Expat Life in Bali

By Trevor Fenner | Updated 2026 I left Los Angeles in 2016 with no fixed destination and a laptop. I’d been running ecommerce businesses through Ecommerce Paradise well enough to untether myself from a physical location, and Southeast Asia had been on my radar for years as the obvious place to test what a genuinely […]

By Trevor Fenner | Updated 2026 The visa situation in Bali is one of those topics where bad information is everywhere and the consequences of acting on it can be genuinely serious. I’ve been based in Bali since around 2018, after leaving Los Angeles in 2016 and spending about a year in Bangkok before landing

By Trevor Fenner | Updated 2026 Fair warning: my schedule is going to sound strange to most people. I stay up all night and sleep through the morning. My workday starts when most of Bali is eating dinner. I’m usually just winding down when the digital nomads in Canggu are opening their laptops at their

By Trevor Fenner | Updated 2026 Every few months someone asks me what it actually costs to live in Bali. Not the fantasy version. Not the “I spent $800 a month eating street food and staying in a fan room” version that gets passed around in digital nomad forums. The real version. What does it

By Trevor Fenner | Updated 2026 I grew up in Seattle. Went to college in Los Angeles. Spent most of my adult life in Southern California building businesses, chasing the next thing, operating with the kind of relentless forward momentum that American entrepreneurial culture rewards and rarely questions. My wife grew up in Jakarta. She’s

By Trevor Fenner | Updated 2026 Everyone has a Bali fantasy. The Instagram version: a infinity pool overlooking rice terraces, a laptop open to a Shopify dashboard showing six figures, a smoothie bowl, golden hour light. It’s everywhere and it’s not entirely wrong. Bali is genuinely beautiful, genuinely affordable, and genuinely welcoming to people who