Therese Mascardo was done with the daily grind of life in Los Angeles. As a licensed clinical psychologist, she was seeing about 40 clients a week and spending hours commuting by car.
“As an American you feel a pressure, and in L.A., I definitely felt like I needed to work as much as possible, either to pay my rent or buy whole foods, and so my quality of life really suffered there,” Mascardo, 42. , Dr.
So Mascardo made radical changes in search of a simpler lifestyle.
He continues to see Portugal on his list of great places to live as a “digital nomad”, a fairly recent term for a person who can work remotely from several locations rather than one fixed location. Since 2007, European countries have offered nomads a visa that allows them to live there as long as they are earning money while working for a company from a non-EU country.
Mascardo fits the bill.
He decided to move to Lisbon in 2018. At first, Mascardo said, it was hard to stop being a “workaholic.” He continued to see more than 35 clients a week remotely but eventually dropped to about 25 clients a week, a move he could afford because Lisbon is so affordable.
He also left the car. “Most of my friends live within a 15-minute walk of my house, or I can take an Uber that costs 10 euros to the other side of town, a maximum 30-minute drive,” he said.
And Portugal felt peaceful too. Mascardo and other digital nomads we spoke to in Portugal cited the trend of gun violence in the United States as a reason for leaving.
“It’s crazy to live in a place where every day I don’t wake up and read about a mass shooting,” Mascardo said. “That whole part of my brain that was experiencing trauma in the US is no longer working with it.”
The pandemic turned work in America upside down: many companies went completely remote, meaning knowledge workers in particular had more freedom than ever to choose where to live without changing jobs, as Mascardo did. After four years, however, there are many companies Called the staff back to the office At least some of the time, some for the entire work week.
Which means some workers are living the digital nomad dream while others are back on the long haul $15 desk salad.
We wanted to know what these two extremes reveal about how we think about work and how we balance work and life, so a team at Vox Today, explained The podcast went to Portugal. We also visited an American city where the five-day, office work week never went away: Miami. We’ll head to Miami tomorrow, but today, we’re exploring how Portugal has turned itself into a haven for remote workers and found mixed results.
How Portugal attracted nomads and breathed life into its cities
Thousands of digital nomads from all over the world have moved to Portugal, many after the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. Although nomads are difficult to track by their nature, some estimates show that there are approx 16,000 live in Lisbon aloneBulk from USA.
In 2022, a few years after Mascardo arrived, Portugal began offering a new type of visa as an incentive for digital nomads. The D8 visa allows non-EU/EEA nationals with remote employment to live and work in the country for up to one year with a permanent residency pathway.
Even before that, Portugal was an interesting place for digital nomads to hang out. After the Great Depression, economic growth in the country stalled, forming Govt A liberal tax structure and relatively easy visa requirements for certain types of foreigners (aka those with money). The idea was to attract entrepreneurs and knowledge workers to a torpid economy, not just people with cash to spend.
It worked, he said Luis CarvalhoProfessor of Economics at the University of Porto, Porto, Portugal. Just look at your city.
“Twenty years ago, the city was declining very rapidly. You have seen many criminals. Buildings were collapsing,” Carvalho said. One of the oldest city centers in Europe, Porto was generally known for port wine, not for laptop warriors. When foreign workers started showing up, new energy was created. New skills, high incomes, entrepreneurship. Tourism. , too.
The urge to travel and travel to a new country is baked into digital nomadism, so it’s no surprise that coworking and coliving spaces have popped up. We happened to be in one in Porto, where we stumbled upon the place called Outside of Muoko It looked like an ordinary hotel. It’s actually a chain of rooms and apartments with locations around the world offering long-term stays and using the “remote work revolution.” to define A new way of life.” Porto’s property featured plenty of co-working space, sleek Scandinavian design and even a library for listening to vinyl records.
We met 25-year-old Gia Lee in the vinyl library when a British punk band played a concert in the basement. He never pictured himself jet-setting around the world while working, but Lee graduated from college amid a pandemic and the worst job market since the Great Depression. “There was no job in 2020. I was planning to go into a typical ad agency and corporate trajectory but Covid threw a wrench in the situation, and we had to sort of adapt and figure out how to do our own thing,” Lee said..
This means bouncing straight to a fully remote job. Lee and two friends founded a marketing agency Ninety eight That gives brands an insight into the minds of Gen Z. It made sense to Lee to continue keeping the company fully remote because it was less expensive and offered more freedom to move.
Portugal has also experienced the downside of attracting well-off workers
The pandemic gave many laptop workers like Lee time to consider their living conditions and jump into the pond, but all this self-realization had some negative implications for the Portuguese.
Foreign workers, often in exchange for cash, add to housing costs. Carvalho and a team estimated an 8.5 percent increase in prices due to foreign workers. This has upset many Portuguese people, who are now facing some Maximum housing cost And Minimum average income in Western Europe. Tourism didn’t help either. Now there is a movement Banning short-term rentals in Lisbon.
Mascardo highlighted the change in sentiment from locals. “Prices for housing have skyrocketed because people show up with their American budgets and just throw their money away, and inflation doesn’t help,” he said.
Portugal is seeing new hopeful digital nomads every day; More than 2,500 visas have already been issued this year.
Carvalho hopes the Portuguese government can find a way to strike a balance. He says it is important to attract entrepreneurs to the country and that visa and tax incentives introduced for digital nomads have brought a lot of new skills and technology to Portugal. But policymakers need to consider the impact on Portuguese society as a whole before pricing the country’s native citizens out of their own housing market.
“I think you can’t have a decent city without economic growth and people with skills and talent coming in. So I see policymakers as very much cooks who are trying to put together different ingredients, but the recipe isn’t there. So sometimes you have to make the recipe yourself.”
