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….

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

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

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

Now where were we…

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

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

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

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