Inside Nomad Tools — Every Feature, Explained
A complete tour of the planning suite for early retirees and long-term nomads: what each tool does, what it connects to, and what’s coming next.
This is the detailed companion to the Nomad Tools overview. Below is everything currently in the app, grouped the way it’s organized inside the tool — Travel, Money, and Life — followed by the outside services it connects to and an honest look at what’s still on the roadmap.
A note on the flags below: Live means it’s built and working today. In testing means it’s built and being verified before we switch it on. Planned means it’s designed and on the roadmap.
Travel & Logistics
Border & Days Tracker
The heart of the legal-compliance side of nomad life. Tracks every border crossing and tells you, per person, how many days you’ve used and how many you have left:
- FEIE / Physical Presence Test — counts your days outside the U.S. against the 330-day threshold for the Foreign Earned Income Exclusion.
- Schengen 90/180 calculator — handles the rolling 180-day window per traveler, so partners with different travel histories are tracked separately.
- 183-day residency warnings — flags when a stay approaches the tax-residency threshold in worldwide-taxation countries.
- Travelers & passports — store each person’s citizenships and passport details; a visa-compliance planner projects whether an upcoming route stays inside the limits, backed by live visa-requirement data (visa-free / on-arrival / eVisa / eTA, allowed stay length, and an official verify link) for every passport-and-destination pair.
Trip & Leg Planner
Plan a trip as a sequence of legs (city to city), with each traveler attached to the legs they’re on. A built-in AI advisor answers freeform questions — best seasons, country sequencing, visa gotchas — using live web research, and lets you save the suggestions you like. Per-leg, it drafts a destination brief that covers both compliance (visa, tax-residency, Schengen) and the practical living details that are easy to forget — power plugs & voltage, climate for your dates, language basics, tipping, water, and SIM/eSIM options — plus card/spending advice for that destination.
Long-Stay Base Evaluator
When you’re choosing somewhere to settle for a while, compare candidates side by side instead of by gut feel. A weighted 1–5 scorecard rates each country on visa path, tax regime, cost of living, healthcare, internet, safety, U.S. flight connections, Peruvian-passport access, and climate — you set the weights and the list re-ranks live. Scores can be AI-seeded and then hand-edited, and it reuses the visa and tax data the rest of the app already has.
Housing Research
Map out where you’ll live across multiple destinations. Save and compare options (coliving, short-term rentals, furnished medium-term apartments) with price, neighborhood, lease length, and a status of considering / booked / passed. An AI-powered search can suggest places to look into for a given destination.
Neighborhood Map
A Google Maps view of wherever you are, with category pins for the things that matter day to day. AI can suggest spots worth visiting nearby, you can import your own Google Maps location history as private pins, and any leg’s map can be shared via a read-only public link — handy for visiting friends.
Trip Notebook
A running log for each trip — highlights, stays, places, restaurants, and notes, tied to specific legs. Drop in a Google Photos album link, and the AI can weave your entries into a saved trip narrative you can regenerate anytime.
Document Vault
Encrypted document storage (passports, IDs, contracts), PIN-gated for an extra layer of protection, with a passport-archive view. The vault also feeds other tools — a scanned insurance contract or vaccine card can be read by AI and turned into structured records.
Guest Visit Planner
When friends or family come to visit, the AI drafts a visit brief, gives you a WhatsApp-ready copy to send, and produces a shareable page so guests have everything in one place.
Emergency Contacts
For every country you’re in, an AI-maintained reference of the nearest U.S. embassy, local emergency numbers, and hospitals — cached so it’s fast and refreshed periodically.
Money & Finance
Guardrails Spending
The flagship financial tool: a retirement-spending engine that turns your portfolio into a quarterly and monthly budget you can actually live by. You pick the drawdown strategy that fits your philosophy, and it does the math:
- Die With Zero — spend the nest egg down to zero by a target age.
- Variable Percentage Withdrawal (VPW) — amortize at a fixed assumed return.
- Capital preservation — spend only the real (above-inflation) return.
- 4% rule (SWR), percent-of-balance, and traditional return-based methods.
Layered on top: an inflation-indexed spending floor and ceiling, present-value credit for future guaranteed income (pensions, Social Security), and an optional tax carve-out that estimates the federal tax on your withdrawals. A side-by-side panel compares all strategies at once.
Tax Optimizer
Model the tax-efficient moves that matter most for early retirees living on investment income — Roth conversions, long-term capital-gains harvesting, and filing-status effects, with support for Traditional/Roth/Taxable, 401(k)/403(b), and more. It includes:
- Account tracking — add accounts and import balances by scanning a statement (AI reads the PDF), with snapshot history and closed-account handling.
- Multi-year projection and individual scenario modeling.
- Cash & T-Bills — a T-bill ladder and money-market (SWVXX) tracker.
Trip Cost Dashboard
Budget vs. actual for every trip and leg, with variance percentages so you can see where you’re over or under. Expenses get in three ways: typed in manually, imported from a credit-card statement (AI extracts the transactions and de-duplicates against receipts), or forwarded by email. Merchant rules let you auto-categorize recurring charges.
Subscriptions & Cards
Track recurring subscriptions in one place, plus a Cards tab that doubles as an ATM/foreign-exchange optimizer — which debit card to use abroad based on fees, reimbursement, and whether it needs a U.S. address. A nomad-readiness checklist covers the basics (Texas address, no-fee ATM card, subscription review).
Rewards & Loyalty
One view of all your airline miles, hotel points, and credit-card rewards, grouped by traveler, with expiry warnings so points don’t vanish. Balances can be synced automatically (see AwardWallet, below) or edited inline.
Currency Holdings
A simple inventory of the physical cash you’re carrying, by currency — useful when you’re juggling leftover bills across several countries.
Health & Daily Life
Medical / Supply Tracker
Check whether a prescription is legal, restricted, or banned in a given country (AI-assisted, cached, with a confidence indicator), track your prescriptions and how much supply you have left, and keep a list of saved doctors. A practical reference — not medical advice.
Vaccinations
Per-destination required and recommended vaccines (AI-maintained and cached), with per-traveler records that handle boosters and supersession, exemptions (e.g. citizens of endemic countries), and the ability to scan a vaccination card — front and back — straight into your records.
Date Ideas
A small delight: AI-generated date ideas tailored to the city you’re currently in.
The Glue: Alerts & Households
Alerts Hub
Everything that needs your attention — expiring passports, visa-day limits, low medication supply, lapsing vaccines — pulled into one place. Each alert can be dismissed permanently or snoozed for 7, 30, or 90 days. The most urgent ones surface on the home dashboard, and weekly email reminders go out for anything expiring soon.
Households, Sharing & Settings
Nomad Tools is built for a household, not a single login. Two people (say, a couple) each sign in with their own account but share one set of data. The account owner can invite members, link multiple email addresses to the same person, set spending caps, manage a calendar feed, and bring their own AI key if they prefer. Each device can also opt into offline access, caching your read-only trip and health pages for flights and dead zones — scoped privately to your household and cleared on sign-out.
What It Connects To
Nomad Tools does the boring integration work so your data flows in automatically instead of being typed twice. Here’s everything it talks to:
- Plaid Live — securely link your banks and brokerages to sync account balances. Access tokens are encrypted; we never see your bank login.
- AwardWallet Live — one-click sync of airline/hotel/credit-card loyalty balances into the Rewards tracker.
- Google Maps Live — powers the neighborhood map and location-history import.
- Google Photos Live — link a trip’s photo album directly into its notebook.
- Anthropic Claude (AI) Live — the engine behind every smart feature: trip advice, document and statement scanning, visa/medical/vaccine lookups, Base Evaluator scoring, and trip narratives.
- Travel Buddy visa data Live — live visa-requirement lookups (status, allowed stay, official application link) per passport and destination, cached so a lookup benefits everyone.
- Email forwarding Live — forward a flight confirmation or receipt and it’s parsed into a crossing or expense automatically.
- Live exchange rates & inflation data Live — currency conversion for expenses and official U.S. CPI figures that keep the spending floor and ceiling honest.
- Email & push notifications Live — weekly expiry alerts and reminders.
Under the hood, the app runs on Cloudflare’s edge network with encrypted storage, secure sign-in handled by Clerk, and all data scoped privately to your household. See our privacy policy for the full picture.
On the Roadmap
We believe in being upfront about what’s built and what isn’t. These are designed and either in progress or waiting on an outside dependency:
- Automatic credit-card transaction import In testing — pull card charges straight into the cost dashboard through your linked bank, so expenses appear without uploading a statement. Built and being verified before we turn it on.
Recently shipped Live — all described above: full offline access, richer destination briefs (power, climate, language), the Long-Stay Base Evaluator, a structured per-country tax & treaty reference, and live visa-requirement data. We move fast.
Smaller ideas we’re kicking around: a language toolkit, a time-zone dashboard, a housing-community directory, a citizenship-document tracker, and a packing-list manager. If one of these would be useful to you, let us know — it helps us prioritize.
Cost & Access
The core planning tools are free, with manual data entry. Automatic bank & brokerage sync and AI-powered features are on the paid plans: bring your own AI key for $6/mo, or AI included on Plus ($12) and Pro ($29) — see plans & pricing. It’s a companion to this site, built for the same audience — people designing a retirement that doesn’t look like everyone else’s.
Nomad Tools is an external web application — the link above opens it in a new tab.