Part 7. A Goal Without a Plan is Just a Wish

(attributed to Antoine de Saint-Exupery)

(the photo is not relevant. Nothing interesting to look at it in this post, so that is us in front of Bodiam Castle in Sussex, England.)

It’s great that we have dates marked on the calendar for when we leave, but what about everything before that? What exactly do you do to get to Portugal? There are many great resources out there; what I’m about to write is an overview. When you are ready to dig into the details, particularly for the D7 visa part of the puzzle, you should run, don’t walk(!), to Facebook for the Americans & Friends in Portugal (“AFIP”) group. Even if you share my irritation towards Facebook in general, you need to make an exception for this group. It is fantastic, and has a file section that they should charge admission for. But, for all the help that this group will provide you, the visa is not the entire deal.

(Let’s just get this out of the way: things change. They continue to change. As time goes on this will more and more be a historical document rather than practical advice. The tone of AFIP seems to have deteriorated over the years. Their file section is still worth your time, but I can’t describe the mood in their as friendly or helpful at this point. Still worth your time, just tread carefully.)

When we shifted our thinking from “wishing” to “we’re gonna do this!”, the first thing we did was start gathering a list of aaaalll the things we would need to do. Before you get too impressed, let me say up front that the initial list was laughably incomplete. (Let me say up … from hindsight?… that the final list was still pretty incomplete, but you don’t know what you don’t know. Pão pão, queijo queijo.) Still, we wrote down everything we could think of, and in the following months we’ve added to it time and again. We’re probably going to write in minute detail about all of this as time goes on (/me looks at list of blog posts…. yeeeeaaaahhh….), but here’s a rough guide for how we got our arms around the issue.

First of all, we broke the task into the broadest, 10’000-foot view buckets we could come up with. There were 3; 1 & 3 were “USA” and “Portugal” respectively. 2 was “transitioning between 1 & 3”. Bucket #2 is the one that glowed the shiniest, with things like the D7 visa process and all that that entailed. However, the other two buckets were just as important, with some deadlines that can sneak up on you if you aren’t careful. Without speaking for anyone else, I can tell you that we were guilty for a time of spending all of our time worrying about that 2nd bucket, which left us scrambling a bit with the 1 & 3.

(Quick aside: if you have project management experience, whether with old-school GANTT charts or with the latest AGILE methodology, some of this stuff is going to be intuitive and obvious. Not everybody has that; you can skip ahead if you like. :)) (That’s an old aside, not a new one. Plus ça change…)

Bucket #1: USA

This is where we started writing down everything we need to do in the US that doesn’t have anything to do with Portugal (other than via karma, at least). At this point we weren’t 100% sure if we were going to sell our house or keep it as a rental; some countries really like to see an ongoing income stream and “sensible withdrawals from our retirement savings” doesn’t always cut it. So, we add “learn about income requirements” to the list. From there we start to sketch in both branches, with things like “contact real estate agent OR contact rental management company” and so on. THEN we realized that we could literally go insane if we diagnose every conceivable path, plus we’d do a tremendous amount of work for paths that we weren’t going to follow. So instead, we set a pretty fast deadline for figuring this part out. That became the model for our earliest plans – if we could see multiple possibilities for a task, we set early deadlines for whatever it would take to make decisions. Otherwise, we’d be planning for five trips worth of trips! Bucket #1 soon filled up with projects like “Sell house”, “dispose of our possessions” and “spend time with anyone we need to see before we go”. BIG projects; we’d get into fine details a little later (and so, then, shall we here at the Ramble).

Bucket #2: the Liminal Space

(Ever since I learned the word “liminal” I’ve just adored it… I’d probably be insufferable if I ever got one of those word-a-day calendars.) (… plus ça change…)

So getting from the US to Portugal is, in some ways, the easiest thing to make plans for. Executing those plans is a different story, but still. As I said earlier, the AFIP group on Facebook is worth somebody’s weight in gold; so many people who have gone before have left excellent roadmaps for how they got there. Very few of these plans can be 100% cribbed for your own use, but still – it’s a hell of a head start. Into bucket #2 went “get a D7 visa” which, soon, we replaced with the component parts of the D7 process – sometimes a big picture can be TOO big, and “get a D7 visa” is so abstract as to be useless. Instead, we placed “get passports in good order”, “get NIFs”, and so on. THOSE projects are still pretty big picture – there are certainly tasks encompassed within them. We also used this bucket to track our travel itinerary, make decisions about what we needed to bring, establishing contacts in advance of our trip, and so on. The D7 is absolutely the biggest, scariest-LOOKING thing in this bucket, but if you myopically focus on it you could get to the far side of your VFS appointment and realize you don’t know what to do next. That might sound ridiculous, but I’ve seen the stories from people in that exact situation. Try to be thorough, and get everything on a list or calendar SOMEwhere.

(I’m pretty sure we talk about this down the road a ways, but since this part can maybe heighten your D7 panic, here’s the Golden Rule of D7s (and really a lot of things): do exactly what you’re told. We hadn’t diagnosed this particular, and peculiarly, American psychological problem, but too many of us say things like “surely it’ll be ok if…”, or “that’s dumb, I’m going to ….”, or “this document does the same thing, I’ll use it instead” and so on. If that’s you, I encourage you to break that habit post haste. Do exactly what you’re told and provide exactly what you’re told to provide. You’re not smooth-talking your way past anything in this process.)

Bucket #3: Portugal

Obviously this is the sexy bit, but for all that it’s the other end of the rainbow there are still things you want to understand before you land. Big picture – where are you going to live? What sort of accommodations do you want? (Also, what details are necessary to satisfy D7 requirements; but that’s more details for another day.) How do you make sure you’ll have utilities for your home once you get there? Phone service? What are you doing about learning the language? (Small preachy moment here – don’t be one of “those people” who learn “please” and “thank you” and “where’s the bathroom” and call it a day. If you’re this far into our series on moving to Portugal, you aren’t a tourist. You’re going to be as much a resident of your new town as you are in your current town/city/arcology, so reside there. That means being able to talk to the other people in town. Nobody expects fluency from you any time soon, but show a good faith effort. Ok, off the soapbox.) (About that soapbox: we still stand by it, but in the name of honesty you should know that you *can* get by without much Portuguese. It’s easier in the south of the country (Brit tourists swarm the Algarve every year and it’s had a sizeable impact) or the biggest cities (Lisbon, Porto), but you can do it.) I think having a set of defined tasks in this bucket is useful for a couple of different reasons. The first, obvious, reason is that this stuff needs doing. You need your utilities, you need phone service… the things you put in this bucket will need doing. And second – having a nice chore list for when you arrive will stave off a potential feeling of overwhelming.. er, overwhelmedness. Like, it’s going to be ALL NEW. You won’t know anything about anything. If your schedule starting the day after you arrive is just one big empty page, well… we’re all wired differently, but I know I would find that incredibly daunting. Having at least some idea of what I should be trying to accomplish in those first days will be a huge help in not feeling lost at sea. After that? I dunno, I’m not there yet! I’ll tell you all about it in a few months. 🙂 (Yep, have as much of a plan in place for that first stretch as you can – I cannot even imagine what “we’ll figure it out when we get there” would have been like. We knew who was going to help us with early tasks and when they were going to do it.)

Postscript: Marrying the timelines

Maybe I’m the only person who will find this interesting, but I want to start jotting down where we actually were in our process as these posts are being published. This post was begun in July or so, and fleshed out on October 24th, just before going up for publication on the 25th. It was updated in early-June for an early-June publication.