Part 2. Let’s Do This

Welcome to the second part of our annotated look back at the process of us moving to Europe. Hopefully, it’s an enjoyable read for you; we’re certainly enjoying going over the process and thinking about what we did well and what we could have done better. Enjoy!

Moving to Europe was still very much a hypothetical at this point, but a couple of things began to break our way. First: we had an absurdly specific notion of where we would move to – Pieve al Toppo, a small town (a village, really) in the Arezzo area of Italy. We had stayed at an agroturismo near Pieve al Toppo on our last trip to Italy, and it checked a lot of boxes for us (not the agroturismo, the town. Living in a hotel would be one of those weird things that people like Greta Garbo did), enough that it seemed like a good place to start. It was itself a small place but nestled in a network of small towns and villages that, between them, offered the variety of experiences you might get from a much larger town or city. It was an easy driving distance to major cities, which means it was also an easy driving distance to the rail network. Having such a specific vision for what success would look like helped take this out of the realm of “dreams” and into the world of “plans”. Second: the initial “are you kidding me??” test passed by pretty quickly. It turns out that as much as it might be a fantasy, neither of us threw up our hands and said, “this is ridiculous.” Believe it or not, this is huge.

Moving to Europe requires, first and foremost, the will to do it. It’s not a herculean task; millions of people emigrate every year. It starts by deciding it is a thing you’re willing to do. (These last two sentences are basically the tl;dr of this entire series of posts.)

So, with neither of us saying “get serious, that ain’t happening,” I began to investigate what it takes to move to another country. My apologies now, if you already know all about this it’s going to be very 101-level stuff for a minute, but not everybody does. Have I mentioned the “About Us” page for getting the short version? (Have I mentioned that it’s been two years and the “About Us” page doesn’t have much on it? That’s embarrassing. Anyhooo….) Anyway, the fundamental thing to learn about if you’re going to move to another country is visas. A visa is the legal instrument that defines what permissions you do and do not have regarding your stay in a foreign country. As far as I know every country has a variety of them for different purposes: tourism, working, studying… you get the idea. You prove to the country you want to move to that you satisfy their requirements for the type of visa you want, and Bob’s your uncle. It’s as simple as that. Not easy, but simple.

One of the visas that most countries have is an “I don’t want a job, I’m not going to school, I just want to live in your fine land” type of visa; it’s called a lot of different things in different places. Usually, the requirements boil down to “have enough money or ongoing income that you aren’t going to be a burden on the state”, although some countries want an actual investment in their markets, or for you to start a business, or some such. By and large, though, it’s just “have X dollars/euros/pesos/whatevs” and then fill out a pile of paperwork. Have you ever bought property? The visa paperwork is like that, only moreso because it isn’t mostly filled out by somebody else and you just sign it all 45 times. You actually have to fill it all out.

In retrospect, this leaves out that the process of finding the right people to receive your paperwork, and figuring out how to get it to them, is not a trivial task. Underselling that is a little disingenuous, although to be fair to us it wasn’t so obvious at the time. In Portugal at least, and especially as this update is being written in early 2024, knowing which agency to use and how to contact them is actually a source of frustration. It still gets worked out, but be prepared with your best frame of mind and lots of patience. On the flipside, we had a very DIY mentality about the process as far as filling out the paperwork goes; you absolutely can pay people who will help you with every step of the way, and if administrivia is the kind of thing that can derail you on a project it may very well be worth your money to use a facilitator!

The next thing you do if you’re thinking about moving to another country, at least if you’re anything like my wife and me, is you start to read.

A lot.

You read books, both of the how-to variety and also memoirs and travelogues relevant to your hoped-for destination. You find the many blogs being written by people who have done exactly what you want to do and think that their story is sooooo interesting that others will want to read about it. (Ahem.) (Extra Ahem.) Some of what they write is inevitably navel-gazing or so personal as to be useless, but there’s usually something thrown in there that will apply to your own situation. You join Facebook groups, of which numerous exist for people who want to move to X country or who already have done; I have a pretty low opinion of Facebook in general, but for the purpose of finding veeeerrry specific communities to connect with Facebook is hard to beat.

Italy’s visa process was actually fairly straight forward on the surface. You get a short-term visa to go to Italy, where you immediately get an appointment to apply for a long-term visa (I believe it was one year to begin with).

“What’s with Italy?” you may be asking. “Don’t y’all live in Portugal?” you may be asking. Yep. This is absolutely the “long version” of this story, with all the twists and turns and especially including the eventual dead ends. It is absolutely true, we did not start out with a plan to move to Portugal, and we still think it’s a valuable lesson – practically everything about a plan to move overseas is subject to review, up to and including your final destination. We are thrilled with how life turned out, but we’d be liars if we said everything went to plan. So yeah, we 100% thought we were aiming to move to Italy when this process started.

And not to get too far ahead of the story, but since we’re already discussing how this doesn’t end up with our moving to Italy – if you’re actually interested in moving to Italy, our friend Rafael DiFuria has a lot to say on the subject and can connect you to invaluable resources.

Once you get that, you begin a cycle of temporary visas until you eventually are allowed to apply for a permanent visa and/or apply for citizenship. If you’ve done any research on this subject, you’re already cackling at my use of the term “straight forward” but, again, I call this “simple but not easy”. Stories abound in the relevant message boards and facebook groups of people going through 10 different hells trying to navigate the visa process in Italy, but in my opinion almost all of those stories boiled down to “I can’t believe they were such sticklers” or “it took forever.” Which, when I read them, I would think “why are you surprised that they are sticklers? Why did you take any short-cuts at all in something so important?” Every story I read of someone successfully navigating the bureaucracy involved pointed to the same basic facts: assume nothing, show some humility, follow every little instruction no matter how picayune it may seem to you, and give yourself enough of a head start that you won’t be panicked about missing a deadline. Well shoot, I can do that, and we’re talking about moving in like 10-15 years, so we’ve got plenty of time.

At least, until I said the next thing.