[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.

(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.