Could you sell up and become a digital nomad?

As regular readers of the property press, one recent story caught the attention of the Move Places team. It featured in the Evening Standard’s Homes & Property supplement, detailing the radical moving story of one couple.

Priced out of the London property market – where they were paying over £2,000 per month to rent a flat in Battersea – Irene Lidia Wang and Luca Mussari decided to give their landlord notice and become digital nomads.

Now, with minimal possessions, laptops and jobs that allow them to work remotely, the couple spend their time flitting from country to country, finding more temporary accommodation via Airbnb or Booking.com, as well as staying in cheap guest houses and in co-living spaces.

Travelling the world while carry out a traditional desk-bound job was a very niche concept as little as four years ago but now it’s a very viable option. The pandemic accelerated the use of remote technologies and businesses learnt to trust employees away from the office.

Today, bolstered by video conferencing, fantastic Wi-Fi, cloud storage and collaboration platforms, such as Monday and ClickUp, many professionals are becoming digital nomads. A set of figures compiled by the Global Mobile Workforce Forecast puts the digital nomad movement into perspective.

In 2017, it estimated the mobile workforce totalled 1.52 billion people globally. In 2023, it forecasts that figure will rise to 1.88 billion, with 43.3% of the total global workforce working as digital nomads. Fuelling this increase is a growing number of countries that offer digital nomad visas, making it easier for internationals to work overseas.

While some nomads prefer to sample the bricks and mortar in other countries, there’s a growing trend for ’van life’. A quick search for #vanlife on Instagram reveals more than 16 million posts, with a number of digital nomads documenting how they live out of a VW camper or a modified transit. Many photos show laptops open in exotic locations or the professional working in a far-flung café, maybe with a rainforest as a backdrop.

Does the digital nomad lifestyle sound appealing to you? If so, Move Places would be delighted to sell any current property you own in order to help realise your plans. Can’t wait to get travelling, you’ll love our express property sales service, where we aim to sell your home within 28 days.

If you are ready to put your property on the market, offload most of your possessions and live with just a laptop and backpack, there are some considerations:

• Acknowledge you’ll be saying goodbye to reliable routines and set working hours
• Establish if your current employer supports fully remote working or whether you’ll have to become a self-employed freelancer
• Make a list of places you’d like to visit and if they are international, find out what digital nomad visas are available
• Work out what home comforts and personal possessions you simply couldn’t live without
• Consider putting items of furniture into storage
• If travelling overseas, find out whether you still need to pay HMRC tax on your earnings – this will depend on how many days you come back to the UK for
• Establish how to access the healthcare system in any country where you set up
• Have a plan for if and when you return home
• Still interested in the digital nomad lifestyle? Talk to Move Places about how much your home could sell for. Our free valuations are a great place to start – you may make enough profit on a sale to buy that dream van or fund a whole year overseas.

Talk to the Move Places team about your future plans – we’re available on the ‘phone, via email or even in person! Get in touch today.