You could try freelance work for clients remotely. That would give you a lot of freedom to choose where to live.
I am an American living, working (as a freelance programmer) in Czech Republic -- good economy (especially Prague), low crime rate, low cost of living. Happy to answer questions.
I lived in Prague for a short while as a digital nomad. It's a great city and I'm considering coming back more long-term and buying property there. Not only is the economy great, but it's a very walkable city with fantastic public transportation and is generally very clean. All of this was helpful in making each day I woke up a happy day, something that's hard to capture and definitely not the norm for most cities in the world.
So if you do get your remote work job, this is another +1 for Prague being amazing.
Nice to see praise of my city. As a research software engineer I am in the top 1 % percent here so it is definitely a good career choice here.
However, the cost of living is skyrocketing now in Prague compared to the rest of the country and our wages. For the cost of my small flat (60 m^2) I could buy two nice big houses in a smaller city just 60 km from here.
Correct, eLance and other similar websites are an absolute waste of time unless you are ok with competing only on price and you have a very low cost of living.
* Build a web presence that funnels potential leads to you (blog, portfolio, resume, stackoverflow profile with activity like posting questions/answers, programming/freelance subreddits, github contributions and projects).
* Build your personal network via meetups, conferences, etc.
* Toptal [1] is the best platform for finding gigs that I've used, but it could be better. It has short-, medium-, and long-term contracts. Not the best possible rates and it's possible to waste some time with interviews, but it's still a lot better than elance and others.
* Gun.io [2] is something that looks interesting, but I have never gotten a contract through it. So could be hit or miss.
I gave the most consideration to Toptal of all the gig sites, but ultimately even the high end of their rates are below market, at least for someone with 3–5 years experience doing web APIs for startups. I still may consider them for short gigs down the road, but I definitely think it's better to have your own clients.
I know every path is different for every person, and the things that worked for you might not work for other people, but could you tell us how did you get your first remote freelance client?
I posted a short update on Linkedin like "I left my CTO job at {nnn} and started a development shop" and a guy from my network saw it and asked if we could develop something for him
I started doing full-time freelance a few months ago (really independent contracting, not project-based freelance). My initial clients came from companies in my network who I'd met with before and know needed dev work. There's also been some traction with referrals, but working with someone who already knows you and is familiar with your work simplifies a lot.
[And I'll second that the dev marketplace sites are a waste of time. Anyone I've mentioned it to has echoed similar thoughts except for the one-off non-technical person who wants to get a simple job, like converting a json file to an Excel spreadsheet, etc done for cheap.]
The easiest and best option for me was temporary residency, because my partner is Czech. But if you are not in a long-term relationship with a Czech citizen then I recommend a business visa. Here's a fairly straight-forward resource for what is required:
I am an American living, working (as a freelance programmer) in Czech Republic -- good economy (especially Prague), low crime rate, low cost of living. Happy to answer questions.