I need to vent.
Everyone all the time asks me how can I afford traveling all the time. I work remotely and have a corporate 10 years long career, I don’t have kids and don’t have a car or an apartment. I speak 2 languages and used to be the most hardworking person ever to make my career. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still from a poor country and I don’t make big money, I travel on budget, but in my country I would be consider above average in terms of money. I’m great in managing money, I provide for myself and am independent for 10 years and I used to live for only $275 a month.
Also as a digital nomad I travel to live in a country, I’m not a tourist that spends much money every day.
How do you deal with it? People tell me all the time that I’ll get broke or that I should work more or that I have a sugar daddy. They ask me if this lifestyle isn’t expensive. Obviously it is, but having kids also is super expensive.
The most funny thing is that I meet people that makes literally 10 TIMES MORE than me and they are jealous and ask me of I could advise them to make more and how much they should make to afford being a digital nomad.
The money part is actually fairly easy to explain, at least in my case. I can simply tell them that I’ve spent most of the past couple of years in ex-Soviet countries where even temporary accommodation will be cheaper or barely more expensive than what I’d pay back home for long term rent. It’s even more convincing considering many of them are mortgaged up to the eyeballs for stupidly expensive homes because NZ is a horrifically dysfunctional and regressive shithole when it comes to anything housing related. There’s nothing stopping some of them from cashing up on their capital gains and moving to SE Asia and living a little more minimally on their savings or even on passive rental income or something, but they’re still not going to do it.
As for the envy part, I don’t think there’s much point in trying to combat it. People tend not to understand anything about such a lifestyle and even if you try to explain it to them, they often aren’t truly interested in listening, so I generally don’t bother. Suits me just fine because I don’t tend to bring it up unless absolutely necessary. Since I don’t seek out nomad types and don’t know any IRL, I only really have one friend/acquaintance who properly grasps some of the less obvious realities, difficulties and sacrifices of such a lifestyle and can empathise - it really helps that she had a stint working on a cruise ship as that presents some similar challenges. Almost everyone else assumes everything is amazing all of the time and it’s not unusual for them to react with blind envy or even hostility.