- Big Changes Coming
- Part 1. Can We Do This?
- Part 2. Let’s Do This
- Part 3. Tomorrow is Promised to No One
- Part 4. Vive la France?
- Part 5. Portugal
- Part 6. When Do We Leave?
- Part 7. A Goal Without a Plan is Just a Wish
- Part 8: Our Stuff is Now Their Stuff
- Part 8b: Revisiting “Our Stuff is Now Their Stuff” – Results!
The Portugal portion of our story is, unsurprisingly if you’ve actually read parts 1-4, complicated. When we started to sniff around Portugal as a potential Golden Visa target, we found all the things you’ve found if you’ve been doing a similar search. The weather in Portugal is beautiful in most parts. The beaches are exquisite. The people are reputed to be lovely. From a long-term perspective, the government seems relatively stable and forward-looking, the health care stacks up fine in Europe (which means it runs circles around the U.S.)1, the food is not insanely spicy or otherwise difficult to eat… it’s the sweet spot on the chart of cost vs. quality of life. We start to talk around the house like Portugal is “the place.” It feels nice to have some direction. Then we dig down into the details with our financial advisor.
I want to be clear – neither Lisa nor I are financial advisors. All I’m about to present is what we believe we learned. This ain’t the kind of thing you should feel educated by from a blog post. So, that said…. what we realized was that there was no efficient way for us to use our retirement investments to fund the Golden Visa. The money for the Visa would have to come out of 401(k) funds (not, you know, by law, just how our money is situated), and the penalties for premature withdrawal are brutal. And, even if we used one of the strategies for early withdrawal and it actually worked and we didn’t pay a penalty, taking $600,000 out of your 401(k) all at once means it will be taxed at the top of the brackets. In other words, to get $600,000 we’d have to withdraw ~$800,000 or more (don’t math-nerd me on this stuff, I’m keeping it simple on purpose), and that extra $200k we would basically be setting fire to; we’d never see it again. We’re doing ok, but we’re not doing “set fire to $200,000” ok. So, we pivoted to figuring out how we could get post-tax liquidity (that means cash or easily-cashed investments for those of you about as new at this stuff as I am) as fast as possible. We’re talking half a million dollars or so, depending on exchange rates. As I said in Part 4, you aren’t “buying” a visa; your money is invested and there are plenty of legitimate instruments for this. But, you can’t do anything with your invested money for as long as you use the G.V. Since we planned to use it as a path to citizenship, that’s 5 or more years. That’s a long time for that much money to be tied up, for us at least.
For a post entitled “Portugal” I haven’t really talked about the country much, have I? Like I said, it’s a complicated subject for us. As we’ve read about the country we’ve become more and more interested in it. Porto seems to have very Seattle-like weather. At first this appealed to us since we figured we’d have little problem adapting. But then… look, we’ve become trained to respond to bitching about Seattle weather, e.g. “hey, Houston gets more rain than we do!” This is true, and it’s not even close; the difference is Seattle dribbles it out over 7 months or so, while Houston just has downpours every now and then. Or, “our summers are the best kept secret!” and this is also true – from July to September or so it’s actually dry, temperate, low humidity… just drop-dead gorgeous really. On the other hand, as I write this in mid-June, we’ve had weather warm enough to not want a comforter on our bed foooooor about 3 days. There just comes a time in May or so where you can’t help but think “shouldn’t it be warm by now?” So, maybe not so much Porto? There are many diverse climates in Portugal, and we’ve investigated many of them. Surely, if we spend a month toodling about the country, and doing plenty of reading besides, we’d Baby Bear this sucker.2 So… yes, at this point in our process, we were not in love with Portugal the way we were with (aspects of) Italy and France.
The next part of this story is, weirdly, a moment that I can remember super-clearly. Lisa and I were sitting in a couple of Queen Anne-style chairs we have in our living room, talking the same things through over and over and driving each other juuuust the teeniest bit insane, when the idea started to form. “You know… if we’re going to spend the next several years building the funds to get the Golden Visa, running out the clock here in the U.S. while constantly feeling like we’re just waiting for the good part to start… we could, you know, spend that time in actual Europe simply by going the more traditional visa route.” In other words, instead of going on some insane quest to accumulate a massive amount of “extra” wealth, and let’s be clear there’s no guarantee that jobs or stock/housing markets would cooperate for all that time, we could go immediately; the only “sacrifice” is having to adjust to the moderately more restrictive “regular” visa process. Which, come on now, would mean having the run of the continent for about 9x more time than we normally get these days.3 We just sat and looked at each other for a minute. I mean, this isn’t rocket science, I’m sure plenty of people start from this premise at the beginning of their process. But for us, it was like trying to pick a lock and suddenly feeling the tumblers snap into place. This is how we’re going to do it. And just like that, moving to Portugal switched from a happy dream to consider to … well, if not a guarantee, a much more tangible possibility.
So when are we going? Yeah, that’s a whole story of its own.4
1 if you want to debate about the state of U.S. healthcare, do it elsewhere. Lisa went through cancer in the U.S., and we’ve both experienced various minor surgeries, broken bones, and general illnesses over the years. We’ve had parents with ICU-level illness, joint replacements and on and on. We’ve experienced all the vagaries of insurance, and authorizing companies, and all of that nonsense. If you genuinely think the U.S. has superior healthcare, especially considering how much is spent on it, nothing we can say will convince you and nothing you can say to us can drag us back into delusion-land.
2 “This part of Portugal is too warm… this part of Portugal is too cold… this part of Portugal is juuuuuust right!”
3 We vacation in Europe approximately every 3 years for about 20 days, give or take. At the most restrictive period of the “normal” visa process we will get ~60 days in every year that we can be out of Portugal, so 180 days in that same 3-year period. And of course, when we aren’t wandering the rest of Europe we’re still free to rummage through Portugal to our hearts’ content.
4 Sorry not sorry about all the footnotes. You’ve probably noticed that I can be an incredibly parenthetical talker, and it just occurred to me that this might be a more interesting way to format my longer digressions.
Comments (7)
Yes, exactly! My spouse and I did the same analysis. We had been thinking about filing a GV application as early as late 2019, in preparation for moving in 2023-ish. With each of the GV options, the combined gov’t fees and lost earnings potential for the money we would be parking seemed to average out between $200-250k. When covid hit we quickly realized we’d rather just wait till 2021, supercharge our savings, and then park our rumps rather than our assets in Portugal. We submitted our D7 app in late July, and are targeting next month for our move.
“Park your rumps rather than our assets.” LOL I think I want that on a t-shirt! Exactly right, though – we keep thinking “well, maybe we can ‘only’ explore the rest of Europe for a couple of months, but we can either explore Portugal for 10 months or… work a desk job? How is this even a conversation?”
Do you know where you’re going yet? Not to spoil future blog posts, but we should be in Braga by December 1st; love to meet up for lunch or something, and really anywhere in the country is fine by us. 🙂
Greetings from fellow intrepid D7 seekers! We made it through the SF VFS office… Very much enjoying your blog but I can’t figure out how to sign up for notifications or your email list? 🙂 Thank you and best of luck!! Looking forward to following along on your journey.
Huh…. interesting questions. We’re still new at this (or at least, new to inviting more than our immediate family to read us hehehehe) and those things hadn’t even occurred to me. Maaaaybe it’s possible? Please hang tight, I will poke at those features this afternoon and see what’s up with them. 🙂
Hi John & Lisa,
Fellow Seattle-ite here (currently trapped on West Seattle Island) who found your blog via the Americans in PT FB group. I am greatly enjoying following your adventures! Portugal is still pretty distant future for us at this stage – our first visit to the country will be Oct. 2022 – but it’s interesting to see how much our thought process/discussions track with yours.
Looking forward to reading more!
Hi Liz!
Glad you’re here. 🙂 Speaking of fb, have you found the “Puget Sounders Interested in Portugal” group yet? I’m mildly surprised at just how man of us there are, but there are dozens and dozens! There have even been a couple of meet-ups lately.
Since we’ll be old hands (HA!) by the time you’re planning to come over, please do look us up; we’ve learned so, so much from other recent immigrants and I know we’ll be keen to pay it forward when the opportunity arises.
Ok, update. No lie, the same morning that I read your comment, I received an email that someone had just subscribed to our blog. Which, again, I did not know was a thing you could do(!). Soooooo… yeah. The feature is in there, I just need to figure out how to make it less obscure. 😀 More soon.