Travel Archives - Kind of Lost

Airline Miles Are Worth What You’d Actually Have Paid

Back in 2018 I wrote a post ranking seven levels of credit card usage, and somewhere in the middle I said I prefer airline miles. I was very proud of the pun that followed (your miles may vary). What that post did not have was a single number to explain why.

So this is the number. More precisely, it is the argument that the number everybody quotes, what are airline miles worth in cents per mile, is the wrong one to look at. A mile is worth what you would actually have paid for the thing you used it on, minus what you still paid, compared against what the same spending would have earned in plain cash. That’s less exciting than a points-valuation chart, and it gives a smaller answer most of the time.

Bali Digital Nomad Visa

Bali has been the shorthand for “digital nomad paradise” for years — maybe too many years, which has made it both more developed and more crowded than the version people picture. I still looked into the visa situation carefully, because living and working from Indonesia for an extended stretch is genuinely different from a two-week vacation there. The honest answer is that the Indonesian visa system for long-term nomads is more complicated than most guides make it sound.

Portugal Digital Nomad Visa

Portugal keeps showing up at the top of digital nomad destination lists, and it’s not manufactured hype — the country has been actively building the conditions for it. Lisbon and Porto have genuine tech and startup communities. The climate is exceptional. The food is underrated. And Portugal has one of the more functional visa programs for remote workers in Europe: the D8, or Digital Nomad Visa, which replaced the older D7 passive income visa as the standard route for people earning remotely from abroad.

Croatia Digital Nomad Visa

Croatia joined the EU in 2013, adopted the Euro in 2023, and somewhere in between launched one of the more appealing digital nomad visa programs in Europe. The combination of Adriatic coastline, lower cost of living than Western Europe, and a formal one-year remote work permit makes it easy to understand why it ended up on a lot of people’s shortlists. I looked into it seriously, and here’s what the actual process looks like.

Estonia Digital Nomad Visa

Estonia is a small Baltic country of 1.3 million people that has somehow become one of the most digitally advanced societies on earth — e-voting, digital prescriptions, online tax filing in under five minutes, and a government commitment to putting services online that most larger countries have only talked about. When they launched a digital nomad visa, it made sense. The country was already wired for this kind of thing in a way that most places aren’t.