When you move to Spain, there’s an unbelievable amount of bureaucracy to deal with — and even more so if you’re self-employed and holding the Spain digital nomad visa, like we are. While we’re figuring it out little by little, and I’m working on a checklist for new digital nomads in Spain, one thing that inevitably brings up a lot of questions is the topic of health care.

On the digital nomad visa, my understanding is that we are eligible for Spain’s public health system due to the fact that we’re paying Social Security. However, we still haven’t registered for it. There’s a certain order you need to do things in, and I’m not sure we’ve completed all the steps yet. I wasn’t planning to get a private plan, and I just figured we’d get the public health insurance as soon as we could, but there was one more thing that I was a little concerned about.

What health insurance would we use when we went home to the U.S. for a visit?

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Less than a week after arriving in Alicante, our new home, we’re officially settled into our new apartment! 🎉 While it took a lot of hard work — scheduling appointments, running around town for visits, and speaking Spanish with all the realtors/landlords — I’m glad that it paid off. However, it was a little more difficult than I anticipated in some ways. It turns out that it can be really tricky for digital nomads to find an apartment in Spain.

If you’re a digital nomad in Spain searching for an apartment, keep reading. Not only have I experienced the housing search here in Alicante, but I also went through the process in Madrid a few years ago.

So, now that I’ve gone through it twice, with two totally different experiences, in two different situations, and in two different cities, I feel like I have enough knowledge to share that could be helpful.

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Hello from our new home in Alicante, Spain!

Three and a half years after moving back home to Kansas City from Madrid, I’m finally back in Spain — and the best part is that Matt is with me now, too. 🙂 While our first few days here have been a whirlwind of adjusting to the time zone, looking for an apartment, and even having our TIE appointments bright and early on Monday morning, I’m ready and excited to start sharing our adventure with you all.

Of course, once we got approved for the Spain digital nomad visa, there was an important decision we had to make: where in Spain did we want to live? We talked about different cities for a while, but in the end, we decided on Alicante… a place that neither of us had ever visited before!

It was definitely a little bit risky (but so is moving to another country at all, lol). In the end, there were five main reasons we felt like it was going to be a great fit for us. So, without further ado, here’s why we decided to move to Alicante without ever visiting. [Read more…]

Back in September 2018, I moved to Spain to work as an English language assistant through the auxiliares de conversacion (NALCAP) program. I lived there for two years, four months of which were the initial onset and very early days of the pandemic. While I would have loved to stay in Spain for longer — and bring Matt, my then-boyfriend and now-fiancé — over with me, the craziness of 2020 and 2021 was not the right time to attempt an international move.

Although I moved back home to the U.S. in July 2020, the idea of living in Europe again never left my mind. We thought about applying for a digital nomad visa in Estonia, one of the only ones that were available at the time. But in August 2021, something caught my eye that remained in my sights ever since: a new digital nomad visa was coming to Spain.

Two years later, in September 2023, we’d officially been approved to move to Spain on the digital nomad visa! Here’s exactly what you need to know if you want to apply for the Spain digital nomad visa as an American. [Read more…]