Name: 'Digital nomad' visas are easier to get than ever — especially if you're rich
Uploaded: 2022-11-12T17:36:49.000Z
Duration: 9 min 52 s
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a tasty meal, a nice car, a luxurious home.

But what about a long-term stay as a digital nomad on the beautiful Indonesian resort island of Bali?

Well, with $130,000 to spare in the bank account, that could become a reality too.

Digital nomads have been defined as “people who choose to embrace a location-independent,

technology-enabled lifestyle that allows them

to travel and work remotely, anywhere in the world.”

And while the digital nomad lifestyle has gained much traction since the onset of the pandemic,

the phenomenon has steadily been on the rise since 2014, based on worldwide searches

for the term, which the OECD says started making its rounds online in 1997.

The first image of the digital nomad you have is,

the guy working in a cafe for five hours, trying to get the free Wi Fi,

between Bali, Phuket, and partying and having cheap beers on the beach.

The Indonesian government, however, is taking a slightly different approach

through a “second home visa,” permitting wealthy foreigners,

professionals, investors, and retirees to stay in the country for up to 10 years.

Matthieu Chauveau has been working as an entrepreneur

The people are amazing, the sweetest people in the world, in my opinion. One of the best places

to surf in the world. And it's well located, 2-3 hours from Singapore, Thailand,

not too far from Australia. We have a beautiful villa, at half the price of an apartment in Paris.

The only painful part is sometimes the traffic, but I can live with that.

According to local authorities, the second-home visa -- is a “non-fiscal incentive” for certain

foreigners to make a positive contribution to the Indonesian economy.

And Matthieu has been doing just that. In 2020, he founded Tropic Invest to help

foreign individuals and organizations invest safely in Indonesia. Today, his company

has expanded to facilitate the development of real estate projects in the country.

In Bali, or in Indonesia in general, the property market, you cannot get a loan as foreigners,

so you need to pay cash. So now, around Canggu, a villa will be $350K or $400K,

$500K, so it's quite a lot of money So it's clearly that type of people,

that this new visa wants to attract. Because they bring wealth, they will spend,

buy houses, send their kids to school, they will maybe set up new companies.

Indonesia is just one of the many countries that have launched new visa

programs targeting digital nomads like Matthieu.

As of June 2022, more than 25 countries and territories have

introduced their versions of digital nomad visas to draw remote workers,

according to a report by the Migration Policy Institute, a US-based think tank.

Kate Hooper is a policy analyst who co-authored the report.

Even though the first programs were really introduced around the pandemic, initially as

a way to substitute for the fallen tourists that happened during the early months of the pandemic,

they now seem to have outlived the travel restrictions of the Covid era. And so we're

now seeing more and more countries introducing these programs with fairly competitive terms

around how long you can stay, the minimum income, and various other sort of arrangements like

whether or not you have to pay income tax. So, there's an element of competition.

According to Indonesia's tourism minister, 95 percent of digital nomads

surveyed rated the country as a top destination for remote work.

So which factors do digital nomads typically consider when moving to a new destination?

We wanted to pursue something different, different environment. We knew that for the nature

of our business, we could provide a service here, as well as internationally. It's one of the biggest

powerhubs in Southeast-Asia. The way that systems work here, I call it lifestyle optimization.

It's definitely about lifestyle, I'm a new mother, and to get some help

at home, I'm a very busy businesswoman, and so trying to juggle the two was really hard

and with the skills shortages in Australia, it was hard to find help.

So, I decided to move here for lifestyle and also

I grew up on an island myself, so I wanted that for my daughter.

For Matthieu, a longer-term perspective helped him narrow down the options.

Many people think Indonesia is a very far country and not very well developed. Actually, Indonesia is huge,

280 million people, the growth is amazing, 6 percent a year. And in the next 5 years, 10 years

they will become much bigger than France, U.K., Europe. If you're an entrepreneur, and you want

to be close to one of the fastest-growing markets in the world, then you need to be in Indonesia.

But adopting a digital nomad lifestyle isn't easy. A report by independent workforce management

platform MBO Partners noted that personal safety, being away from family and friends,

and loneliness were among the top challenges cited by American digital nomads.

So how does Indonesia's second-home visa stack up against other countries?

The simple answer is that it differs in three fundamental ways. In other countries,

digital nomads are typically business owners or employees of a company in their place of origin.

In Indonesia, candidates need not be employed, but are encouraged to invest in the country.

If you want to capture part of this market, you cannot do it without being based in Indonesia

or partnering with someone in Indonesia. The  regulation is very tricky to understand;

you need the right lawyers, notaries, it takes time.

Secondly, most visas offered elsewhere permit digital nomads

to stay for up to a year, with the option of extending in certain instances.

Whereas in Indonesia, the period of stay is up to 10 years.

And finally, wherein some proof of monthly or yearly income is required for most countries,

Indonesia requires a six-figure sum in applicants' bank accounts.

There's a history of retiree visas in the region and this is where I think

Indonesia's new visa really aligns with, more than digital nomad programs -

geared towards people who aren't currently employed, might have passive income,

but are quite high net-worth individuals and allowing people to stay for longer periods of time.

But there are questions about how these visa programs will be implemented.

For example, issues around taxation, social security, and labor laws.

Kate tells me this requires a policy rethink.

The ability to work from anywhere, and the reality of immigration systems and employment systems,

taxation systems, are all built with a particular country in mind. There's an interesting gap

between the interest of employers in offering remote work policies as a perk to attract workers,

and what they feel comfortable offering. So even with some of the more high-profile,

work from anywhere policies, it ends up being a little bit more restricted,

because I think employers are worried about falling foul of some of these rules.

According to the OECD, digital nomads, as with any other foreign resident,

are considered tax residents in the host country after 183 days. However, several countries,

including Croatia and Mauritius, have issued tax exemptions for up to one or two years.

If you work in Indonesia and you generate revenue in Indonesia,

you should definitely be taxed. If you earn a million dollars,

one of the main criteria to decide where you will be based will be on taxation.

Whether these digital nomads will have a sizeable effect on the local economy,

There have been some studies trying to pass out the different economic

benefits and potential drawbacks of digital nomads, but they're really in their infancy.

So these studies take into account things like the impact on local housing prices,

spending by digital nomads in restaurants, on services, on cars, as well as some of the more