17-Year-Old Digital Nomad Living on Trains in Europe

Lasse Stolley is a digital nomad from Germany 🇩🇪 who has been living on trains for almost two years.

He recently told the Guardian…

I’m 17 and since August 2022 I have been living on trains. I grew up in a village in the north of Germany. I enjoyed travelling to Scandinavia with my parents and going on nature tours, and was also interested in computer programming. 

I taught myself how to program during the pandemic and decided that was what I wanted to do for my job.

👀 It all started when Lasse saw a TV report about someone who lived on a train…

I could not get the thought out of my head. I loved the idea of having the freedom to travel anywhere in Germany every day. A few days later, I bought my first BahnCard 100, which offers unlimited travel on Germany’s national train network.

That cost him €2664 / $2860 for a year of train travel.

🚂 A typical day in Lasse’s life…

Arriving into a city between 6am and 8am on an overnight InterCity Express train.

I’ll go to the railway company’s guest lounge and eat breakfast. I’ll then have a quick wash in the bathroom, or go to the local swimming pool to shower.

Afterwards, I look at the day’s train departures and choose a destination.

How he pays for everything…

I’m a software developer at an IT startup and work about 10 hours a week. 

The great thing about my job is that I can choose my own working hours. It’s not a problem if I don’t work for a day or two. I use my time travelling on the train to work, so the job fits quite well with my lifestyle.

👎 The downsides…

Living on the train means I have to do without some things that I used to take for granted.

I don’t have privacy. I have also had to reduce my possessions so that everything I own fits into a 30-litre backpack.

But the advantages outweigh the disadvantages.

🤑 Lasse says this lifestyle costs him…

… less than €10,000 a year. That sounds like a lot at first, but it’s very cheap compared with the costs of renting an apartment.

The original plan was to do this for only a year, but I have enjoyed it so much, I’ve decided to keep doing it. At the moment, there’s no end in sight.

He posted on his blog last September that he’d secured an Interrail Global Pass, which allows him to travel on trains all around Europe at a cost of €700 for 3 months.

I doubt Lasse’s lifestyle would appeal to many, but it goes to show the kind of freedom a person can have when they earn a living from their laptop 😎