What we can tell you about the process is that, in the end, it all worked well. We’re not sure if that’s because we ended up processing our renewal through the old agency’s system or what. But our experience has been echoed by a lot of people. So this is how it is, until it changes. (Which is very bureaucracy, right?)

Our timeline looks like this:

~ On March 3rd the SEF site started giving us a different error message, (We forget what, but it was something along the lines of “try again later.”) At this point, we began to hope! (Quietly, with lots of whistling in the wind.)
~ We successfully went through the sef.pt website and requested “automatic renewal’ on March 8th (Fri). An error message was initially returned on a later page, preventing us from completing the renewal request. We closed the browser and tried again and the website gave us a notice that payment was required and that we would receive a message about how to pay at the email associated with our account.
~ Payment notice was in our inbox within minutes and included MB information to pay.
~ The payment notice asked us to wait 48 hours to submit payment so that our renewal request could be properly processed.
~ On March 11th (Mon) we went to a MB machine and paid. We kept the receipts. Note that this is not a requirement — SEF accepts MB payments electronically. We just wanted the hard copy receipt in case.
~ On March 13th (Wed) the money left our bank account.
~ On March 16th (Sat) our online file showed a new message “concluído” (concluded). No further communication was received. We consigned ourselves to the special times know as “waiting.”
On April 5th, our new cards were delivered by CTT. One of us had to sign for both cards. ID was not requested. (Our delivery person seemed to enjoy our obvious enthusiasm at seeing the envelopes.)

A few more bits:
~ We started requesting renewal at both the AIMA site and the SEF sites on February 25th (1 month prior to expiration).

• The AIMA site never gave us an opportunity for an appointment — this is something many people we know have mentioned. (Although, one couple we know got appointments for the following week just one distract away! Evidence of the randomness of this system from a certain perspective.)
• The SEF site consistently gave us a the message that our type of residency permit was not eligible for automatic renewal. There is some evidence that this error may be tied to the website’s built-in English translation. We recommend using your browser’s translation program instead.
  

~ The cards use all of the same info from our initial permit (name, address, birthplace, picture) but have a new number. If you have to change an address or otherwise update any information, your process may be different.
~ We figure we’ll need to update our SEF accounts at some point. Either to open one at AIMA or to update our files with the new Permit number.
~ Our processing date was March 16th, and our cards are valid until that date in 2027 (exactly three years).

Lessons Learned?

• Make sure the email address associated with your AIMA and SEF accounts is correct.
• Start trying to do the automatic renewal about a month before your permit expires.
• Try to renew at both the AIMA and SEF websites. (Eventually AIMA will be the primary, accurate source.)
• Take a stab at it a couple of times a day.
• If you are able to start the process and get an error message, close everything down and try again in an hour or so.
• If it succeeds (at the SEF site), you will almost immediately get an email message. Check your spam box if you don’t. If it still hasn’t shown up in an hour or so, check the SEF site again for information.
• “Concluído” (concluded) is the gold! Once you see that, your new card will arrive.

That’s it. Have faith, there is progress.

As has been exhaustively detailed, we’re in Portugal on our first, two-year Residency Permit; we were made official in late March of 2022, so we’ve got a renewal/anniversary coming up in a few months. Not inherently a big deal, it’s hardly a surprise after all. What was possibly a big deal was a shake up in the Portuguese immigration bureaucracy (what was known as Serviço de Estrangeiros e Fronteiras or “SEF”) which to be fair needed some shaking. The Portuguese weren’t happy with it and most immigrants at best considered it an irritant. There had been a general sense that change could be coming since before we moved here, but then in early June of ’23 the government announced that SEF would be less “re-organized” and more “shattered into its component pieces and divvied up across numerous agencies.”

Even as late as November of last year this presented no obvious hassle for us. It was clear that all we had to do at the beginning of March was to log into the website of the agency that processes Permits, upload documentation about our stay, and approximately two weeks later our new cards would arrive in the mail. This processing of foreign migrants would be assumed by an entirely new agency, the “Agência para a Integração, Migrações e Asilo” or “AIMA” . Apparently this brand-new agency had been in the works for many months and actually kicked off in late October, but when SEF officially closed in late November, nothing had been done.

There was no new AIMA website. There were no protocols or processes in place. People who worked for SEF left the workplace not knowing if they had a job to go to the next day.

Utter chaos.

SEF reportedly handed over 350,000 active cases to AIMA and as of late December almost all of those cases had NOT been processed. We personally know people whose Permits expired in November who are still waiting to make an appointment to process the paperwork required to renew. According to a report by Jornal Público, the president of AIMA Portugal, Luís Gois Pinheiro, has set a goal of processing all the backlogged cases by mid-2025.

But wait, there’s more! Extra confusingly, the actual renewal of residence permits was taken over by the “Instituto de Registo e Notariado” or “IRN.” You can squint and see the logic – AIMA is processing people actively migrating into Portugal, while the renewal of these types of permits is more of a clerical/administrative issues so it goes to the existing bureau for such things. “Oh yay,” one might say except that IRN as of this writing refers permit renewals to the old, defunct, SEF website. Dear readers from the future: I do hope you’re having a good chuckle about “that crazy couple of weeks that old immigrant friends reminisce about”, instead of option B which is that we all look like Tom Hanks in “The Terminal.”

Let’s be clear: it is not a mystery exactly how this got bollixed up. The fate of SEF had been debated, voted on, and changed several times over many years. It was a political hot potato that no one wanted to run afoul of and could have been un-mandated right up until its last days. Moreover, the resignation of the Prime Minister had/(has) the government in some disarray. And it’s not like Portugal is uniquely challenged in this way – anybody remember the rollout of the website for the Affordable Care Act? Still, knowing how it happened and that it’s not an evil plot doesn’t change the chaos that’s swirling.

Anyways, the whole thing would just be something that we sit in our armchairs and watch with mild interest except that we don’t want to be caught in residency limbo at a bad time, e.g. while crossing an international border. We’ve already put the kibosh on a plan to see a Mark Rothko exhibition in Paris this spring with friends of ours, and we’re starting to sweat plans even further out, even into the summer. We also had to require some modifications to a family member’s medical situation so that we could ensure that we’d be able to provide care. Nothing life-threatening, but tricksy.

Our local social media group has a local lawyer in it who has offered to do the research to see what the best process for renewal is, and how to do so. We should know more on that in the next couple of weeks. What we know now is that we can’t do anything about our residency status until late February if all is going well. And if it isn’t going well, it’s literally unknowable how long it could be before there’s resolution.

So . . . Happy New Year! and: Stay Tuned!

For starters, we didn’t have ONE appointment this past Monday, we had two. Two appointments, but only half an hour apart. . . 30 minutes and 225 kilometers apart. How this happened will always be a mystery (although Lisa took an entertaining stab at trying to guess a few weeks ago) but that was the hand we were dealt. “Didn’t you try and get them changed?” you might very well ask, but here’s the thing: there was recently an election in Portugal, and one of the hot-button issues in the country was <drumroll> the Serviço de Estrangeiros e Fronteiras! We can’t begin to explain why it was a problem, not the details anyway, but there was (and is, actually) a movement afoot to disband SEF and distribute it’s responsibilities throughout other agencies. Because things surrounding the agency were so fraught this past winter we were advised by many folks to just leave the appointments alone. Try to reschedule, they said, and there was a non-zero chance that our appointments would be pushed out several months. The odds might be low, but the stakes were enormous. We decided to make these appointments work.

The plan in a nutshell: Lisa took a train on Sunday afternoon to Lisbon. She got a hotel in the city, and from there she killed time until her 3:30PM appointment on Tuesday. MEANWHILE, John picked up a rental car on Tuesday morning, drove to the … er… town of Portalegre. (It’s a quaint little town, really, but for a 3-hour drive a fella might want something more) for his 3:00PM appointment. Fun fact: John had the times mixed up, and if not for an off-handed conversation with his dearest bride while killing time in a grocery store he would have com-PLETE-ly missed it. Yikes.

The very common advice given to folks in our situation is not to sweat your SEF appointment. If you were going to get turned down it would happen at the D7 stage, back in the United States; your documents are pretty thoroughly reviewed at that time. And here’s the kicker – the whole point of that review is to make sure everything is in order for your eventual SEF appointment. The D7 Visa, in and of itself, doesn’t really have many requirements to satisfy, they only put you through the ringer at that stage to weed out folks who would fail at the SEF level. While it feels like the D7 can be very demanding, it’s actually just the sieve that you’re being squeezed through in anticipation of the residency requirements. And so it follows, if you got your D7 (or other visa), your SEF appointment it’s probably going to be a piece of cake.

So, not to drag this out tooooo much, a tale of two appointments. John gets to the office in Portalegre about a half hour early. There are signs on the door advising visitors to wait outside until they are called, but a security guard sees him and waves him in. He is seen immediately. A nice lady with very little English (usual caveat applies: this is not a bad thing, we’re just being descriptive) communicates that she will simply take all the documents John brought, which include a bunch of extra stuff we weren’t sure we’d need. No problem, she seems to say. A few minutes later he is called over to have his picture taken and his index fingerprints scanned. A few minutes after that he is called up to pay and given a temporary copy of his residency document, and told that the actual card will arrive in the mail in two to four weeks. All told, he’s done in about 20 minutes and has basically zero interaction during the whole process. Lisa’s experience is slightly more complex – she is actually asked to present three documents (out of the 15 or so that we had prepared for each of us). Neither of us was asked about proof of residence / a current lease, which if you read our last post you know was a source of consternation for us. Oh well. Unsurprisingly the Lisbon office is busier than the one in East Bumble@#*(&@ and she takes maybe 30 minutes to get the same process finished.

In other words, the people giving advice are right, and it was a piece of cake for both of us. If you are reading this because you’re hoping to glean some guidance for your own SEF appointment, all we can say is this: over-prepared beats under-prepared, because there are stories of people being asked for more than we were, or that their documents were scrutinized with great diligence. Take nothing for granted. BUT, if you are genuinely sure that you’ve got everything they tell you to bring, you can probably get as good night’s sleep knowing that it’s going to work out for you. For us, the end result is that we have both been approved for our residency visas and can now reside in Portugal for up to two years if we would like. The future is now as wide open as it has ever been for us… which, naturally, presents its own challenges. But that’s a story for another time.

The short answer is that we’re fortunate beyond words for how well it has turned out. This isn’t actually obvious at first glance. The apartment we’ve moved in to, which we were smitten with at first glance, has turned out to have a couple of almost-literally fatal flaws, to the point where we are moving out early to get to a new place. That story will probably come in more detail later, but the fact that we are packing up everything we own, again, slightly less than 4 months after we did it the last time, is certainly not optimal. Our first trip out of the country was not a resounding success. I mean let’s not kid ourselves, we saw and did some really amazing things, but we were overwhelmed at times in Barcelona and the chaos in the middle of our trip to France left us off-balance even as we tried to salvage the experience (which we did by and large). Certain goals that we set for ourselves and our health are more work-in-progress than mission-accomplished; as anybody’s therapist will tell them, the one thing you are certain to take with you wherever you go is yourself. I remember as a kid I heard “wherever you go, there you are” and thought “well that’s dumb.” Hang on, younger me, it’ll make sense one day. How exactly is it so amazing then?

Shockingly, we’ll explain by telling you a long story. Way back when we were in the planning stages of uprooting our lives and moving to a foreign country, we’d talk about why exactly we wanted to do it. For my (John’s) part, there was this hypothetical story I’d keep going back to. “Whenever we’re in a big city like New York or London or … wherever, you read the paper or Time Out Istanbul or or or … and read about all sorts of amazing cultural events that don’t even make the news. Like, when Lisa surprised me with a trip to New York to see Hamilton while the original cast was still there (<—brag), we dug around in the papers and found a little play that you never heard of outside of the city, called “The Woodsman”, and by golly if it wasn’t one of our most favorite theatrical experiences ever. These things are happening, all the time. We’re always seeing reviews of gallery exhibitions or plays or concerts that are taking place in far-flung corners of the world, and they might as well be in Narnia. How amazing would it be if we could actually go to these things?” Side note: whenever we travel to an English-speaking destination we make a point of rooting around for local theater options; we’ve had fantastic experiences in places like Dublin and London. More stories for another time. Anyway.

A couple weeks ago my news feed brought up a review of an exhibition going on at the British Museum in London, The World of Stonehenge. It sounds absolutely fascinating. Interesting. I mention it to Lisa and we both think it sounds neat. Then, a couple days later, another review pops up: A Century of the Artist’s Studio. It looks really fascinating, if maybe a little brief. The mental tea kettle starts to rattle. Then the dominoes start to teeter: in Oxford at this same time is Pissarro: Father of Impressionism. Now the kettle is whistling. We do some quick checks of the calendar, fiddle with a half-dozen websites and, just like that, we’ve got three days at the end of May where we fly to London, see a couple of amazing exhibitions, hop on the train for a day trip to Oxford to see the Pissarro and just sight-see one of the great universities of the world, then back to London to chomp on a Raphael exhibition at the National Gallery that we didn’t even know was there when we planned the trip. Do you see what I mean? Even now that we’re paying closer attention, a pretty fantastic event was going on that is aligned perfectly with our interests and we’d never have heard about it, but here we are seeing it.

Another story. Lisa likes the beach. Waaaaay more than I do, although I’m coming around. Back in the States we would occasionally try to work out a trip every couple of years to somewhere with decent beaches so we could sun ourselves and splash around a bit. This year, she says she’d like some beach time for her birthday. No problem. Plan A is to head to the Greek islands to hit the Mediterranean, but the truth is we were just there a couple years ago and that trip left a mark (another story for another time) so maybe give that a rest. So instead, right now we’re in the middle of planning a few weeks in the south of France and the Loire valley. We’ll splash around in Nice for awhile, then head up into the center of the country and take a gander at a dozen gorgeously-restored castles and their magnificent gardens.

Oh, and in October we’re taking the Orient Express to Venice to spend a week, and we’re trying to sort out which cities’ Christmas markets we want to visit this year. And when we aren’t hitting the road, we live in a charming European city complete with cobblestone streets and an easy pace to life. Whatever travails we’re going through, bumps in the road or whatever you’d like to call it, the truth of the matter is that we are living exactly the life we’d hoped to be living; we know it, and we’re so so grateful for it.