Personal blog on early retirement and analytics projects. I write about what I learn as I am learning it.
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.
Are you ready to get your hustle on? Look no further than the 2005 drama “Hustle & Flow” for inspiration. This movie tells the story of a Memphis pimp named DJay who dreams of making it big as a rapper. With the help of his friends and a few unlikely allies, DJay sets out to turn his dreams into reality.
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.
Costa Rica keeps coming up in conversations about digital nomad visas, and it’s not hard to see why. The country launched its remote work program in a clean, accessible package — a defined income threshold, a single-entry point for applications, and a one-year permit that’s renewable. It’s not the cheapest option in Latin America, and it’s certainly not Europe, but it occupies an interesting middle ground that a lot of remote workers find genuinely appealing.
Of all the factors that go into a credit score, credit utilization rate is the one I find most buyers fixating on — and for good reason. It’s also one of the few you can actually change in a matter of weeks rather than years. For the dollar-amount version of the question, I wrote up how much credit card debt is too much.
Continue reading “What Is Credit Utilization Rate? (And Why It Matters)”