Personal blog on early retirement, selling tradelines, and analytics projects. I write about what I learn as I am learning it.
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 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.
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.
