Most people picture the first months of nomad life as a montage of airport lounges and laptop sessions with a view. In practice it is mostly admin, small humiliations and quite a lot of time in phone shops. That is not a reason to stay put. It is a reason to learn from people who have already made the mistakes, because most of them are predictable and cheap to avoid if you spot them early.
Packing for a life you have not lived yet
The classic beginner move is buying gear for an imaginary version of yourself — the one who does sunrise yoga, formal dinners and cold-water swims in the same week. That person does not exist, and you will be the one carrying their suitcase up four flights of stairs.
Pack for one week and accept that you will do laundry. Laundry is cheap, boring and available nearly everywhere. A sore back from hauling 23kg of "just in case" is none of those things.
Things new nomads carry and rarely use:
- A spare laptop charger "in case" — buy one if the first dies
- Formal shoes for an event that has not been planned
- A journal and three pens you will write with twice
- A full toiletry set — familiar brands exist abroad, or something close
- Books. Genuinely, books.
A better test than any packing list: lay everything out, then halve it. Remember that replacing a forgotten T-shirt costs roughly the price of a coffee and a pastry, while the space it occupies costs you every single day for a year.
Nobody has ever regretted packing less. Plenty of people have regretted hauling a bag they could not lift above their own head.
Visa oversights that catch people out
Visa rules are the least glamorous part of this life and the one that bites hardest. Two mistakes come up again and again: assuming a border run resets your time, and assuming a tourist entry lets you work — even remotely.
In the Schengen area, for example, many nationalities are limited to 90 days within any 180-day period, and the count does not reset simply because you left and came back. Someone who spends 90 days in Spain, nips to Morocco for a month and returns to Portugal for the summer has not started again from zero; the earlier days are still sitting on the clock. Days are recorded from stamps and entry systems, not from memory. Other countries have their own limits, extensions and registration requirements, and these do change.
Read the official government source for each country on your route, not a forum post from three years ago, and keep a simple spreadsheet of entry and exit dates. If you want to stay longer, or you plan to work remotely on a tourist entry, check before you book. Where the answer is unclear, ask an immigration adviser rather than a Facebook group.
The related classic is overstaying by a day because you counted the arrival day wrongly, or turning up at a border convinced you can buy a visa on arrival. Border officials do not find either of these charming.
Treating tax as someone else's problem
You can earn from one country, live in another and be tax resident in a third. That is not a loophole; it is a set of rules most people read only after a letter arrives.
Many countries use a days-present threshold, often around 183 days in a tax year, but the details vary and other factors — where your permanent home is, where your family lives, where your income comes from — can matter too. Tax treaties between countries add another layer. "I'm not resident anywhere" is not the clever position people think it is; it is usually just a description of someone who has not checked.
You do not need to become an expert. You do need a rough idea of where you stand, clean records of invoices, expenses and travel dates, and an accountant who deals with cross-border clients. This is not a good area for guessing.
The cheapest bed is rarely the best office
A dorm bed at a low nightly rate looks like a bargain until you spend a month working from a bunk with no desk, no chair and someone unpacking a rucksack at 2am.
If you are working, your room is your office. That means a table and a real chair, a door that closes, decent light, and heating or air conditioning depending on the season. A slightly pricier private room with a desk often costs less than a co-working pass plus taxis to escape the noise.
Book a week before you book a month. Photos are taken from the best corner of the best room on the sunniest day, and neighbourhoods surprise you — sometimes pleasantly, sometimes with a building site at 7am. Once you have slept there, walked to the shops and run a speed test, commit for longer — and negotiate.
Assuming the internet will just work
Every listing says "fast Wi-Fi". Almost none of them define it, and the number that matters is not the one in the advert. A connection that streams video perfectly can still be useless for a two-hour client call, and a signal that is fine at noon can collapse at 8pm when the whole building starts watching something.
Assume that at some point the internet will fail you at the worst possible moment, then build the obvious defences:
- Test the connection before committing to a month, ideally during your working hours
- Carry a backup — an eSIM or local SIM with data, and know how to tether from your phone
- Identify the nearest co-working space or café with reliable Wi-Fi before you need it
- Work offline where you can — drafting, editing, reading — so a dead router costs an hour, not a day
- Tell clients what to expect, so a dropped call reads as logistics rather than carelessness
The simple rule: never book a call for your first morning in a new city. Arrive, test, sleep, then promise things.
Ignoring the boring safety net
New nomads insure the laptop and forget the person. Travel insurance is not optional just because you are working rather than lying on a beach, and plenty of cheap policies quietly exclude anything they can call "business activity". Read the exclusions, or pay for a policy that names remote work explicitly.
The rest of the net looks like this:
- A money buffer. Three months of expenses you can actually reach from abroad. Flights home, a dead laptop and a dental emergency rarely arrive one at a time.
- Two ways to pay. A blocked card, a bank that flags a transaction in Vietnam, a phone that dies with the banking app on it — all survivable, all avoidable.
- Copies of documents. Passport, insurance, prescriptions and vaccination records, stored somewhere you can reach without the device you just lost.
- Health. Enough of any regular medication for the whole trip, plus its generic name, because brands change at the border.
None of this is exciting, which is exactly why it gets skipped. It is also the difference between an inconvenience and a flight home.
Burning out by week six
The first month feels like a holiday with deadlines. You work full days, meet people at night, take weekend trips and change cities every few days because you can. By week six you are tired in a way that a beach day does not fix.
The usual cause is treating travel and work as two full-time jobs. Give yourself a rhythm:
- Two or three evenings a week with nothing planned
- One full day off that involves no transport
- At least three weeks in each place
- Something regular — a breakfast spot, a gym, a call home
There is a quieter version of this too, and it is the part nobody posts about. Constant movement means every friendship is three days old, and after a while that wears thinner than any timezone change. Loneliness is a real risk of this life, not a character flaw. Co-working regulars, a language class, a standing Thursday dinner or a weekly call with people who knew you before you had a suitcase all do more for your stamina than another scenic train ride.
If you are sleeping badly or feeling flat and anxious for weeks, that is worth taking seriously rather than working through. Slow down, stay put for a month, and talk to someone — a friend, a doctor, a therapist on a video call. Nomad life is not an endurance test, and the people who last at it are the ones who treat rest and company as part of the job rather than a reward for finishing it.
Photo: Peggy_Marco / Pixabay
