Personal blog on early retirement and analytics projects. I write about what I learn as I am learning it.
If you’ve spent any time in FIRE circles or on personal finance forums, you’ve encountered the VTSAX vs VOO debate. Both are Vanguard funds, both are extremely low-cost, and both will make you more money over 30 years than most actively managed alternatives. The debate mostly comes down to structure and personal preference rather than any meaningful performance difference. Here’s what actually separates them.
If you’re curious about your financial health, one of the key metrics you’ll want to track is your net worth. In simple terms, your net worth is the difference between your assets (what you own) and your liabilities (what you owe). It’s a snapshot of your overall financial situation and can be a useful tool for setting financial goals and tracking progress.
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 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 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.
