A typical digital nomad’s office.

Digital nomads, which is a digital era tribe, seek new experiences and horizons every single day. They are in a way, professional tourists who do their work wherever they feel like, hop from one country to another every few days and of course convert one currency to another every time they cross a political border.

Being a tourist in a city is way more expensive than being a citizen and also, as a tourist you got to use your wallet a way more frequently. Therefore nomads tend to move towards the welcoming and inexpensive south east Asian countries which offer great conversion rates.

It so happens that whenever humanity converges at a point, an economy around that points starts to emerge. Something similar has happened with Digital Nomads as well. The Asian countries are now seeing the wave of professional tourists landing at their airports every single day and as a consequence of which there has been an emergence of cool and hip co-working centers, hostels and a number of related services useful to an on-the-go professional.

The view from these co-working spaces are not the traffic laded streets of Manhattan but instead green valleys bustling with life. But not everything is perfect. Although they do not have a fixed office, digital nomads still have to take care of all the back office operations- creating invoices, following up on payments, keeping an account of expenses, booking hotels & flights etc.,

The payments a digital freelancer receives are mostly from Paypal and these are transferred at rates which seem inflated with today’s technology. Once the payments are received in Paypal, they are then to be transferred to the freelancer’s bank account which takes a few days atleast and after which the bank charges unreasonable rates for withdrawing the money. Dealing with money and banks is a black spot in the otherwise brightly colored life of digital nomads.