A new fad or the future of working: digital nomads in Hungary

The digital nomad lifestyle allows for great flexibility and freedom – that is why more and more people decide to leave traditional office-based employment in search of a more unconventional work arrangement. Hungary is a popular destination for digital nomads, too, largely due to the country’s favourable visa policies for those seeking to work remotely.

Earlier this month, CNBC interviewed a 30-year-old digital nomad about her experience living and working in Hungary as an expat. Denae McGaha graduated college in 2016 and after fruitlessly searching for a job in her field decided to look up teaching jobs in Budapest at the suggestion of a friend.

“I felt like such an imposter,” McGaha recalls her experience after leaving college. “Everyone I knew was applying to grad school or landing job offers in big cities, and I was just tired and lost …. I had no idea what to do with myself, but I knew I wanted to keep travelling.”

Within weeks of applying for a job as an English teacher to kindergarteners in Hungary, she was accepted, and in August 2017, she made the move to Hungary. It is now seven years later, and she is still here, but now working in a completely different field.

After losing her job during COVID-19, she re-vamped her previous blog so successfully that businesses started to approach her to help redesign their own blogs and social media. In 2021, she was hired as a remote digital marketing strategist by an agency in Philadelphia. With her US salary, McGaha was able to reduce her working hours to 20 per week at the company, still earning “more than enough” to cover her monthly expenses.

“I’m grateful that living here has given me so many more options for how to spend and save,” she says. “If I lived in Seattle on my current salary, for example, I wouldn’t be able to enjoy the financial freedom I have now or the peace of mind.”

Who are digital nomads?

McGaha says she dreams of being a digital nomad: “I value having the freedom and flexibility that comes with working remotely, including the ability to weave in more travel into my schedule,” she says. “Some Fridays, I’ll hop on a train to the Hungarian countryside for a long weekend and work from there.”

But what is a digital nomad exactly? According to the Harvard Business Review, digital nomadism is “a lifestyle where one leverages remote work to travel and live in varying, often affordable locations around the world,” that “offers an alternative path away from expensive, long-term mortgages and a raft of possessions and instead opens the door for people to maximise their income by living in countries with lower costs of living.”