Before I decided to make this move, I was living in New Jersey on a futon inside my sister's
house because I didn't actually have a home and that was not particularly pleasant.
So I knew I wanted to sort of get out at the earliest opportunity that I could make myself sort of
financially comfortable to relocate.
My name is Steve Tsentserensky.
I'm 35 years old.
I moved to Croatia from New Jersey.
I live on $47 dollars a day here and I make about $4,635 dollars a month.
I learned about the digital nomad visa around August of 2020, reading on a website called Total Croatia
News. It became this little light bulb moment and a goal of mine that I put in the back of my head that the
entire rest of this year I'm going to be working towards getting out by the end of the year and it'll be
Croatia where I go.
Living in Croatia is much cheaper than living in New Jersey or New York for sure.
The first few months I was here, I wasn't spending my money on much outside of groceries and occasional
drinks out and things like that.
It was winter. It was cold.
Now that it's summer, I'm spending more, but it's still within that narrow confines of like
food and a little bit more travel-related expenses now.
My phone bill every month with around 30 dollars in the U.S., generally cheaper than most people's.
Here, it's cheaper.
It's about $12 dollars.
As far as health insurance goes, I pay $65 dollars a month.
I know the average in the U.S.
is north of $400 a month.
If I'm going to go out for, let's say, a lunch, a nice meal, drink and that'll be about ten dollars.
I'll try not to eat a ton of meals out.
I'm spending a little bit more on experiences, going to see things, going to sort of get in amongst the
country, feel the texture of the streets and stuff like that.
I walk everywhere. I don't take public transportation much.
I take Uber occasionally too.
But like, I make a point to have my apartment be as close to the amenities, facilities,
grocery stores, cafes.
I try to be as close to sort of the center of everything as I can.
I've always been pretty frugal with how I spend either that's a byproduct of how I grew up or the fact that I
worked in the ways and places that I worked at weren't financially sort of always stable.
As far as any financial obligations or ties to the U.S., I have no debt, any credit cards I
have, I pay off multiple times per month.
Since I've been here, I use only local currency so I can pull out of the ATM or usually I just use
credit cards everywhere. I use no dollars.
For a living, I'm a writer, video producer, and photographer.
I've been working in video production for about 10 years and writing is actually new, that's something
that came about during the pandemic.
So writing has only been about a year.
Ever since I was a kid, I wanted to travel because of how it was raised.
My parents would always go on these family vacations.
So I thought what you're supposed to do with your free time when you had free time is basically go travel
somewhere. I was living in Mexico prior to being in New Jersey, and as
things got more real with the pandemic, I knew I needed to sort of come back.
It was great being with family, but it wears thin at a certain point when you're you don't have your own
space. I was in Croatia in 2019 for about a month and I knew was a place I already liked.
It sort of captivated my imagination.
It's just an amazing mix of like natural beauty and wonderful cities, great warm people.
And there's a pace of life different within the states.
Croatia is fantastic, but of course, it has its downsides.
I live in a majorly touristic city despite covid, there are a lot of people here from crowded streets and
packed beaches to longer waits for just about everything.
Comes with a lot of annoyances and it could be overwhelming at times.
Another thing is that government and the bureaucracy here are famously tough to navigate.
And while my personal experience was largely without hiccups, the general consensus is you never know what
to expect. Relocating during Covid was, I think, a rather unique challenge.
There's a lot with getting your obviously your PCR test your Covid tests.
There's tons of emails going back and forth.
It was not an ideal time to relocate probably.
I got here January.
Beginning of the year was when it was official that you can actually apply for this permit.
The permit costs about one hundred dollars for all the processing and fees associated with it.
First, you have to show your proof of income of having at least $33,000 thousand in your bank account, or you
have to be making $2,750 per month.
The next step was having proof of employment and having proof of continued income.
Step three would be proving that I had some type of health insurance.
Fourth step was you had to prove that you were staying somewhere.
And the fifth step was having the background check from the FBI.
The one thing I needed that I didn't have, which presented a lot of problems, because it's not the
easiest thing to get fingerprints in Croatia.
The U.S. embassy here doesn't do it.
So I had to find a way to get fingerprints to send it to the FBI, have the FBI do a background check, and
then get that back to me and then get it to the Croatian government.
Initially, when I first came, I was very worried about money because I had just started sort of making money
as a writer and I just had a few video sort of projects come back.
I was worried I was not going to have enough work.
So I started accepting every single job writing job that people were offering when I arrived to look at my
calendar. I had zero free time.
All I did was sit in front of my computer and write.
It made me much more comfortable.
But getting here initially I had savings, but you don't want to dip into that.
Walking you through a day in the life is I wake up around 6:30 ish and
pretty much immediately make coffee.
First thing because it's religion here, is coffee.
Breakfast, we're usually just fresh vegetables some bread, egg, whatever, simple start to the morning and
keep it pretty basic. And then I sit in front of the computer and I start the day and I
work from home. If I want to take a break, I'll either go outside for a walk around the day, I'll either make
lunch here, or go outside and eat outside occasionally.
So that pretty much covers the entire workday.
Pretty good. What do you what are you up to over there?
Eventhough
the digital nomad thing feels exotic and maybe different or like an interesting,
strange way to live, it ends up being pretty mundane and how anyone else would
live. I would stay in Croatia.
The issue is the visa is one year I have to leave for three months After the
permit here expires, I don't have a definite place I'm going to go.
The idea for me is to maintain the sort of freedom to decide not have to go somewhere or be
in a financial situation where I'm in an emergency and need to go back to somewhere.
It's about sort of maintaining the work to create a work life balance and a life that is sort of
maintainable and transplantable with ease.
And that would be sort of the next step.