The Tools We Use to Travel the World Full-Time as Gay Digital Nomads
Four years of full-time international travel has taught us which tools actually matter. Here's the honest list — what we actually use, what we've dropped, and why each one earns its place in our workflow.
People ask us what tools we use constantly. We’ve been traveling full-time since January 2022, running a media business entirely remotely from wherever we happen to be, and the answer has evolved a lot over four years.
This isn’t a list of everything we’ve tried. It’s the list of what actually stayed — tools we’ve used long enough to have real opinions about, that solve real problems we’ve encountered as an LGBTQ+ couple living and working abroad.
Disclosure: some links in this article are affiliate links. We’ve earned commissions from some of these companies. We recommend these tools because we use them — the affiliate relationship came after the decision to use them, not before.
Travel & Points: The Cards That Make This Affordable
Flights are the biggest variable cost in a nomadic lifestyle. We’ve learned to never pay for them.
Chase Sapphire Reserve
This card is the foundation of our travel strategy. The math: $550 annual fee, offset by $300 annual travel credit (applied automatically to any travel purchases), which brings the real cost to $250. In exchange: 3x points on travel and dining globally, Priority Pass airport lounge access (genuinely useful for long layovers), and exceptional travel protections — the trip delay coverage has saved us money on hotels during missed connections.
The Chase Ultimate Rewards points accumulate fast and transfer to 13 airline and hotel partners, including United, Air France, British Airways, Hyatt, and others. We’ve redeemed for business class flights to Europe and accommodation in places where we’d never pay retail prices.
Four years in, this remains the card we’d keep if we could only keep one.
Chase Ink Business Preferred
The business card that pairs with the Sapphire Reserve to maximize the Chase ecosystem. 3x points on travel, shipping, advertising, and internet/phone services — which covers essentially everything we spend money on for the business. When the points transfer to the same pool as the Sapphire Reserve, everything compounds.
The sign-up bonus on this card is routinely 100,000+ points. At $1,500 in minimum spend over three months, it’s very achievable if you’re already spending on business expenses.
Capital One Venture X
We added this more recently as our “everything else” card. Unlimited 2x miles on all purchases makes it the optimal card for anything that doesn’t earn bonus points on the other two. The $300 travel credit and 10,000 anniversary miles offset the $395 annual fee in year one and ongoing. Capital One’s lounge network is growing — not Priority Pass level yet, but getting there.
The strategy in practice: Sapphire Reserve for travel and restaurants. Ink Business for business expenses. Venture X for everything else. Points funnel into two pools (Chase and Capital One) and we book flights strategically depending on availability.
Privacy & Security: Proton Suite
We use Proton for email, VPN, and passwords. This is non-negotiable for how we work.
Here’s why: we access financial accounts, business tools, and personal email from hotel WiFi in Tirana, cafe networks in Belgrade, Airbnb connections in Lisbon. Without a VPN, this is genuinely risky. We’ve used several VPNs over the years and found Proton VPN consistently the fastest and most reliable.
ProtonMail handles our business email with end-to-end encryption. The pricing for Proton Business is reasonable for what you get — encrypted email, unlimited VPN, and Proton Pass (a password manager that’s genuinely good) in one subscription.
Proton is Swiss-based. Swiss data protection law is strict. This matters when you’re running a publication that occasionally publishes political content.
Money: Monarch
Monarch Money is the best personal finance tool we’ve found for a complex financial life.
We have multiple checking accounts (domestic and international), three credit cards, a business account, and expenses in three to five currencies depending on the month. Before Monarch, tracking all of this was a mess of spreadsheets and manual reconciliation. Monarch pulls everything together, categorizes transactions automatically (and lets you correct them), and gives you a clean dashboard of where you actually stand.
The feature we use most: custom reports. We set up a “cost of living by country” report that automatically categorizes and totals everything we spend while in each country. Over four years, we have a genuinely clear picture of what life costs in Albania versus Serbia versus Portugal. This is how we make location decisions now.
Monthly subscription. Worth it.
Accommodation: Booking.com
We’ve tried every platform. We’ve settled on Booking.com as our primary, for specific reasons.
Apartment inventory in Eastern Europe: Booking.com has better apartment listings than Airbnb across most of the Balkans and Eastern Europe. When we’re staying somewhere for three to eight weeks, we want a full apartment — kitchen, washer, space to work. Booking.com reliably has that inventory where Airbnb doesn’t.
Loyalty benefits: Booking.com’s Genius program gives discounts and perks that compound after a few hundred nights. We’re at a tier that gets us free breakfast upgrades and room upgrades at hotels fairly regularly.
Long stay filtering: The “monthly stay” filter is underused. Rates for 28+ night stays are often dramatically lower than the daily rate multiplied out, and many hosts prefer the reliability of long-stay bookings.
The AI Layer: Claude
We use Claude heavily in our publishing workflow — research, first drafts, editing, and building tools (Claude Code literally wrote most of this website). This is not a secret.
Our view on AI in journalism: it’s a tool, like a camera or a word processor. What matters is editorial judgment — the human deciding what to cover, what sources to check, what the honest assessment is. We fact-check everything, we edit extensively, and we stand behind every word published here. AI accelerates production; it doesn’t replace the editorial function.
What We’ve Dropped
Nomad insurance: We tried several international health insurance products and found them consistently bad — high premiums, terrible claims processes, exclusions for the things you’re most likely to need. We now have a more conventional insurance approach with a US-based plan and a separate travel policy for trip interruption. Not sexy, but it works.
Co-working space subscriptions: We paid for global co-working network memberships for about a year and used them maybe 15 times. Coffee shops and apartments serve us better. If you need reliable video call quality constantly, co-working is worth it. We don’t.
Cloud storage fragmentation: We’ve consolidated to Google Workspace for business documents and a single Proton Drive for sensitive files. The era of having different things scattered across Dropbox, iCloud, OneDrive, and Google Drive simultaneously was stressful and expensive.
Full list on our Toolkit page → — all the tools in one place with longer write-ups.
Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links. We earn commissions from some of these products when you sign up through our links, at no additional cost to you. See our affiliate disclosure →.
