5 Lies You’ve Been Told About Living and Working from Anywhere

I was sitting in a Lisbon café with my laptop open and a very reasonable flat rate for the month, and a woman at the next table asked me how I did it. I told her. She nodded, then said: “I could never do that — I don’t have enough savings.” She had a fully remote job and a passport with stamps in it. The savings weren’t the issue. The belief about the savings was.

That conversation stayed with me because it wasn’t unusual. I’ve had versions of it in Porto, in Bali, in São Paulo. Smart, capable women who have already done the hard part — built remote-compatible skills, earned real income — holding themselves back with a set of ideas that were never accurate to begin with.

These are the five I hear most often. I believed at least three of them myself before I dismantled them. Here’s what’s actually true instead.

You need to quit your job first.

This one stops more women than any other item on this list, because it sounds like a logical sequence. First quit, then figure it out. In practice, it inverts the order of risk and produces the worst possible outcome: maximum financial pressure at the exact moment you need mental bandwidth to build something new.

A location-free life is not a dramatic departure. It’s an infrastructure problem. The question isn’t whether you’re brave enough to walk out — it’s whether you’ve built the systems that make the logistics work before you test them under pressure. Connectivity, banking, scheduling, gear. None of that requires resignation.

The women I’ve watched do this well built the system first — sometimes over six months, sometimes over two years — and stepped into it when it was ready. Not the other way around.

You need a lot of money saved.

I understand where this comes from. Financial cushion is not a bad idea. The problem is the framing: that the number needs to be large, and that accumulating it is the prerequisite. In practice, this lie functions as a permanent deferral mechanism. The number never feels big enough. The goalposts move every six months.

What actually determines financial viability is burn rate, not savings balance. A person spending €1,500/month in Lisbon with €8,000 saved is in a more sustainable position than someone spending €4,200/month in Sydney with €30,000 saved. The variable that matters is the gap between income and outgoing — and for most women in remote-compatible work, that gap improves when they remove the fixed costs of a high-cost home city.

This isn’t permission to be reckless. It’s a reframe: you are solving a margin problem, not an accumulation problem. Solve the right one.

It’s for young people and free spirits.

This is the most insidious one because it’s dressed up as self-awareness. It isn’t. It’s age-coded permission to stop. And it misunderstands completely what makes a location-free life functional.

The people who struggle with location independence are not the ones who are too old. They’re the ones who treat it as a vibe rather than a logistics problem. You don’t need a particular aesthetic or a particular decade of your life. You need a reliable internet connection, a banking setup that works internationally, a data plan that doesn’t fail in the field, and a device you can work from. That’s it. That’s the whole infrastructure. Age is not a variable in any of those equations.

The 24-year-old with a laptop and nothing to lose is often the one who loses wifi in the middle of a client call and improvises badly. Preparation is the advantage, and preparation is available at any age.

You’ll be lonely.

This one has some truth in it, which is why it’s harder to dismiss. There is a version of location-independent life that is genuinely isolating — the version built around constant movement, refusing to stay anywhere long enough to develop anything. That version does produce loneliness. But that’s a lifestyle choice, not a structural feature of the model.

The loneliness people worry about is usually the loneliness they’re already managing at home, in the same city, in the same routine, surrounded by people they know but not necessarily by meaningful connection. Geography doesn’t create or cure that. What it changes is the texture of the days around it.

Slow travel — staying somewhere for three to six weeks — produces a different social reality than tourism. You find a café you return to. You learn which coworking spaces have the better crowd. You develop the kind of low-stakes daily familiarity with strangers that city-dwellers often miss entirely because they never leave their neighbourhood.

You need to be braver.

I get told this regularly. I do not experience what I do as bravery. I experience it as preparation.

Bravery implies acting in the face of unmitigated risk — stepping into something dangerous with no map and no plan. That’s not what a location-free life is. It’s a system. Before I go somewhere new I know which eSIM covers the country, which bank card won’t charge conversion fees, which neighbourhood I’m staying in and why, what backup I have if the wifi fails. The uncertainty that remains after that preparation is manageable. Not because I’m brave, but because I’m not winging it.

When people say they wish they were braver, they usually mean they wish they were less afraid. The solution to that is not a personality shift. It’s information. The fear is almost always about the unknown — and the unknown is reducible. That’s what preparation does. It converts uncertainty into variables you’ve already solved for.

You don’t need to be braver. You need a better system. Those are not the same requirement, and only one of them is actually within your control to build.

If this post dismantled a belief, the next step is building the system. Start here: the full connectivity stack for remote workers — the infrastructure layer that makes the whole thing actually function.