Personal blog on early retirement, selling tradelines, and analytics projects. I write about what I learn as I am learning it.
Someone asked me this in a comment once — I think after a post about credit cards — and I realized I didn’t actually know the answer with any precision. I knew the $10,000 threshold existed somewhere, but I didn’t know the details: whether that applied to carry-on, checked bags, domestic, international, or all of the above. So I looked it up. Turns out there’s more nuance than most people assume.
I ported out of Google Fi after using it for a few years, and the process was smoother than I expected — once I understood what information I needed upfront. The main thing that trips people up is not having their account number and PIN ready before they contact the new carrier. Get those two pieces of information first and the rest is straightforward. This post is a companion to my Google Fi review for anyone who’s already decided to leave and just needs to know how.
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.
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.
