different, no? Indeed it’s not even clear that this is bad, at all, relative to the counterfactual where no trade takes place.
So (perhaps with the benefit of saving yourself some effort in searching out examples which end up being beside the point), might you clarify what exactly the claim is, in the first place? (But if you prefer to provide examples first, and then generalize a claim from them, that is also fine… in any case it’s good to get this distinction noted in advance, to forestall any claims of goalpost-moving on anyone’s part.)
I am also curious about something else—you seem to be suggesting that you’ll be looking for examples of which you’re not already specifically aware (or did I misunderstand you?). This is well and good, and I look forward to reading them—but I wonder if you recall what led you to having this sort of model in the first place? (Or was it a cached thought that you can no longer easily trace the origin of?)
update: I’ve had more trouble than I’ve expected finding descriptions of examples I’m pretty sure exist. I’m going to call this query timed out for now, and you can update on this conversation however you like from that result.
Here’s a description of a related thing instead from memory, which isn’t actually in one of the tourism-heavy areas of the carribean, but has examples of the same kind of ownership network structures.
Alright, thank you for the update.
Do you know if this info you linked is available in non-video form? I do not find it easy to absorb information from videos.
It’s a general model of how complex incentive systems in economics work in the form of a claim about a pattern that would be expected to arise any time there are certain structures of contracts in use which are very common, of which I have seen a great many examples in life, but which is a general model and you’re asking for specific instances; very fair request, so I’ll go find the things my general model predicts in this instance after I’m done with a few other things in my queue. (Commenting on lesswrong is a guilty pleasure, it doesn’t count.)
In general, it is common for networks of investors to end up participating in partial cartel monopsony over employment, resulting in ability to do some amount of price fixing. When distant investors own contracts that the implementors of law interpret to give the investors command ability over large portions of the businesses in an area, and those investors are optimizing for their own returns, the investor subnet has an incentive to use strategies that depress wages using this cartel. This typically results in the majority of money spent on goods and services from those stores going to the owners of the stores, not the employees; this is alleged to be good for the purchaser, but in reality typically indirectly makes the product much worse. in a region with many poor folks and distant investors, and where the poor locals don’t have synchronized bargaining with the investors, the investors can and often do take advantage of their synchronized bargaining against employee’s desynchronized bargaining to ensure that local market wages do not increase as fast as trade, resulting in most gains from trade being shared between purchaser and investor, with employees ending up treated as a nuisance cost by the network pattern.
You may recognize this description from somewhere; I’ve rephrased it somewhat out of the typical words because they’ve become fnords, but it’s a pretty standard criticism of stock-investment-based ownership patterns.
To participate in local markets where such things are happening, look for ways to spend money that result in more gains from trade going directly to locals, and especially in ways that result in balancing the amount of group synchronized bargaining between employees and owners.
And of course, as you imply, many people who bring up this network pattern and critique employment structures take it too far and assume this means no gains from trade go to the employees. Some definitely often do. But quite often the system becomes efficient only at some subgoals, while the biggest investors end up with a significant majority of control and thus can induce market inefficiencies selectively that limit growth of locally owned, small-owner small businesses. It’s especially frustrating because it’s not always obvious where this is happening.