[Note: we offer this advice because we know people are asking. This is absolutely not the space to argue good/bad about anything in US politics, gods know you have enough places for that.]

I. The Golden Rule

The absolute, number-one-most-important component of moving abroad, here or anywhere else, is the will to do it. This starts with the idea that you want to move, but the will to see it through is a stronger thing. Everything else about immigrating is administrative and bureaucratic in nature. If you went through a college application process, or bought a house (or even a car that required financing), you’ve succeeded at tasks as complex as anything you’ll do to make this happen. It’s not rocket science… but it will test your resolve and attention to detail.

II. Grading Problems On a Curve

How important a problem is when weighing your options can vary in relation to your sense of urgency. There are deal-breakers for people in normal times that maybe aren’t so deal-breaking when the stakes are high. Take, for example, “moving investments to Europe will really mess up my tax situation.” That’s the kind of thing an American ponders when thinking about living here. In some times, the penalty for doing that would be reason enough to leave your accounts as they are. This may be a point to reconsider if you’re feeling particular unease about the stability of your home country. Learning the Portuguese language with sufficient proficiency to pass a qualifying test for citizenship might seem like a huge task, and sticking with residence permits can be easier. Weighing that hassle against the value of secondary citizenship (and a passport) may look different to you these days.

III. Don’t Kid Yourself

The reason why “the will to do it” is up top is because you will be tested. If you’re only thinking of moving now because of a recent state of unease, you may be glossing over things like:

• the language barrier: Yeeeeeesss, you can get by without Portuguese language skills, but for starters the places here with a large % of English speakers are the more expensive places to live. If finances are zero worry for you then great! But if we were any good at drawing graphs we’d demonstrate that the correlation between “cost of living” and “attracts English speakers” is basically a 1:1 line. Lisbon = lots of tourists, so lots of English speaking Portuguese to work there, and its THE most expensive place to live. Porto is less than Lisbon but still has high tourist traffic, plenty of English spoken, and is somewhat cheaper but still high cost. Braga (where we live) begins to enter the mid-zone of being industrial enough that English is valuable for some locals, and so there’s a decent English-uptake (though not enough to count on), and the cost of living sits kind of mid-high for the country. You can absolutely live cheaply in Portugal, but it’ll be further from cities. The cheaper you want to be, the more you need to invest in language lessons; outside of the cities most people there don’t speak English.
• financial risk: if you’re worried enough about the States that you’re seriously thinking of leaving, closely examine your financial plans to see how much reliance you have on government programs. For example, how much do you rely on Social Security? How paranoid/concerned are you about its stability? I’ve heard more than one of my friends say “if Social Security goes away I absolutely will have to find a job.” And speaking of jobs…
• a new employment reality: if you’re still working, that isn’t a deal-breaker for coming here, but even if you satisfy any requirements (i.e., bringing desired skills to the country), make super sure you understand what the compensation (and taxation!) situations are here. You may be looking at salaries half (or less… sometimes much less… ) than what you’re used to; suddenly that low cost of living you heard about isn’t quite so sexy.

We’re not suddenly against living here; not at all. It’s just that things are sufficiently different in Portugal that you absolutely should not ready-fire-aim on this idea if it’s the first you’ve thought about it. If you’ve been nibbling around the idea for awhile now, and traveled on “the continent” a fair amount already, you probably already have a decent grasp of some of this.

IV. It’s Absolutely A Thing You Can Do

So many people that live here begin their immigration story by talking about how they came to realize it was even possible. Most Americans don’t give any thought to living abroad. But you take a school trip or a semester abroad, maybe, and then you understand that the same kind of people are living the same kinds of lives, just with differences. People start to ponder the idea that millions of humans emigrate/immigrate every year for untold numbers of reasons. Clearly it’s a thing that people are capable of, and if they can figure it out then why can’t you?

V. First Steps / Next Steps

• No matter how much you have sworn off Meta as a corporation, we highly recommend that you hold your nose and get back on facebook for the “Americans and Friends in Portugal” group. Don’t join and immediately ask questions, they aren’t the friendliest bunch sometimes but that’s ok, you aren’t joining to make friends. Sit quietly for awhile, use the search feature for your questions first, and devour their files section – it’s the foundation for so many successful immigrants in Portugal.
• For pete’s sake, if you don’t have a passport get started on that, you’re not going anywhere without that in good working order. If you’ve got one, check its expiration date and start the renewal process if you’re anywhere vaguely close to time.
• Vocabulary test: make sure you know what “VFS”, “NIF”, and “AIMA” / “SEF” mean. Search engines are your friend.
• Conversely, remove “picky” from your vocabulary for awhile. If you really are anxious, don’t get choosy about (for example) your first apartment. Don’t get caught up in deep dive price comparisons on phone/internet services – sure there are differences but they all do the same thing and the prices aren’t that different. Do you want to leave or don’t you?

VI: Our Last Bit of Advice

Are you genuinely anxious about your situation in the States but genuinely overwhelmed by moving to somewhere like Portugal? Totally understandable. If that’s the case, don’t come here. Go to Ireland.

…

What? They speak English there, which will make about a thousand of your problems easier to deal with. I’m not saying that, long-term, it’s any easier to settle in Ireland than it is in Portugal. In our calculations a few years back it seemed to us that a lifestyle we would enjoy living would cost us more there than it would in Portugal. That said, if more than anything you just want to be somewhere else, right now, you can go to Ireland as a tourist – you don’t need any sort of visa to enter the country, and you can start on your paperwork at the dining room table of your little Irish cottage. Don’t try to go to a sexy city you’ve heard of before, because those can be spendy. Throw a dart and find a village or small town and, if it’s got a grocery store and isn’t too far from health care, find an apartment and get crackin’. Besides, once you’re there and maybe can settle your nerves some, you can reassess your options for a more lasting relocation. You’ll encounter plenty of rigamarole in Ireland, too, but if you feel like your seat is too hot to sit in for much longer… go to Ireland.

[Caveat: our community is a lot like us – mostly Americans, mostly people that no longer work full time (or at all). The stories we know reflect this.]

The most common thing we’ve heard in stories where people returned to the U.S. is that they bounced off the cultural divide. On the one hand, this is a totally understandable phenomenon – a lot of basic cultural norms and customs that Americans take for granted are unabashedly different here. (There are whole books, and numerous blog posts (ahem), on the subject, so a list of bullet points now doesn’t seem necessary.) On the other hand, we can’t help but side-eye these folks a little. What did you expect? There’s a reason why, despite our rejection of the premise, most folks visit Portugal first to get the lay of the land. What even is “Portuguese cuisine?” Are the people friendly in the public square? Do I really have to use the metric system? If you have any kind of deal-breaker in mind, it’s totally worth investigating those things in person.

Adjacent to the cultural divide is the language barrier. We’ve mentioned this before, but the numerous reports out there that you don’t need to learn Portuguese and “everyone speaks English” are wildly overblown. For a tourist this is probably true. You probably are going to places designed for tourists, and those places hire people that have language skills as a result. And yes, English is a commonly-studied subject for kids in school and has been for awhile now. However… as John likes to say, remember your own language class back in high school? Remember how a few people would actually get good with the language, and most everybody ended up at barely-passing or worse? Yeah, nothing has changed. We’ve met immigrants who have been here longer than us who can barely get past “bom dia.” And several of those folks have packed it up because they feel isolated. Not knowing what everyone around you is saying keeps everything at a specific distance.

A reason you might not expect is finances, but sure as poop it happens. Yes, the national averages on cost of living categories are somewhat-to-very-much lower in Portugal compared to the United States, a fact that is often wildly overstated by certain “international travel” media. Some folks seem to think that this means it will be dirt cheap and they come here because they were barely making it in the U.S.. This is relative in so many ways! Just for one example, if you’re paying $1,000 a month for a 3-bedroom home, you won’t pay less that that in a modern (read: city) Portugal. Moreover, while it can eventually be fairly low-cost to live here, there are a lot of up front expenses that you’ve got to be able to absorb. Travel, shipping (if you’re bringing things), deposits (or purchase down payments) on housing, and innumerable unforeseen expenses. Because some things are just different. Also, those national averages include all the people in rural Portugal, who live a muuuuuuuch simpler lifestyle than folks are probably used to. You can rent a 3 bedroom detached home for 450€/month in Moimenta da Beira. “Where’s that?” you ask? Exactly. A similarly appointed home in Braga goes for ~1,600€/month. We’ve seen folks realize they can’t make it here while living a life they want to lead, and the compromises are too much for them.

We also can’t overlook the difference in food. Organic isn’t a label, and just because its a small farm or producer (including home grown) doesn’t mean pesticides weren’t used. Traditional Portuguese cuisine often tastes bland or unexciting to newcomers, and has a strong emphasis on using “everything” to be frugal. (A major problem during the dictatorship was a starving population. Anything that could be consumed, was. A trait that has been carried down.) Vegans, or even vegetarians, may have a lot of difficulty finding restaurants they can trust. Lard is popular here — pastries usually use that instead of vegetable oil or butter. Fresh jalapenos aren’t available, nor is sweet corn. (Unless you grown your own.) And even if a restaurant offers a dish we once loved, it’s not likely going to be anything like what we remember. Seattle style teriyaki. Hard shell tacos. Barbecue. Thick crust pizza. (Ok. stopping now.) Most of us make our own versions of foods we miss.

Really, all of these problems come down to “know thyself.” Yes, we moved to Braga sight-unseen. In fact, we’ve met others who have done the same, so it’s not even as wacky as we used to think it was. BuuuUUUuut, all of those folks (including us) knew that we had enough go-along-to-get-along in us; we had decided that we’d both had shit apartments for a year (or more) in our lives before, and that the worst that would happen is we don’t like Braga and so spend the year of our first lease exploring other potential landing spots. Oh no, seeing Europe! It comes up in the immigrant community every now and then – we are not a random sample of the United States. If you have problems with “foreigners”, people speaking in other languages, not being served the exact foods you’re used to etc etc… you probably didn’t come here in the first place. But that’s not an iron-clad rule and people are free to make their mistakes, so every now and then folk show up here and just don’t make it.

(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.

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.

When we left our intrepid explorers they were wrapping up a trip to the Emerald Isle with some mundane shopping that was nevertheless welcome. We both left the shop we poked our heads into with shoes that felt much better on the ole tootsies. Our trip back to Braga was pleasant enough, helped along enormously by neither beginning nor ending at one in the morning. During this travel day, however, there was a flurry of communication that we suddenly had to stay on top of. You see, we had two pallets of our belongings, our last belongings in the United States, sailing over to us on a boat. Communication on the subject had been sketchy and we had a pretty large window of potential delivery dates. (There will be a whole lot more written on this subject in the future.) Naturally, while we were in another country the window began to tighten until we had a few potential days that our goods could arrive in Braga. Sure enough, a golden day for delivery was our travel day. We had contingencies in place, but they turned out to be no match for the communication issues that arise when at least three parties (the shipper, the folks receiving our stuff for us at a storage unit, and us) are trying to communicate and none of us share a common primary language. Good times. This actually made John a little happy only in that it pushed the delivery day to one where we’d be home. Thus he was there when the truck showed up… and thus he got to see the truck driver decline to back his truck up to the facility.

Long-ish story abbreviated, he felt the turn radius of his truck was no match for the space he had available to line up with the driveway. Fortunately, this is still Portugal. He walked down the street and had a chat with a nice young man in a Home Depot-esque supply store, who drove over with his forklift and extracted both pallets from the truck, and scooted them down the driveway and into our storage facility. Then he lent John a pallet jack so that he could get said pallets into our actual unit. All of this was at no charge, just being neighborly. Ye gods and little fishes. Goods secured we called it a day, and a weekend. On Monday, with the help of a nice young Portuguese man we first met when we had a yard that needed mowing, we made a couple of trips with a van and moved our things into our apartment. Our resultant feelings of satisfaction at having our things will also wait for another time; suffice it to say we were tickled pink.

And a little busy for a day, unpacking.

While all of this is going on, we’re having after-action conversations about how our trip went and what we can learn for the next time. At the moment we’re having long conversations about luggage. On the one hand, we aren’t looking to re-accumulate a house’s worth of stuff. On the other hand, we are genuinely bumping into occasions where we feel the need to check our roller bags but only barely, leading to the thought that once we hit the point of checking a bag no matter what, why not have bigger luggage so that we can expand what we bring? There are no conclusions at this time, and honestly we welcome any thoughts any of you might have!

And while these things are occupying us, we are a) trying to get ready for our next trip that starts this week, b) trying to catch up with at least some of our friends here before scooting away again, and c) trying a little clandestine sneaky sneaks to get ready for Lisa’s impending birthday. This is a lot busier than we ever expected to be when neither of us has so much as a part-time job. Nevertheless, the things that needed doing got done, the thoughts that needed thinking at least got some attention, and bags that needed re-packing were packed. Next stop – Nice!

Make doctor’s appointments in your home country for everyone. If you have recent check-ups done just before you leave, you’ll relieve the potential pressure of needing to sort out the medical situation in your new home quickly. As part of that appointment:
* Have a complete wellness exam — you want to make sure there are no hidden issues
* Obtain written prescriptions for medications — many countries will honor previously made scrips, at least initially, without having a local doctor write a new one. It also helps your new physician approve it. In our experience, presenting current Rx documents to our new doctors led to new ones with minimal fuss.
* Fill all prescriptions to their max, and keep them in their bottles for travel — many countries will discard unlabeled pills. The argument is that they can’t tell the difference between aspirin and morphine, so they assume the worst and toss it all.
* Obtain copies of all medical records — we had a paper summary, but also all of our files on a USB drive to make it easy for our new physician to get up to speed on our health.

Schedule immunizations and medical services — you want to give finding a new physician the longest time possible. Plus, some countries have specific immunization requirements. Getting anything major may want to wait until you’ve moved. You may want to be able to rest and recuperate, or the procedure may be significantly less expensive in your new location. (In the US I would have had to pay $1000, after insurance, for a diagnostic colonoscopy, but here in Portugal it will be about 150eu, if my insurance doesn’t cover it.)

Make dentist appointment for check-up and cleaning — even more than the physician, finding a new dentist is a task you want to put off for as long as possible. Note that this does not necessarily mean getting any extra work done; it may be a lot less expensive in your new home. John, for example, developed a small infection in a back tooth. He was given antibiotics to hopefully get rid of it, but only had to see a dentist in Portugal to find out if he needed any further work done. (As a comparison, having an implant from our dentist would have been about $3,000 out of pocket, after insurance; here in Braga it would be about 500eu, if our insurance didn’t cover the entire cost.)

Make sure passports are up to date and valid through your stay — most countries require that your passport be valid for at least six months after your entrance, and you really don’t want to have try and renew your passport from outside the US as long as possible. In the best of times a passport renewal was not a quickie, and these days have been anything but. Deal with this soon if it does need dealing with.

Get copies of all court documents — Marriage and birth certificates, child custody agreement . . . if a court has made a decision that can affect you, bring a copy with you to your new home. This is especially important if there might be issues. For example, my husband and I do not share the same last name. We brought a copy of our marriage certificate as a “just in case”. As part of this, consider getting those documents apostilled* by the Secretary of State. This is kind of a notarization at a State level, and validates the document in a way other countries recognize. While you’re at it, gather and organize all legal documents, such as:
* Birth or naturalization certificates
* Diplomas
* Marriage licenses
* Insurance polices
* Ownership paperwork / Bill of Sale for large items or electronics (there can be customs or tax issues)

Having copies of all of this will save you a lot of headache in the future, if you need it. If you never do, then its just a hassle to get a bunch of documents. But if you do . . . ’nuff said. Again, consider getting these documents apostilled or notarized as a precaution.

Sort everything in your house into one of four categories: sell, store, pack, or donate — From the art on your walls to the jewelry in your dresser, look at everything and decide what to do about it. Even if you’re just moving across town, this is a perfect time to look at what you’re moving. Do you need 14 plastic food saver containers? How about 10 empty plant pots? Moves are always great times to purge your possessions, take advantage of the opportunity. We decided to get rid of almost anything. We sold a bunch of books and started to do some piecemeal selling of things around the house, but it got overwhelming quickly. We’ve lived in this area for more than two decades, together for almost twenty years, and in this house for more than a decade. We have a lot of stuff. More than we thought we did. (See our posts on MaxSold and STUFF.)

Sell any vehicles you aren’t taking. If you do want to take your vehicle international, there are shipping options. However, pay close attention to regulations in your new home. Here in Portugal, retrofitting your vehicle to meet emission standards costs upwards of 2000eu and there is a 23%VAT on top of the cost of shipping. Many people find it far less expensive to just buy a new/used car when they arrive.

Reserve a storage unit. We knew all along that we’d need a storage unit. Having never been to Portugal, we just weren’t sure how much we’d like it, and weren’t going to ship all our precious belongings there if we were going to turn around after a couple of years and go back. Also, we hoped to sell our art before we left, but it didn’t work out that way, so we’re storing it. Other than those items, however, we didn’t keep much. A few plane trips, maybe a single palate will be necessary when the time comes.

Review financial institutions and decide whether to close the accounts, or alert them to the move; secure new banking options. Here’s the thing — some financial institutions will not do business with people who live outside the US; don’t be the person who discovers this after you’ve moved. I know of at least one person who found this out by being informed all of their holding were being liquidated within 10 days — barely enough time to find a new manager to transfer the assets. Note also that most of your financial institutions will require you keep a US phone number for two-factor authentication.

Create a power of attorney (PoA) document for a friend or family member to handle any stateside affairs. This is likely to not be needed, but is very much a “just in case.” A PoA is a simple document that requires only two witnesses – you leave the signed copy with the person you’ve designated. they’ll show it if they need to be able to sign documents on your behalf.

Purchase adapters for electronics. You’ll likely need more adapters than you think, and pay attention to whether your plugs are two- or three-prong. (While you’re at it, make sure your electronics are dual voltage. If they aren’t then adapters won’t prevent them from burning out quickly because of the different voltage.)

Purchase international health insurance. We needed this as part of our residency package, but its a good idea for everyone to be aware of how their health will be managed in the new country. Don’t take for granted being on the national policy — make sure you’ll qualify, and when. Get travel insurance (if nothing else) to cover you for any gap period.

Cancel insurance policies on your car, home, and health. You won’t be there, you won’t need it.

Register a forwarding address with the post office (this may be a friend or family member) or consider setting up a mail forwarding service. There are pros and cons to each in areas of privacy, reliability and cost. Watch out for services that may be recognized as commercial, which might raise red flags about whether you are in country. (It can make a difference to some institutions.)

If there’s something you think we missed, please feel free to leave it in a comment for the benefit of the inevitable visitor in 2026 who is led here by a deep-dive on google.

*An apostille is something almost nobody has heard of until they need it. (Spellcheck has no clue, that’s for dang sure.) As the University of Wikipedia will explain to you, it’s a specialized certification issued by a Secretary of State (at least in the US). Think of it as notarization that works outside of the U.S.