If you’re a digital nomad or considering becoming one, you know that this lifestyle affords you a host of benefits like travel, freedom, flexibility, and growth opportunities, both personally and professionally. But being a digital nomad also requires caring for your finances to support your lifestyle and continue exploring different parts of the world. Many tools can help you manage your finances so you can maintain financial stability.
The tools below will help you manage typical financial tasks—like budgeting, saving, investing, and handling business expenses—as well as the financial needs unique to digital nomads, such as tracking earnings and expenditures across multiple currencies. As a result, you’ll be able to track your finances in the way that best meets your needs. Before we share our top five tools for digital nomads, let’s look at how they can help with budgeting.
How Financial Tools Can Help You Manage Your Finances
The right tools can make tracking your finances simple. While different apps provide different features, you can expect them to help you with at least one, if not more, of the financial tasks noted below.
Expense Tracking
Expense tracking provides an overview of the money you have coming in versus going out in one convenient place. They allow you to see where your money is going from your various accounts and find opportunities to help you become savvier with your finances to reach your goals—whether that’s setting aside cash for your next plane ticket or making room in your budget to indulge in exciting and new culinary experiences.
Tracking Business Expenses & Invoicing
If you’re supporting your nomadic lifestyle as a freelancer or business owner, a robust app or software program can help you keep tabs on all work-related expenses. It will even help you streamline invoicing clients and customers to ensure you get paid for your work and can automate the payment process.
Currency Conversions
If you’re frequently visiting and working from different countries, you’ll undoubtedly benefit from tools that simplify currency conversions. This eliminates the hassle of converting your finances yourself and the potential frustration and confusion that may come with it.
Managing Savings, Investments, and Emergency Funds
While being a digital nomad offers freedom in the present, it’s still important to plan for your financial future with an emergency fund, savings, and investments. These tools ensure you set aside funds for emergencies, investments, and long-term financial goals, with some even helping you begin investing.
Tracking Tax Obligations
Taxes are complex for anyone and even more so for digital nomads. Whether you’re navigating how to claim incomes from different countries or simply trying to track expenses to record on your return, apps can help you organise and gather all the information you need in one place.
Essential Financial Tools for Digital Nomads
No matter your financial needs—personal, business, or both—these are must-have apps for your financial toolkit.
1. Revolut
Revolut is a finance app that allows you to do it all. You can track your personal and business expenses and use it to manage and convert multiple currencies. It also allows you to send and receive money, invest, and link your other financial accounts for a comprehensive view of your financial situation. Revolut has a tiered subscription model, with the most basic features for personal use available for free. The only drawback to this app seems to be that it’s not available everywhere, but if you’re spending the majority of your time and money in Australia, Brazil, the European Union, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, or the United States, then Revolut has you covered.
The app stands out because it can also serve as a POS system and payment gateway for business owners. It allows you to accept a wide array of payment options the same way e-commerce, streaming, and iGaming companies do. And if you’re familiar with the latter, you’ll already know that casino payment methods include options ranging from digital wallets and credit and debit cards to cryptocurrencies. Whatever your preference, these features allow you to keep all your business and personal finances in one place.
2. QuickBooks
QuickBooks is a popular platform for tracking business expenses, budgets, and invoicing. It’s a practical tool for many reasons, and it can help you keep tabs on all the information and receipts you’ll need to complete your taxes. Through QuickBooks, you can also automate bill payments and generate reports to provide helpful insights into your spending and make financial projections for your business. The platform offers tiered pricing, with plans starting at €1.80 per month. The platform allows you to manage multiple currencies but is limited in where it can be used; it’s currently only available in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
3. Wise
For managing multiple currencies, Wise is an invaluable tool. It’s a banking service that focuses on international money transfers. If you’re working in different countries and getting paid in different currencies, it can help you manage this with ease by allowing you to see everything in your preferred currency. This also makes it handy for paying for services in different currencies, as the app automates currency conversion for convenience. It’s free to register for a Wise account and debit card, but there are varying fees—most much lower than traditional banks—for sending and converting currencies.
4. YNAB
YNAB (You Need A Budget) is an app that focuses on helping you be proactive about your finances to actively pursue goals like saving and paying down debt. It allows you to connect your various financial accounts to make tracking simple, though some items need to be manually entered. The platform offers reports that help you understand your spending to make adjustments where needed. It offers extensive resources to boost financial literacy, helping you take control of your money with confidence. YNAB is designed for managing your personal expenses. The app offers a free 34-day trial period; after this, it costs $14.99 USD each month.
5. HoneyDue
HoneyDue is a great tool for digital nomad couples looking to simplify shared financial management, especially if they’re dealing with multiple currencies. It allows you both to connect your accounts, establish goals, create a shared budget, and track your spending by category. It will even inform you both when bills are due and who is responsible for the payment. Tracking shared finances and budgeting can ease financial conflicts—an incredibly common stressor in relationships. HoneyDue is a free service, meaning you can test it out with no financial commitment.
