Four Years as Gay Digital Nomads: What We've Actually Learned
In January 2022, we left California with no return date. Four years on, here's the honest accounting — the things we got right, the things we got wrong, and what it actually costs to be LGBTQ+ and untethered from any single country.
It was January 14, 2022. We handed our apartment keys to the landlord, put our remaining things in a storage unit in Sacramento, and got in an Uber to SFO. We had no return date. We had a rough plan (Europe, for a while), two suitcases each, and a business that existed entirely on the internet.
Four years later, we haven’t been back to the United States. We’ve lived in Albania, Georgia, Portugal, Croatia, Slovenia, Italy, Montenegro, Kosovo, North Macedonia, Serbia, Hungary, Austria, and several other countries. We’ve learned Albanian geography. We’ve developed opinions about the relative quality of guesthouses along the Albanian Riviera. We have a lek-to-euro conversion permanently running in the back of our heads.
Here’s what we actually know now that we didn’t know then.
The Financial Reality
Let’s start with the question everyone actually wants to ask.
The honest answer is that digital nomad life is significantly cheaper than life in California — even accounting for travel costs — but only if you’re thoughtful about where you go and how you structure your time.
We spend four to six months per year in Tirana, Albania. Our monthly costs there — a comfortable apartment in Blloku, eating out regularly, occasional travel, all living expenses — run about €1,800-2,200 for two people. In San Francisco, our rent alone was more than that.
The rest of the year we’re moving more, which costs more. But we’ve found a rhythm: anchor in a low-cost base for the productive months, travel more freely when work allows.
The tools that make this work financially: we use Chase Sapphire Reserve and Chase Ink Business Preferred for almost every purchase — the points accumulate into free flights, which meaningfully reduce what looks like high travel spending. Monarch Money lets us see exactly what we’re spending across all accounts and multiple currencies. Both are indispensable.
The LGBTQ+ Reality
This is what people rarely write honestly about.
The experience of being gay and location-independent is not uniformly positive. It requires constant assessment. We’re lucky to be two married men who read as relatively conventional — we’re not navigating the additional layers of visibility that trans travelers or gender-nonconforming people face, and we’re aware of that privilege.
Even so: every new country requires recalibrating how visible to be. In Tirana, we’re comfortable being ourselves in almost every context. In some other places we’ve stayed for extended periods, we’ve been more careful — not from explicit hostility, but from ambient awareness of where we are.
What we’ve found: LGBTQ+ friendliness doesn’t correlate as neatly with geography as the travel guides suggest. We’ve felt more at ease in Tirana than in some nominally liberal Eastern European capitals. Small cities in “friendly” countries can be more hostile than small cities in “unfriendly” ones. Urban centers almost everywhere are more comfortable than rural areas. Reading the local context carefully matters more than consulting a rainbow ranking.
The thing that’s most changed our experience abroad: connection with local LGBTQ+ communities. The queer Albanian people we know in Tirana are some of the most generous, funny, thoughtful humans we’ve met anywhere. When you stop being a visitor and start being a neighbor, even temporarily, the experience changes entirely.
What We Got Wrong
We underestimated how much we’d miss community stability. We had a community in California — people who knew us, who we could call, who shared our history. You can rebuild parts of that abroad, but it takes years, and the transience of digital nomad life works against it. This is the real cost that doesn’t appear on the spreadsheets.
We overestimated how much work flexibility we’d gain. The freedom is real, but so is the reality that good work requires focus, and focus requires some stability. We were more productive after we started anchoring in one place for several months at a time rather than moving every few weeks.
We underestimated the administrative complexity. Banking, taxes, health insurance, visas — none of this is simple when you’re not a resident of anywhere specific. We’ve figured it out, but “figure it out” required time, money, and occasional anxiety.
What We Got Right
We left when we said we were going to leave.
That sounds simple. It was the hardest part. We had reasons to delay. We had objections from family. We had uncertainty about whether we could actually make it work.
If you’re considering something like this: the information you need is available. The tools exist. The main variable is whether you’re willing to accept some genuine uncertainty and live with it.
On Building TrueQueer From the Road
TrueQueer came out of being outside. When you’re living in Albania and following LGBTQ+ news from the US, you see both how bad things have gotten and how much of the coverage is written for an audience that hasn’t left. The gaps in LGBTQ+ media — geographic, topical, tonal — are visible from a distance.
We also saw the gap in Balkans coverage. There is almost no quality LGBTQ+ coverage of this region in English. We’re here. We know people. We can do that.
That’s the honest version of why this site exists.
We keep getting emails from people planning similar moves. The most useful thing we can say: do the math honestly, pick somewhere with a real LGBTQ+ community (not just rankings), and start. The rest is logistics.