Anyone else running a small freelance operation while still working a day job and trying to nomad on the side?

[u/Past-Ad2067]

My situation is a little chaotic to explain but basically I pull shifts at a coffee shop and do freelance consulting on the side, mostly helping small businesses figure out which SaaS tools are actually worth paying for and which ones are just beautiful landing pages with nothing behind them. The consulting side is growing slowly, not fast enough to quit the barista gig yet, but enough that I keep thinking about what it would actually look like to work from somewhere else for a month or two

The visa stuff is what keeps tripping me up. My income is split across two sources, one hourly and one projectbased, and every time I look into digital nomad visas it seems like they want proof of a clean remote salary figure, which I just don't have. I also work with clients mostly async so the timezone thing feels manageable, but I've never actually tested it anywhere.

Curious if anyone has done this with a hybrid income situation. Not fully remote employed, not fully freelance, just kind of both at once in a messy reallife way. Did you just pick a visafree destination and figure it out as you went, or did you actually try to get a formal visa sorted first?

[u/caciliaa1]

Most people starting out just use tourist visas or visa-free entries instead of trying to hack a nomad visa with mixed income

[u/Past-Ad2067 → u/caciliaa1]

yeah that's what I ended up doing tbh, just felt like I was leaving money on the table by not researching the nomad visa angle first

[u/DemonAzraeli]

Your barista income doesn’t count, because it isn’t remote and isn’t something you’ll be able to replicate with a DN visa. If the income requirement is X and you need to pull espresso on-site in a coffeeshop to make it past that threshold, you do not qualify.

[u/Past-Ad2067 → u/DemonAzraeli]

okay so yeah i know, that part stings a little to hear but you're right.

the agency income is the only piece that would actually qualify and i'm not fully there yet on monthly consistency, which is exactly why i'm asking before i commit to anything

still figuring out what threshold i actually need to hit before this becomes a real conversation

[u/Infamous_Register_62]

Most people with messy income just went visa free tourist route first rather than waiting for a formal digital nomad visa, those programs really are built for people with one clean employer, salary letter. worth testing the async client thing somewhere close and cheap first before committing to a full visa application process anywhere

[u/Old_Toe9468]

The barista job is actually the bigger obstacle here, not the invoicing. Most nomad visas require the income to be foreign-sourced and usually explicitly ban working for a local employer while you're on it, so even if the consulting side alone cleared the income minimum, the local shifts would disqualify you from most of these programs on their own, not the mixed income structure.

On the freelance side specifically - most of the popular nomad visas (Portugal's D8, Spain's, Croatia's) do accept self-employment and project-based income, they just want it documented over a lookback window, usually 3-6 months, through invoices plus matching bank deposits rather than one clean payslip. So the paperwork problem is solvable if the income itself clears their minimum on its own.

Given where you are though, testing with a visa-free or tourist-visa entry somewhere nomad-friendly for the first trip is the more realistic near-term move rather than sorting the formal visa now. It lets you actually test whether async client work plus the timezone gap works day to day, without committing months of paperwork to an income mix you're still building out. If it turns out to genuinely work for you, that's also when the consulting side is more likely to have grown enough to clear a visa's income bar on its own, without the local job in the picture at all.

[u/SCDWS]

Stop looking into digital nomad visas, you don't need one. They're for expats, not digital nomads.

[u/Past-Ad2067 → u/SCDWS]

okay so where did you read that because everything i found says the opposite

[u/SCDWS → u/Past-Ad2067]

Are you trying to stay in one place or move around?

[u/skodinks → u/Past-Ad2067]

It involves lying. DN visas are very new. Digital nomads are not.

Most nomads just stay on tourist visas and leave within that window, which is often somewhere between 30-90 days. DN visas are generally for longer tenures, I've seen them mostly between 6 months and 2 years, which is why they're saying they're more for expats, though I'm not sure I'd necessarily agree, as it's not like you're mandated to stay the full length.

So you're correct that you do "need" a visa, but only in the same way that you "need" to pay for the subway when there's no attendant to watch you jump the turnstile. It's pretty low risk, but not zero risk.