Financial Mistake I Made as Nomad

Everything I did so far has been through fail and try that also includes the way I approached finance as a nomad. On the contrary to popular believe that we area all living in exotic places drinking martinis or some type of cocktail, it’s not always the case. Hanging out with digital nomad crowd from western hemisphere taught me a thing of two, a privilege that they have that I don’t. As we all know, nomading needs money, breathing needs money and everything needs money. More often than not, I also meet nomads who recently started funded by some of their government programs/ financial aids. How convenient, right? But it’s not the point of this post. With this post, I want to talk about a simple mistake that was quite damaging from my nomad journey and wished to stick to this method a lot sooner.

Many of my nomad friends gets easy access to credit, to cards that benefits them outside the country and many other perks that inherently making their life less miserable while moving around. Whereas, for me, just an average nobody, I have to try my best to gather resources at the same time, making this nomad living thing works. I am a lot more restricted with my financial access. I can’t have credit cards, can’t have crypto cards even, which I think is bullshit. But as regulation sweeps through this country, it makes things harder for me to get access to these convenience. While the cost remains the same, there are hidden and added cost for me just to breathe.

These hidden costs are often something that I don’t really think about. It comes in form of currency exchange, transfers fee and a lot more hassles when paying with my regular card. This is where I made a huge mistake as I stopped separating my personal and business account a few years back.

Technically, as a SP (sole proprietorship) it is best to have separate account. One for business operation, another for personal account. I learned that I can’t use the method used by people who work as an employee (red:wagie) to manage my finance. There are may methods out there when it comes to personal finance where it’s 50/20/30 or some form of variation. Since as SP things can get blurry, those 50/20/30 doesn’t work for me. Instead now, I learned to have separate business account and also introducing the idea to pay myself instead of taking everything into one wallet and take everything.

What works currently is that a lot more complex than just 50/20/30. It’s now 40/20/10/10 ( business opereation/taxes/investment/business investment) and the rest goes to personal account. Back in the day when I earned money from copywriting, I just lumped everything and rarely think about if I made profit or that internet belongs to business operation money and not something personal. It’s the same as laptop, phone for work, or as simple as the office/house that I rent for it. These aren’t something that should come from personal expenses. It might seem silly and small mistakes but it’s something huge I learned these days that these distinction could counter a lot of hidden cost of nomad.

After all, I started this journey as a clueless 18y/old and today it has been quite a few years since I moved around, or worked remotely. And if I start from scratch again, at least I know what I did wrong from my previous experiences. D But yes, if you start today, don’t forget to separate both account since living as freelancer and a nomad can be ups and downs. More importantly, make sure to have business operation budget as well as paying yourself.

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