Way back, when we started selling our stuff and moved some important documents into packing cases, once in a while a few questions came to our minds. The questions if it’s going to be sustainable to be traveling all the time, how to organize and most definitely how to finance the whole undertaking?
For those who may be tempted to trade in a fixed working desk location for a location independent working life style, we put together some of our findings and back them up with the figures!
First things first. For us, being digital nomads, two things are of utterly importance: electricity and a reliable internet connection (who needs sleep and food anyhow?). We craft software, thus those two things come as natural requirements due to our tools being notebooks.
There are lots of digital nomads out there, more than we expected to be honest, and therefore some good communities are existent which offer their support for several questions one could have (e.g. this FB-Group).

We think it shouldn’t matter if you work 10, 100 or 1000 km apart from each other

…at least not in the field of information technology. As a service provider, we want to be as easily reachable for our customers as we would be if we’d be staying in Germany. Therefore we utilize an infrastructure, which allows to call us on a usual German phone number no matter where in europe we are – without any extra costs for our customers. The solution is internet based and that’s why we searched for one which includes forwarding to a mobile phone in case we don’t have a capable connection.
Skype offers the Euro-Package, which is a very attractive solution to us.
Heavily relying on a stable internet connection leads us to the question we have to ask ourselves all the time when we switch places – How to know what circumstances to prepare for at our next office location?

Organisation

On the one hand the answer to this question is once more use the experiences others have gained. For example the page nomadslist.com offers a dozen information, ranging from air quality, over bandwidth rates to monthly living costs, for several very attractive travel destinations. All information has been gathered and curated by other nomads and reflects their findings when they’d visit the respective places.
And if one location may be missing, you can contribute it yourself “Give and get back!”.
On the other hand our experience tells us that you simply can’t know. A small risk is always involved. It’s likely that you’ll encounter some struggles at your new location which you simply will have to cope with. E.g. most of our landlords/landladies couldn’t answer our question for the bandwidth at their places completely. We got back any kind of unspecific answer such as “unlimited” or “umts”, which is comprehensible because it’s not a usual guest’s concern. Thus we start making it a habit to send a query in advance kindly asking to do a bandwidth test and refer to our needs for our business as a reason for it. We use the website speedtest.net for this purpose. Furthermore quite often either the amount of devices being allowed in the wifi or the monthly volume is limited! Definitely check that in advance as well!
And if it actually happens that you still have trouble with the connection we noticed that it’s really easy to get a data plan in the european union if you are not in Germany.
Reasonable prices and reasonable amounts of volume limits are available in almost every country. In Spain for example, it took us 20 minutes and nothing more than a ID-Card to get hold of a prepaid data plan offering 2GB on 4g for only 15€. Every topping up comes for 10€ per GB. If you consider our daily needs of approximately 1.5GB it’s still very expensive but at least it’s an acceptable backup plan. Of huge assistance when it comes to finding prepaid data plans is the Prepaid-Sim-Wiki by the way. Even if the prepaid sim cards are easy to buy they sometime offer some surprises in the details limiting the network speed for voip or vpn services – those pitfalls are perfectly described in the sim card wiki. We always at least want to learn the basics of the language of the places we stay at – Duolingo, which will also offer klingon in the nearer future, is a huge help in this regard!

The following map shows the bandwidth measurement results we encountered at each respective location we’ve been to so far.

We travel as a group of three

Once in a while we are asked “don’t you miss your friends and family”? The answer to this question comes easily: of course! But we are fortunate to travel in a group of three so we never feel lonely, and because we travel through Europe we are often visited by friends which are on vacation. Also we make new friends as we go! Finally, if one of us is really getting homesick – the next location we move to will simply be somewhere closer to our homebase.

How to organise accommodation

We read of many nomads which buy a one way ticket, make sure they have a place for the first night and are improvising from there on. We keep to a simple rule. Our next accommodation has to be clear! We have quite a regular business week which means customer contact on a frequent basis as well. Therefore we book our apts approximately one month in advance. Most of them we find via airbnb.com . A good tip is checking camping resorts close to the desired city! They often have little well equipped lodges for a reasonable pricing.

Costs

traveling the whole year has to be expensive? Answer: no not really. We gave up two separate flats and therefore joined forces. If we do the math we pay rather less but definitely not more than we did before. Vacation apartments are a fixed cost thing – they include energy and internet costs and therefore are easily calculable. But what does the rest of this lifestyle costs each of us. We want to tell you by presenting the costs of our own on a per person and per company basis, so that you can compare that to your average monthly spendings. As already mentioned we are a group of three – so those figures have a minimalistic representative touch 🙂

Of course we visit restaurants occasionally, but most of the time we cook for ourselves. We watch the price tags carefully when we head to the local markets and it surely helps that there are some well known discounter all throughout europe.
The big costs for hardware stem from the basic investments we had to do to get the company started.

Hardware to go?

What did we focus on when getting our hardware? The foremost thing we focused on was enough energy for a whole day. To achieve that the first important element has been the notebook itself. We’ve quite wide spread requirements which range from software development to graphic editing and video rendering. Video- & graphic rendering is something we surely don’t do on the highest hardware needs but still considerable. Solely developing on a machine mainly asks for RAM, a SSD and a decent CPU, adding graphic and video editing to the mix requires at least a dedicated graphics card as well. On top of the notebooks we need quite normal office equipment. E.g. a scanner and printer for administrative tasks. Taking all those things into consideration we decided for the following setup:

Laptops

Infrastructure

And why all that?

Travelling while working may sound more romantic than it actually is. Once you realize you are not on vacation – which happens rather quickly, because elsewise you’ll wreck yourself while squeezing the sight-seeing-ambitions of a striving tourist into a full-time working schedule – you’ll figure out a daily routine for yourself. Of course the new impressions at every new location are stunning every time. And changing your offices location and by that your daily input definitely is a huge boost for the motivation, it’s simply enjoyable to see new stuff on a regular basis. The following video therefore shows how our office already altered itself in the current year.