After that first trip the first half of the year had a quick jaunt down to the Alentejo region of Portugal, a trip back to the States for Lisa to see family in San Francisco, and then the Roman Empire made its annual reappearance in town with Braga Romana.

In May we house- and pet-sat for some lovely folks we met through friends (and who are now our friends to boot!), forcing us *ahem* to spend a few weeks in London.

We knew that we’d be slowing down more once fall hit since we’d be starting our Portuguese language class, so we bopped down to Aveiro, finally played tourist for a bit in Lisbon, and John snuck in a trip to see his parents in South Carolina. It’s funny, I think we consider this our quietest year yet since we moved, but that’s still more trouble adventure than we ever got up to living in the States. Thanks for reading along and we’ll see you in ’25!

tl;dr: the managed seller auction pickup process is so easy, we could have left the house for the day.

2024 tl;dr: this is a factual account of how selling our stuff went, so there’s nothing more to add, really. For all that we might have edited our belongings differently with the benefit of clearer foresight, we remain happy with the results from MaxSold and recommend them to people looking for their kind of service. Read on for the blow-by-blow of how it all went.

As discussed awhile back, we sold essentially everything we owned before leaving for Portugal. Our belongings were divvied into lots, and those lots were listed on a website to be auctioned for approximately two weeks. (You can read more about it at that link above to Part 8 of Moving to Portugal.) Once the auctions were completed, auction winners were slotted into times on Saturday to pick up their plunder. Three ladies from a company called MaxSold showed up about 30 minutes prior to the first scheduled pickup. (We do not have an affiliate relationship with them, they just happen to be who we used.) They went through the house making notes about where the various lots were and if any buyer had several lots to pickup (many did). They put out an A-frame with a big “MaxSold” logo on it, and divvied up responsibilities. One mostly handled the upstairs lots, another the downstairs ones, and the third the ones in the garage. Both of the downstairs ladies took turns checking IDs and managing the number of people in the house at any given time (for COVID protection). We helped a bit, but were pretty superfluous and even left before it was completely done. When we returned, we found our house tidy and locked up tight. The MaxSold team was professional and courteous.

There were a few minor issues:

• One person showed up for pickup about an hour early and sat in her truck out front until it was time. (Turns out she’d been given the wrong time by MaxSold, a minor problem and no one fussed.)
• One person picked up half her items and then lost track of the fact that she had more and left. We figured this out about an hour before the pickup window closed and MaxSold called her. She came back that evening (at our convenience) and picked up the rest.
• People came when they came, and it rarely had much to do with the time they were scheduled to arrive. This made for some VERY BUSY and intense periods when we had people getting their items while others waited in the chill because we had to restrict the number of people inside at any time.

One thing I can’t stress enough about this process: you need to be ok with your belongings going for fire-sale-level prices. It doesn’t matter that you paid $3k for that couch from Pottery Barn, and maybe could have sold it on craigslist for $200. It sold at auction for $30. (Or even $1.) MaxSold makes it clear that part of their mission is to re-home rather than send to landfill, and you need to make that part of your acceptance process. This is probably the same emotional process needed for a garage sale, but it’s definitely true here. People hunting through these auctions are looking for steals, not for reasonably priced merchandise.

Now for the Plus!!! part of this post.

The first auction went so well, we went ahead and signed up for a 2nd auction, but this time managed by us, to get rid of the things we had to keep on hand while we waited for the house sale to close. This selection mainly included the bare necessities of furniture and sundries that we needed to keep living during the month or so that our house sold and then closed on the paperwork. So, a bed frame, a few chairs, television etc… We negotiated (that is, we asked and MaxSold gave us) a flat 30% fee on the auction.

Hard numbers: The first auction was 80+ lots and netted us just under $1000, the second auction was 28 lots and netted us just under $900.

Unsurprisingly, you don’t “make” money from MaxSold, but doing the lots yourself nets you more. That said, $700 for someone else to put together so many lots and then manage the pickup process was worth every penny. If I were to do it all over, I would have done smaller auctions, managed by us, over 4-6 weeks. The numbers likely would have looked more like:

Three auctions $3600
no fee
commission $1080
total $2520
actual $1846
potential increase $673

Back to 2024: And with this, we conclude our re-visiting of how we got to Portugal. Next post is entirely new content! Here’s a pictorial tease.

One of the people in our area (henceforth known as RV) in the Americans and Friends in Portugal facebook group (henceforth AFiP) group mentioned they were using MaxSold to sell everything in their house. I was intrigued and immediately had a look at their website. It looked intriguing, potentially even the answer to the ancient questions, “how do 2 people in a 4 bedroom house get rid of everything they own without going insane?” (Ok, back then it was a cave, not a house, but still . . .) I asked RV a few questions about how it worked in reality, which he was great about answering. He also told the group real numbers, which is always helpful. We were very excited about this being the answer. But . . . I’m a worrier and we were still in a place of needing to “get value” from our stuff. (I did think I was more past it than it turned out I was, I confess.) A lot of our more valuable things are jewelry and “investment” art. When I looked at auctions and zeroed in on those things I was shocked at how little people were paying for those kinds of items. This bummed us both out, and we started going back on forth.

There’s nothing to add to the following commentary; Lisa did a great job of telling this part of the story. The retrospective thought boils down to this – we had no idea what we actually should have kept, and there’s a good chance that you’ll have a similar problem. We did not know how our life would pan out in Portugal, that we’d have a large community of friends and a spacious apartment suitable for entertaining when we want. We thought we were going to be living in a spartan place which just served as a home base while we were out gallivanting across the continent. As such, we shed a lot of stuff that we might have made good use of if we had it. And have ended up replacing in our new life. If you have any such uncertainty in your own travel plans, we suggest you go bigger on a storage unit in the US than you may originally have planned, with the expectation that you’ll be editing the contents down as time goes by. Either that, or bring more than you otherwise might have, with the intention of divesting here when your lifestyle comes into focus. Anything you can do in the US can also be done in Portugal, although of course you will have paid to transport those things you don’t end up keeping, and like so many other things it will be more trouble to manage the process in Portuguese.

What really got us worried was that we had generated a pretty tight timeline for getting rid of everything before painting the entire interior and that was only the week before we were going to list the house. Here’s the thing: MaxSold will try to sell anything we ask them to (subject to their policies, of course), but are not responsible for the disposition of anything not sold. That would be up to us. In a worst-case scenario, we could end up having to rent a truck and making multiple runs to the dump mere days before the house gets painted, having paid a fee for the service.**

So we made three decisions. One was to work with an Art Seller to sell our signed art (mostly Mangelsen and a bit of McKnight), another was to find a local jeweler and have my collection appraised. The final decision was to do a kind of test run for selling things on our own.

The garage seemed like a good place to start. We had a variety of items, none were needed, and many were good value we could offer for low prices. We spent a weekend photographing items and making listings on Facebook Marketplace and the Seattle-specific Craigslist. We then spent a week monitoring email and Messenger answering questions and making appointments for people to get the stuff. Out of 25 listings for tools, games, luggage, and various household items, we sold about half. To sell those 12, we had to speak to more than 100 people and made about 30 appointments. The number of people who simply did not show was absurd. In the end we had one absolutely superb buyer (who ended up taking items we were going to sell in the future because she mentioned a need and we could do the transaction) and several great (pleasant, easy) transactions, and many weird/ odd/ just fine interactions. It was not an encouraging ratio.

It was exhausting. Absolutely not worth it for us to go that route.

With a quick email I was in touch with a rep at MaxSold who went over the two ways to work with them:

1. You do much of the work to create “lots”, take pictures, and write up the descriptions.
2. You pay them $700 to do that work for you.

Either way, they post the lots online, handle the auction technology (accepting bids and getting payments from buyers), and are onsite for the scheduled pickups by buyers. We chose to also pay to have a Move Manager do much of the work for us, feeling that we didn’t know how to best organize the lots. We were able to schedule a date for them to come catalog the items about two weeks after the first contact, and were sent several helpful videos about how to get ready for the cataloging.

Getting ready for the cataloging is a matter of:

• Getting rid — via recycle, landfill, or donation — of as much as possible. This is a crucial step because they do not move furniture or open boxes, and creating lots takes up a lot of room. You need as much clear space as possible.
• Putting like with like. Gather all your lamps, pottery, linens, books, office supplies, tools, whatever, into one place. Your manager may not think its a good idea to make a single lot of them all, but its the best way to start. Think like a buyer and put your stuff in groups with a value of more than $35. I used each shelf of my china cabinet to create a lot for my dish set, another for my collectible figurines, and the third shelf for a collection I put together of some fine crystal, Swarovski crystal animals, and a dried flower arrangement.
• Moving all personal items away from things being sold. This is mostly to make it easier for the catalogers. They use tape to mark where a lot is stored (making pick up day easier), so you need to keep your personal stuff separate, especially valuables.
• Cleaning out drawers and shelves. Dresser drawers need to be empty, the catalogers will need pictures of everything — they open drawers, open doors, and take pictures of it all.
• Sorting low and high value items. Low value items are best when isolated and grouped together with a high value item or two added in for interest.
• Creating a mindset in which you are OK with all of this stuff leaving your house.

That last point is tough, more so than you might be able to imagine at the outset. We knew for months before that we were selling everything, but in the two weeks between cataloguing and pickup we were irritated, sad, and relieved in turn. What we didn’t think about before the lots were created was that we had to live in the house for a few weeks afterwards. We made it a day, then got a few boxes and put whole lots from the kitchen area into a single box at a time so they’d be easy to locate afterwards. Looking at the things from our life grouped together was a bit of a bummer, memories captured in the tchotckes, pictures . . . even the dishware. It’s true that not all of the emotions that came up were negative — this is where the feeling relieved comment comes into play. But most of us do our best to avoid negative emotions, and cleaning out an entire house is pretty much guaranteed to bring it all right into our lives.

In my next post I’ll tell you how it went. Here’s my tease – it went pretty well.

[Editor’s (aka husband’s) note: we don’t have an affiliate link with Maxsold. We don’t own stock. We are, in fact, bad business-people, but this is just our story, nothing else.]

*Note that Maxsold is not everywhere, so it may not be the answer for you.
**This is very much about not adding to landfill for us, not making money. A little is getting value, yes, but mostly its about not adding to landfill.

(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.

We’ve decided that we would like to move to Portugal. Great! Now how exactly do we make it happen and when will we be able to afford it. We work some things out with our financial advisor (again!) and have a solid plan that, according to some extensive modeling, seems to be 80%+ likely to result in a successful post-work life, starting at Lisa’s 59-and-one-half birthday, which is when we gain access to her 401(k)1. (Verb tenses are tricky when you’re mildly updating a 3-year-old blog post. Mostly I’m just leaving them alone; sorry if it ever gets confusing.) That puts retirement day, or “R Day”, in early 2027. So, ok, solid plan. The only problem with it is, for both of us, once we started thinking in concrete terms about moving to Europe, we really lost patience quickly with the idea of waiting so long. (The history of us shifting from “let’s be very deliberate and consider all our options” immediately into “LFG!!!!!” is a long one. The last house we bought teetered from “it’s a slow day, let’s check out one of the new neighborhoods in the area” to “BUY BUY BUY!” a la the Duke Brothers in about an hour.) I2027 is already far earlier than we ever expected to do it, but that doesn’t change the fact that we had the bit in our teeth and we didn’t want to spit it. We kept noodling on plans. We figured out how to maximize our savings with a larger balance outside of our retirement vehicles (401k, IRAs of all kinds…) because we could basically “buy” months of early retirement by being able to pay cash on the barrel. In other words, if our monthly budget in retirement is $7000, every $7000 in liquid, non-retirement savings is a month we can chop off of the wait to move. (This simplifies a lot of things, like moving and initial expenses, maintaining emergency savings and so on, but you get the idea.) We figure that the process of time passing + increased saving money over that time will meet at about 18 months or so of extra retirement. Awesome! We’ve moved “R” day all the way up to late 2025. That’s way closer, right?

(We won’t keep saying this over and over, but we are not financial advisors. This is a description of how the thinking worked for us. If you need a guy, we still like ours.)

Welllll yes, it is way closer, but still. The small-child portions of our brains were still very much “but I wanna go nooooooww!”, and we weren’t really fighting all that hard to hush those voices. There are some personal considerations that we won’t get into just now, but Lisa in particular has carried a very difficult situation in her life for many years now, and she’s done so with tremendous grace, but retiring and/or moving would cut the situation cleanly out of her life, and I’ve wanted that for her very badly for a long time now. If you’ve guessed what came next, congratulations – again, not rocket science, but we had to work through these things at our own pace.

The home we live in has been a question mark for some time now. Some people in the retirement-advice game suggest that you make your home a rental property while you’re gone, as your destination country really likes to see an ongoing income stream even if you’re retired. Also, it means you’ve got a home to come back to. On the other hand… we’ve been assiduously paying down our mortgage for the 11 years we’ve lived here and owe less than $200k. Have I ever mentioned that we live in a suburb of Seattle, Washington? (Alarm bells just started going off for some people.) This is one of the absolute hottest real estate markets in the country lately; this was written in June of 2021 and is publishing in October of 2021 – hello, readers from the future! (Hi, me! I’m a reader in the future! What the hell, let’s keep it going – this is publishing in June of 2024; hello readers from the further future!) The housing situation tweaks my liberal guilt, as it makes housing less and less affordable for people who need it. However, it can’t be helped that it’s also insanely good if you’re a seller. (The best we could do is try to sell to, you know, actual humans who need a home rather than to an equity pool that is merely expanding their rental portfolio; we managed to pull that one off, thank goodness.) Normally we ignore news about the housing market in Seattle, because we’ve liked living where we do; this means any thought of selling our house has always been immediately followed with “yeah but then we have to buy back into the market, so that’s basically a wash.” Sure… but what if we aren’t buying back in? What if we take the money and, almost literally, run? We re-do some numbers once again(!) only with the infusion of our net gains on our house and, suddenly, we have incredible freedom in picking our “R” day – it has gone from ‘maybe someday’, to ‘very plausible in the future’, and all the way to ‘not quite pack our bags, but definitely start shopping for luggage.’ We come to settle on May of 2022(!!!) as our target. This is incredible! At this point, we tell ourselves, the only thing we aren’t sure about is whether we really are going to Portugal.

We had booked a “scouting trip” to Portugal for October of 2021, hoping that the pandemic would have loosened up enough by then that vacation travel would be allowed again. We have a nice itinerary picked out, where we’ll spend some time in a few different likely spots to settle into. And let’s just settle this now – yes, you’re right, that’s not really enough time to be sure about a place to live in. For sure. However, you are required to have a one-year lease already signed when you apply for your visa, so you’ve got to pick some-where. Some people decide to make several trips before picking a place, which is a perfectly reasonable way to do things. What Lisa and I decided was that we wouldn’t be moving with a lot of household goods; we’d be renting a furnished apartment. And, well, we can put up with ANYTHING for a year. So, we were going to do our best to find a landing spot, land there, and if we hate it we have twelve months to ramble (a ha!) around the country and find where we want to go next. It’s just no skin off of our noses. So, good? Good. Trip in October, come back and have a “come to Jesus” meeting on November 1st; a household meeting (I mean, there’s just the two of us, but whatever) where we look each other in the eye and say “yea or nay” to this whole expedition. Assuming “yea”, we’d then have from November to May to get our affairs in order. No problem-o. (We also come up with this really lovely plan to sail across the Atlantic to begin our new life; it started out as a way to make the best of not having enough airline miles for another international flight so soon after October, and also to avoid showing up to our new home jet-lagged. The more we ponder it the more we really like the idea.) (While we did eventually sail across the Atlantic, it was on a different trip, years down the line….) The November 1st house meeting began to loom in our household as a Very Important Date. We would explore, then we would Decide.

Ok, it blows my mind that this post is missing one of the most important conversations of our entire lives; certainly one of the most critical one of this process. Dear Lord, amateur writers indeed. So, here’s what we totally forgot to write, back in the day: one quiet evening, we are sitting in our beloved, now-gone Queen Anne chairs, looking out on our peaceful backyard. We’re chewing the fat on some aspect or other of our scouting trip, just noodling around. Something about the tone of the conversation starts to tug at my attention, and eventually I get the courage to say to Lisa, give or take, “we are talking about this plan in pretty concrete terms. ‘We will go on scouting trip at X.’ ‘We will make a decision on November 1.’ ‘We will begin the consolidating process before year-end.’ Et cetera… Sweetie, do you think there’s any chance that we’re going to come back from our scouting trip and decide not to move?”

She goes very still. Now that I’ve said it out loud she realizes she’s been thinking it, too. With a slow, nervous smile she looked at me and said “no, not really.” It was like when you find the right key for the door you’re trying to get into and you feel the lock click open. “So, why,” I asked her, “are we bothering with the scouting trip?” And I swear to you it was just that simple. We’d already decided that we were comfortable with the idea that we could put up with anything for a year if we had to, so why not treat that as, at worst, an extended scouting trip?

Ok, so that’s the last revision to the plan, right? We don’t need the scouting trip, so we’ll save a little money there, and we’ll start laying out the details for the mid-2022 move. Awesome!

Except!

Except. As we are noodling around with our plans, we see several houses in our neighborhood go on the market and sell, almost instantly, for significant amounts over their asking prices. Like I said, insanely hot market. The numbers keep going up. And somewhere out of the blue (but certainly out of much thinking in her mind) Lisa says to me “if our house would sell for an additional $50,000 from where we’ve been budgeting, I’d be comfortable with leaving earlier.” See, our budget had included what we already thought was an optimistic estimate of a sale price for our home, but the market seemed to be blowing past this estimate like we were standing still. So, with quite a bit of anxiety, we schedule a meeting with an old neighbor friend of ours who is now a quite successful real estate agent. (Mildly embarassing to realize that we didn’t originally include a link. Sorry, Andrew!) Not that we’re bragging about our real estate agent exactly, we just mean to say that he’s a reliable source of information; he’s sold hundreds of homes over the last few years. We met on Monday, June 21st. After a lovely presentation from Andrew the conclusion is that he recommends us to list at $60,000 over our budgeted number, and notes that on average the homes in our area have been going for ~9% over asking price. Gulp.

Nothing in life is certain except death and taxes, I’m told, and certainly a lot can go wrong in the world between now and then. (Many things went sideways, but not this part of the plan!) But if the world spins on at even roughly the way it is now, we are going to list our home in late October. We will spend Thanksgiving with Lisa’s family in San Francisco, and on the 29th of November we will board a flight that will end in Lisbon, Portugal.

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.

So even before the iconic “read more” page break, we’ve got thoughts, big and small. The beaches are absolutely lovely but do your research because many of them are Atlantic-facing and are too cold to enjoy even in summer for some people. (It’s us. We’re “some people.”) The politics in Portugal are currently wobblier than we’d like, although it’s too soon to say if the country is having a lurch-to-the-right moment or if it’s just a reaction to a recent corruption scandal. That said, we can say from personal experience that health care does indeed run circles around the U.S.; the only thing we can’t speak to are corner cases that we haven’t had to deal with. Should anybody have a “oh yeah, well *I*…” comment forming in your head… I mean, say whatever you want, it’s a free blog, but we never said “perfect”. It says more about the U.S. than it does Portugal that it’s so easy to compare favorably to healthcare there.

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 (GV). The money for the GV 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 about the money (again). In classic Americanisms, “doing ok” is describes a reticence to admit that you’ve got significant savings. You read about the median American’s savings towards retirement being $87,000 and have to realize that’s not what we’re talking about. Even the “average” savings account, which means outliers weigh things down disproportionately, is around $330,000. If we had that amount in savings we wouldn’t have felt comfortable doing this, at least not at our age (in our 50s). Maybe in 10+ years, with additional savings and growth, but not when we ended up retiring (late 2021 for anyone keeping track). “Ok” in our case absolutely meant “in good shape for our goals.” And, let’s be clear, we were super lucky to be top earners for a few years and able to add much of it to our retirement accounts as well as paying down our mortgage. Even so, we can’t access much of our accounts until we’re older.

This doesn’t mean you can’t get it done on the average savings amount, just that you probably can’t go about it like we did. We’re done working. Kaput. Most people leaving the US at our age want to think about being a digital nomad, or some other way of continuing to earn while over here (with all the visa and tax implications that entails.) Especially since some of the financial advantages we were able to take advantage of no longer exist (like the NHR scheme). We need to be super clear that we are not consultants with fiduciary responsibility to you – talk to a professional! Talk to several! Then talk to one more. Moving abroad — to any place — is a huge decision that can leave you without resources in a crucial future time.

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 seven 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.

Dear Lord aren’t we just adorable? For trying to replicate Seattle weather we did about as well as we could hope, in that it’s even hotter down in the Algarve, but hoo boy. Our little Seattle, evergreen trees and rolling green hills acclimatization has taken a beating. We have in fact found an excuse to leave Braga for at least a little while each summer when the heat has been in full bloom.

It’s not the desert or anything, but compared to where we came from it gets warmer earlier and goes higher for longer. Not complaining or anything, but it’s funny to read these assertions from 2021 us.

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 (had – sigh, we miss those chairs) in our living room, talking the same things through over and over and driving each other juuuust the teeniest bit insane, when an idea started to form. (Neither one of us can remember who said it first, so we credit one another every time we tell the story.)

“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, when 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

Footnotes:

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.

Boy oh boy. We traveled our little heineys off in the first year or so that we were here, and the results were that a) we were actually a little tired of traveling, to the point where, more than a year later, we haven’t done any similarly-significant trips. Make no mistake, we’ve traveled when we’ve wanted to, we just discovered that there was in fact an upper bound to our appetite for adventure. And b) we didn’t scratch our limit of time-out-of-country with that amount of traveling. It’s both a relief and a bit of a humbling experience to discover that our idea of “lots” of travel is not in fact pushing all boundaries of sense. We have friends here that are out of country more than we are. They just don’t advertise it in a big dumb blog so people don’t notice so much.

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.⁵

⁵ I wish I hadn’t forgotten about this footnote thing – it’s not like I’ve become less parenthetical over the years. Hrm….

As I said at the end of the previous post in this series, we started to get cold feet about Italy. We’ve looked at some weather data, and it is hot there. “No duh” you might be thinking, but it’s one thing to think “ah yes, the beautiful, sunny Italian countryside” and another to think “holy hell it’s like that all year long, and they just had a summer that they named after THE DEVIL because of how historically broiling it was. Maybe not so much?” It’s gotten worse since we first wrote this. Hindsight is 20/20 etc… but yeah, good call Us. And hey, we also really like France. Sooooo… I begin the research on visas in France. Same story as Italy, basically. I mean, look: every country is different, that’s why we have different countries in the first place. They are all going to have their peculiarities in every process or system you look at. But fundamentally, practically every country (and I only use weasel words here because I haven’t personally investigated every single one of them) has a visa process for staying long-term, and they boil down to “are you not an evil supervillain and can you support yourself?” and if you pass that test you can stay. And in all of those countries, the problem is not, fundamentally, “will you be given permission?” but instead “how big is the lake of utter horseshit that I have to swim across to get that permission?” only, you know, paperwork instead of horseshit. So what’s the difference between Italy and France, process-wise? Near as I could figure out, the Italian bureaucrats are mercurial and finicky, and you had to be light on your feet to adapt to the desires of the bureaucrat you drew that day. Whereas, French bureaucrats are persnickity rules-lawyers who start from “no” and have to be cajoled into “yes”. In either case, though, scrupulous adherence to every stitch of their policies usually wins out.

So, France? There are definitely some pluses to the French route. First of all, the geography of the country yields some climate remarkably similar to what we’ve gotten used to in Seattle. And for all that people joke about the weather in Seattle (“Why is there a waiting period before people from Seattle enter Hell? At first they’re too wet to burn.”) it’s actually bloody amazing here. Sure, it mists a lot, but Houston, Texas gets more rain per year on average than Seattle and it’s not even close. There’s no humidity, we basically never see mosquitos, and summer is roughly 4 months of sunshine and 80 degrees. So, the fact that we can find at least somewhat similar conditions in parts of France is quite a draw. The museums are, of course, first rate. The food… well, yum. We might lean slightly towards Italian cuisine if we were forced to pick just one, but it’s not exactly a chore to eat in France. Still, we aren’t completely sold. The stories of bureaucratic hang-ups are more pervasive than what we’d heard about Italy, and then there was this weird phenomenon wherein Americans living in France just seemed way more uptight than Americans living in other places. Not exactly scientific, but it got our ears up.

That last bit was a crazy-but-true data point that has stuck with us to this day. When we looked at facebook groups for American immigrants in Italy, the people in them were, by and large, a chill bunch. Obviously individuals vary, but the vibe in those groups was relaxed and even friendly. In the two different France-related groups we poked into that had large-ish memberships, they were both just cold. Indifferent. Almost hostile to newcomers in a way that felt extra rude. It may have been a dumb criterion, but we couldn’t ignore it. On the other hand… as we prepare this update in 2024, the Portuguese group that we once found so helpful has been drifting more and more towards a snarky and indifferent tone that, if we had encountered it back in the day, might have similarly turned us off. So, you know… caveat emptor and all that.

France wasn’t a slam dunk and we were still unsure about Italy, so we kept digging around for options. And it was in this state that we took a vacation to Greece. Our trip to Greece is a tale unto itself (spoiler alert: we never seriously considered living in Greece), but one key point is relevant here. At the airport, I noticed the place was plastered with signs in multiple languages, and most frequently in Chinese, touting the “Golden Visa” program in Greece and directing prospective participants to certain real estate developments that were custom-designed to fulfill said visa’s requirements. “What the heck is a Golden Visa?”, I wondered. I vaguely knew the basics – in lieu of a complicated regime of requirements for a long-term visa, you could… well, not exactly BUY a visa, but by investing a significant amount in a country they would reward you with a fast-tracked visa with fewer restrictions/requirements, especially as regards time spent in-country. You see, one of the bits about the visa process I haven’t got into yet is that, well, countries don’t like to be taken advantage of. So, they tend to have requirements that say you have to live in the country for, say, 8 months out of every 12. Hardly onerous if you’re actually looking to live in that country, but it puts a real crimp in your plans if you were hoping to jet-set across Europe on the strength of your cool new EU visa. A Golden visa, on the other hand, typically has a requirement along the lines of two weeks every year, maybe even less. They try to make it sound dignified, but Golden Visas are very much a cash-for-services transaction that gets a country an influx of foreign investment in exchange for lax visa rules. Ok, great. We couldn’t afford to lose hundreds of thousands of dollars to get such a visa, but if it’s simply investing money that was going to be invested SOME-where in any case, maybe this could work for us. But we definitely didn’t want it to be Greece (again, another story for another time) so where might we try this? Not every country has a Golden Visa program, and the list changes up as the political climate shifts in a given country. Portugal, for example, closed it’s lucrative Golden Visa program at the end of 2023. The closing was absolutely politics — the program had brought something like 5 Billion Euros in investment monies over 10 years — not bad for a tiny country in a bad financial state. Anyways, . . . the following is 100% just our personal observations from back in the day. We look at the list. Spain… hefty investment that would crimp our cash flow too much. Ireland… way too hefty an investment. Germany… hefty investment, eight years before you can apply for permanent residency/citizenship. Portugal… huh, Portugal.

Portugal?

We’ll be talking about this in a little more detail coming up, but since we didn’t end up going the Golden Visa route we don’t delve too deeply. Pro tip – be very wary of Golden Visa programs in Portugal. The political climate has gotten …. feisty on the subject. As far as bringing investment capital into the country one cannot dispute the success. However, like a lot of places in the world the cost of housing has been going up, so even if the absolute numbers of GVs is pretty small, it looks bad that Portugal has rolled out a welcome mat for wealthy people to buy up property. More restrictions have been put in place and the timing is apparently molasses-slow. I’d make very few assumptions and consult a knowledgeable professional at the very beginning of your investigation if it’s something that you’re thinking about, just to get the facts straight.

So, somewhere along the line, and this going back to a of couple years ago, (now almost 5!) I say aloud to my wife “I can’t get this one thought out of my mind. I don’t remember where I heard it, but somebody said ‘tomorrow is promised to no one’, and that feels so true to me.” Numerous examples exist in our life (family, friends, coworkers etc…) of people who reached a normal-ish retirement age in a state of health that’s not conducive to extensive traveling. Hell, for that matter people we know have died before ever reaching their retirement. We had already been thinking about cutting a couple years off our work time to retire early-ish, but as we talked it through, we came to agree that our plan to see Europe in our mid to late 60s suffered from an extreme case of optimism. Who knows if we’ll both be healthy in 10-15 years, or if we are then how much longer can we expect it to last? We’re only in “ok” health right now, and while we’re trying to take steps to improve that there’s no guarantee that it’s going to pay off. We could easily reach our 60s and find that we’re in no condition to do all the things we want to do. What, exactly, are we waiting for?

The answer to that question, of course, is basically “money.” I said earlier that the ability to move to Europe requires, first and foremost, the will to do it, and that’s true. The second thing it requires, though, is money. Not obscene money, but whatever number you thought you’d want to retire comfortably (or at least safely) in the United States is a reasonable starting place.

There’s actually a whole lot more to say on this subject. We’ve met people who have indeed immigrated on very modest means. You can live much more cheaply here – but you will be living much more cheaply if you take my meaning. If you’re prepared to live far from a city, in a small town or village where you can expect next-to-no English being understood, and eating a quite-simple diet, you could probably get your monthly budget to … I don’t even know. $500/month? I can find you a T0 or T1 in the sticks for +/- 200eu, utilities oughtn’t to be more than another 100, and then you’re feeding and entertaining yourself on the balance. (Note that you most likely would strongly consider having a car to succeed at this kind of lifestyle.) However simple a life that sounds, you’d at least be saved from the possibility of ruination via medical debt. So from that starting point, your available resources can push you closer to town, push you into nicer digs, push you into more restaurants, and so on and so forth. We’ll chewing on how to write more on this subject later, because we know if you’re anything like we are, this is the subject that gives you the most anxiety about potentially making the move. Hang in there.

Now where were we…

If our financial plan only works on the assumption that we’re working into our 60s, then trying to go any earlier could be super dangerous. Back to the financial advisor we went. “Kevin,” we said (for his name is Kevin; hi, Kevin!), “you know that financial plan we had worked out all nice and pretty? Wellll, what happens if we stop working sooner than we initially said?” He asks us how much sooner we’re talking about. “No no, you misunderstand. We want to know how early we can stop working and still be financially viable. You tell us.” So Kevin runs some different scenarios, and we work out our best estimates on what a monthly budget would look like, and he comes back to us and says “assuming average returns and no catastrophes, you can retire as soon as you can access your retirement accounts without penalties.” (Small clarification here: he never framed it as in “so long as there are no catastrophes” in the sense of recessions/depressions; any competently designed plan builds in some amount of risk management to get through lean times. What he meant was “so long as the basic underpinnings of the economy don’t disintegrate, like a catastrophic war, or similar.”) Great! That’s only 6-7 years away, way better than the 12 or so we were aiming for! We can almost taste the buffala mozzarella from there. We begin to shift from fantasizing to cautiously planning what retirement might look like. Do we own or rent a home? Which part of Italy do we want to live in?

A brief aside. Getting this news was actually far more emotional than I’ve described it to you. Neither Lisa nor I “come from means” as they say. Neither of us was actually dirt poor, but neither of us had a model of comfortable retirement in our lives. (This has since changed, but when we got together this was definitely true.) We had been doing what we had read we should do (fund the 401k, spend within your means, don’t try to keep up with the Joneses, etc.) but we weren’t financially literate enough to have a firm grasp of how we were doing. The moment we were told, by a professional with fiduciary responsibility towards us (that is, not trying to sell us anything, they get paid for knowledge not commissions) that we had, in fact, colored within the lines and were on track for a secure retirement, we had an intense shared moment of “we actually did it.” You tell yourself it’s going to work out, but part of living a moderate lifestyle is not having tangible feedback of financial success. And yes, greater financial literacy would have helped here. I’m not saying we’re geniuses, I’m saying this is what happened. Parents, teach your kids about money while you’re teaching them everything else; you’ve got nothing but time, right? :p

Aside over! We began to think of our future in very concrete terms of “when we move to Italy…”. What’s the rental market in Pieve al Toppo look like? How’s the grocery shopping? Ooo, which cities do we want to explore first? Do we maybe want to live in a city instead? Rome would be way too intense, and Florence looks kind of spend-y, but Siena looks like it’s in a sweet spot of culture and scenery and affordability. Yeah, that might work! Plus, we can never tell the story of accidentally driving onto the Piazza del Campo too many times, right? Do we want a car? We were excited by all the questions.

Except, soon we’re not so sure about Italy.

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.

Hello! As we recently shared, we have reached a milestone by renewing our residency permits for an additional three years; woo hoo! We’ve been stewing on a “what have we learned” type post for awhile now, and this seems as good a time as any. However, we’ve got this series that we started the blog off with, and it’s received a good bit of attention over the years. So, rather than leaving it out there with increasingly-outdated information, we’re going to run them back up the flag pole with annotations of what we’ve learned along the way. Enjoy!

So, to begin with, a warning. This is going to be the spare-no-detail version of our story. I’m sure there’s going to be a cute “About Us” page that tells you the tl;dr version and it will cover the highlights, so if you ever think to yourself “holy hell how long is this going to go on??” I encourage you to pull the ripcord and check out that page. (First edit/ comment we don’t have one! So, you’re not missing something.) If you’re the kinda cat who likes to know everything then, kitty, this is gonna be catnip.

Lisa and I had formulated a retirement plan over the first umpteen years of our relationship; a good, solid, dependable, American retirement plan. We would work into our 60s, then move to Ashland, Oregon or one of the neighboring towns. There, we would integrate with the artistic and spiritual communities, volunteer at the Shakespeare Festival, and generally enjoy our life. We even had our eye on a retirement community a little north on I-5 that we always saw when we drove down, and figured that was where we would transition to if we weren’t able to live on our own at some point. It was a fine plan.

There was another part of this plan, one that came into being after we traveled to Europe a few times on vacation. This part of the plan detailed how we would spend a month or so every year in Europe, going to all of the great museums and archaeological sites we could get our arms around, for as long as our health allowed. The airport in Medford is small, but it has flights to San Francisco and Seattle every day and, from those two hubs, the world would be our oyster. Great plan!

It’s worth pointing out that by this point we’d been across the Atlantic a half-dozen times or so on a fairly consistent basis. It wasn’t completely pie-in-the-sky fantasy; we knew we liked the experience and we knew we wanted to have a lot more of it. I (John) think it’s a little slight-of-hand to undersell just how much we wanted to get ourselves onto “the Continent.” Lisa notes that she, at least, had no idea it was even possible to make a life outside of the U.S.

As the years rolled on, we came to love this part of the plan more than the whole “retire to southern Oregon” part. After all, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival is great, but even if we see all 11 plays, twice even, that’s… well, not even a month. There are other, smaller theaters in the area… maybe a month and a half total. After that, we’re in a tiny town surrounded by rural area. (We’re talking golden hills as far as the eye can see.) We found ourselves noodling on the expense of traveling back and forth to Europe every year or so. The biggest expense, we thought to ourselves, was the actual traveling part. Once you get to Europe, it’s not particularly more expensive to vacation or sight-see there than it is in the United States. “What if”, one of us said to the other at some point, “we just lived in Europe for awhile?” But that’s not something people like us do, right? That’s fancy people. That’s Ernest Hemingway drinking Bellinis at Harry’s Bar in Venice, not John and Lisa doing… I dunno, John and Lisa things.

Meanwhile, several years ago (circa 2019) we had started trying to get a grip on the financial side of retirement. In a story that is too long and boring even for a detailed narrative like this one, we had a terrible experience with a financial advisor who, after metaphorically pulling a shark’s-mouth worth of teeth, gave us a report that was simultaneously exhaustively detailed, completely inscrutable, and utterly useless. We had no better idea of where we stood after working with him as before. Worse, when we explained that we wanted to workshop a variety of scenarios to know what our options were, we were basically handed a horrendously complex tool and told, “hey, this is what we used, plug away!” So, we threw up our hands for awhile. Fortunately, friends of ours told us over dinner one night that they loved(!) their financial advisors [https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevin-j-chang] and we booked an appointment on their recommendation. After a couple of introductory meetings and some data gathering on their part, they had a meeting with us to explain in very clear language that our goals were completely attainable, we’d done an even better job than we’d realized in saving for retirement, and then showed us some ways to be even more prepared.

We continue to work with Kevin Chang to this day. There are people out there who poo-poo the notion of paying someone to do the work that you can conceivably learn to do yourself. We think of it like insurance; if things get tricky we are comforted knowing that a trained professional is already intimately familiar with our situation and can act quickly if that’s what’s needed. We meet online with him quarterly-ish, mostly to keep the lines of communication open. It may not be for everyone, but we continue to think he is money well spent.

This was actually a pretty emotional moment, particularly for Lisa who, it must be noted, has been the guiding star for our financial success. Both as the primary bread-winner and as someone willing to make hard financial choices, it was a tremendous moment of validation for her that she had fundamentally succeeded. Don’t get me wrong, I did a share of the lifting, but the simple truth is that she surpassed me professionally for most of our relationship; she just killed it in the working world. (Can you tell I’m proud of her? I’m proud. )

Buuuut hang on. If we’re in so much better shape than we even realized… does that make us fancy people? Well, maybe, maybe not. We at least felt like we had permission (so to speak) to investigate fancy-people options that we had previously thought were beyond us. As soon as we began to even nibble at this idea, however, something became very clear: you don’t have to be fancy people to emigrate to Europe. At least, some parts of it. Most countries just want proof that you aren’t going to be a burden on their social systems and will play fair and contribute to the tax system if you plan to partake of their services. While it would be wrong to say “anybody” can do it, way more people can do it than probably think that they can. And as soon as we realized that, the wheels started turning.

The $64,000 question, so to speak, is “so how much do you need to do this?” Americans are trained almost from birth not to talk plainly about money, and we struggle to overcome this ourselves. But here’s at least some clearer guidance. First of all, we can’t speak to digital nomads or people just coming to work a job; we retired. We researched the options for retirement. The financial requirements vary wildly from country to country. The UK, when we looked into it, expected to see a million pounds, each, liquid, on account for prospective immigrants. I’m not pouring too much tea to tell you that that ain’t us. That said, if you’ve been saving for retirement in the modern, post-pension America, you’ve probably been working on a nut that will get you overseas. On the other hand, if you’re in the situation of a lot of Americans in that you are far (FAR) behind the model for post-pension America, sad to say Europe is probably not a viable alternative. There are other options, however! We may not be able to offer much guidance, but there are plenty of options in South and Central America, as well as swaths of Asia, that make excellent landing spots for folks with the right temperament. Along those lines, we just had friends return from a trip to Tangiers and their summary review was “we’re glad we looked in Braga first because if we’d seen this place we might have moved here instead.” So, don’t rule out parts of Africa.