[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.

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.

We’ve got some big changes coming. At the end of November we’re going to San Francisco to share Thanksgiving with our family there.

The next day, we’re boarding our flight for Portugal.

We have one-way tickets.

But first, hello to the handful of readers – mostly family! – who come here to see what’s going on with us. (Hello!) Now that we’ve avoided burying the lede, let’s rewind a bit.

A bit more than 10 years ago John and I were having dinner and I told him that I’d like to get married. Until then, we’d been gently circling around the idea, but when the moment came it was with very little warning. That was a big shift for us.

BIG.

It was a voyage into the unknown, one that has gone places we never expected. We are completely and utterly thrilled at how well its turned out, this bringing two worlds together (kind of an understatement) and our lives are so much richer for making this shift.

Like many, the Year (-plus) of COVID has created a huge shift in our lives, one that led to much introspection, discussion, and revising our future plans.We began to feel very much like there has to be more to life than  . . .

Of course, like everyone else we were working from home. So many of our personal activities (hobbies, socializing etc…) involve our computers, though, that it felt like we never got up from our desks. The lines between working on my computer for my employer and being on my computer for fun got very blurry. And depressing. On the other hand, the pandemic times also caused us all to stretch our notions of how we stay in touch. It’s not the same as getting together, obviously, but frankly there were some friends and family that we talked to more in the last year than we had in the previous two or three. And finally, being forced to untether from so many of the physical places that were a part of our life (workplaces, restaurants, the homes of friends and so on) that we found ourselves asking just what, exactly, was keeping us where we are? We felt, viscerally and literally, that “tomorrow is promised to no one” and if we want to fulfill our dreams, there really is no reason not to start now.

NOW.

In saying that out loud, our world shifted. The moment the idea of moving away became even a possibility, it quickly began to feel like an inevitability. If this is as interested in the subject as you’re likely to be, well, there you go – we’re moving to Portugal for awhile and this is why.

If you have any deeper interest in the subject, watch this space. We’ve both been journaling about this process and we think it makes for some interesting storytelling.