Transcripts for Episode 151

These transcripts were generated by robots, not writers.

Stacy: Hi friends. I don’t normally offer a disclaimer at the beginning of my episodes, and I’m going to offer one today because I am talking about some things about life here in Portugal. Just a couple references related to crime and some other things experienced in the US in Portugal that may not be suitable for all listeners. So if you have a little one around, just consider whether or not you want them to hear this episode.

Hello and welcome to an overdue episode on my life here in Portugal. I get so many questions, so many messages from everybody of all walks of life, all ages, all stages. Obviously, there’s also a lot of political tension going on in the US right now. So people, I think, are starting to consider their options outside of the US. So I thought, hey, it’s a good time for me to give you an update on our life here in Portugal. Now that we’ve been here for five years, if you’re a YouTube subscriber, you’ll notice that we don’t have video today. That’s because, just being really honest with you, things have been a little intense on my side over the last couple of months, and as I record this episode today, we have lost our family cat, Leela.

She has been gone for not quite a week, almost a week now, and we’re all heartbroken. She was our first baby. We adopted her in the Dominican Republic. We left her with my parents when we moved to Vietnam because of their quarantine policy. But then we got her again when we moved back to the US. We traveled 2000 miles with her to Ohio, 2000 miles back to Idaho. We flew to Thailand with her back from Thailand and brought here to Portugal. And so today is just a time crunch slash don’t honestly, just don’t feel like being on video. So here I am. I’m showing up for you.

I’m showing up to Cher, and I’m going to tell you all about our life here in Portugal and all the things that have been great and been hard and that we love, that I would like to change. I put quite a bit of time prepping this episode for you so that it could be really informative and really thoughtful. So we’ll dive in shortly. But before I do, I am going to ask you to, as you’re listening right now, take a moment to leave a review for this podcast. You just scroll to the bottom of your podcast app, click. Hopefully the five star rating. Write a quick review. It can be very simple. Love this podcast. Love listening to this podcast. Insightful guests, love listening. Something very simple. It’s truly such a huge difference maker for me.

It’s a small thing that you can do to support this podcast. Help me reach more people with the message of this podcast, which is living a life that is beyond better, not defaulting, not going into this path that somebody else handed to you and I following that without raising your head up and questioning the right path for yourself. So that’s the question that we explore on this podcast. Of course. I am your host, Stacey Ennis. I am a book coach that is the foundation of the work that I do in the world. But the authors that I support all embody this mindset of living a life that is beyond better. They are all striving to make an impact on the world, to live full and meaningful lives. And that’s why I love getting to explore this concept here.
I don’t do, you know, quote unquote career coaching or any of that. So this is where I could explore that piece of it. And I love getting to show up every week with you. So if you would take a moment to do that, I would be super grateful. With all that said, let me give you a little overview of what we’re going to talk through in this episode. We are going to answer the question, is this our forever home? This is what people ask me all the time. Are you going to live there forever? I’ll answer that for you. I’m going to talk through the things that I love about living here. I’m going to detail the challenges that we face, and then I’m going to give you kind of my overview.

And I’m also going to so like a summary essentially, of how we feel about it. And then I’m going to give you some tips. If you are thinking about living abroad, if you’re considering making a similar move for yourself, I’ve outlined a couple things that will help you start to move in that direction. So let’s dive in. So let’s start with the question. Is this our forever home? I don’t know. I don’t know the answer to that. You know, I am a really long term thinker, a long term planner. I think ten plus years in the future. I mean, really, I’ve already envisioned my end of life and where I want to be at the end of life. I know that right now we’re really happy. We have no plans to leave. We’re up for citizenship very soon. Soon.

So actually within six months, I can apply for citizenship. So that’s interesting as an option. I am not 100% sure if we will apply for it. Obviously, if we decide to stay here indefinitely, that will be what we do, I think. But I have to explore our tax pros and cons because we have a really good tax set up here and I’m not really sure how citizenship will impact us as far as taxes go. So I need to look into that. I have some leads for meetings, and that’s something that I am exploring. It’s really attractive to us to have an EU passport, especially for the kids. It opens up a lot of college opportunities. I have my older child who is very ambitious. She has big goals. She’s talked about going to Harvard since she was, like, very small.

I actually had a client years ago who worked with the Dartmouth rowing team, and he bought her a Dartmouth shirt. So I think she was three at the time. So we’ve been talking about university since she was very little. She just has big aspirations. So it would be nice to have access to some of the excellent universities here in Europe. The bonus of that is cost would be much lower for us if we’re still here in Portugal. She’d be a whole lot closer to us. And so all of that is really attractive. I’ll also add that the US is not currently somewhere that I really want to return to. I just had a friend post on social media that she was in a shooting. I was in a shooting in Idaho.

There are so many things not happening, or I should say there’s so many things happening that are scary there. Political tension in Idaho, specifically gun violence. So there’s a lot of things that I am not so excited about and really don’t have a desire to be back in. I do miss my family terribly. I miss my friends. I miss being able to fly to my sister’s house who lives, she lives in Ohio, you know, easily, and go there, you know, for a weekend or a few days and not have it be a huge thing. That’s really tough. And this is why this question of, is this our forever home? I envision splitting my time. So right now, that’s hard because we have young children, it’s very tough for us to go home.

When we go, we really need to go for at least a month. And last month, last year when we did that, it was very hard on our whole family. We had an amazing time. But coming back, it took us two plus months to recover, not just from the sickness we picked up while traveling, we got Covid, but the emotion of it, sleep disruption, the food changes. There was so much plus then restarting school. So it’s really hard to go back. I don’t know. We’re still exploring this, but I know that I want more of my home state in my life. I want more of my friends and family from back home in my life. And I also want my life here.

So I think in the future I’d love to have part of the year in Idaho, part of the year here to be determined. I recognize that I did not answer your question on whether it’s our forever home, but I don’t know. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to answer, if anything is our forever home. I’m just so open to what life brings. And if we’re happy, if we’re not happy, I there are some things here that are becoming hard for us, which I’m going to detail in a little bit. But overall, it’s a peaceful and lovely place and we’re happy.

And while I’m not the kind of person, I mean, if you know me at all, whether you listen to the podcast or you’re on my newsletter, which you can join, by the way, staceyannis.com join if you know me at all, online, in person, your client, you know, I am resilient and I stick through hard things. I don’t give up on things. And so I don’t want to give the impression that we’re like, oh, we’re not happy. We’re just going to move. That is not the case at all. But how do I phrase this exactly? I guess what I want to say is that a philosophy of choice, living a life of choice, means that you have to actively choose. You have to actively choose to keep the choice that you’ve made, or else now you’re moving into default again.

A lot of times we have this idea that we make a choice and we’re now, oh, we’ve made this decision, now we have to stick with it forever and ever. And I just don’t believe that. I believe that life is not binary. I believe that we have the capacity to change our minds and our lives at any point in time. And so for me, I have to continue to actively choose this life, or I’m not choosing this life, I’m defaulting. So it’s a question that I’m constantly asking. It doesn’t make me feel a sense of instability. It might sound like that. It actually makes me feel a really strong sense of anchoring because I am continuing to choose. I’m continuing to lean in hard to the life that we live and the life that we’ve chosen.

That doesn’t mean that I don’t flounder or question or, you know, I’m not always firm, I’m not always steady in this question of where are we going to be? Where are we going to live? It’s not so simple when you live a location independent life, because you can be anywhere. We can pick up and move to Spain or Norway or, you know, anywhere in South America. I mean, there’s almost anywhere in the world that we could move to. And sometimes that makes it hard, because endless options make it really hard to choose. But we like our choice here, and we’re really happy here most of the time, other than some of the things I’ll tell you about in a little bit.

And so for now, we’re here probably for the near term, here, likely for the long term, a combination of here and back home. That’s my thinking, but we’ll see. Vamos aver. All right, so let’s talk about the things that we love. There’s so many things. I love the air here. It’s so supple and clean. It makes me feel healthy just breathing the air outside. We live a mile and a half from the beach, so I get to go to the ocean every week, often more than once a week. It’s very. I don’t even know the word. It’s like I feel connected to the water. I miss the mountains desperately. Growing up at the base of a mountain, surrounded by mountains in a valley, it’s really weird to not look out and see mountains, but we have cliffs here. They’re gorgeous.

And I do love that dramatic cliffside view and being close to the ocean. The food here is amazing. Portuguese cuisine, I think for a national cuisine, is the best in the world. Actually, it’s not my favorite cuisine to eat. Indian food is far and away my favorite food. Different types of asian food are a close second. Obviously love thai food, having lived in Thailand, love vietnamese food, having lived in Vietnam, still love my platanos, and, you know, buy meals from the doctor, Dominican Republic. But for an everyday meal, everyday food, portuguese food is incredible. They eat a lot of soups made of vegetables and olive oil, and they eat fish and farmed meats and whole foods. It’s just a very healthy daily diet. And it’s really nice that you can go to a portuguese restaurant and get a nice salad.

There’s always this really yummy salad that comes with every meal. It’s onions. I actually don’t like onions, so I pick it off. But I like the. The flavor. The onions bring tomato and lettuce dressed with vinegar and olive oil. And usually you can get a fresh fish that’s been caught nearby in the ocean. You can get just a really good meal in any portuguese restaurant, and it’s very affordable. I went out to lunch with one of my team members who’s in town, Rita, who produces this podcast. And we had a full course meal. So it was bread and butter salad. I had a. Oh, I can’t even think. Bacalao, which is codfish, is bacalao and potato kind of cream. It sounds gross, but it was really tasty. And then we also had coffee included and a dessert, which we had watermelon and for all.

Oh, and a drink. So sparkling water. And for all of that, I think it was €8 apiece. So we paid €16, which is close to the dollar. It would figure out to around $17. It’s just super. It’s just, like, super affordable. Really fresh. Now, my meal is not very healthy. You can tell by how I’m describing it. But often you can just get just basically fish cooked with salt. And it’s very clean, very simple. So yummy, amazing food. And we get our food in our home. We buy from an organic farmer. We pick up every Saturday. We get our eggs, most of our produce for the week. On Saturday, we bring back all the containers. So we are. We’re definitely not a zero waste household. I would love to be there, but it’s just not where we’re at.

But we are a very low waste household. We are reusing, exchanging. It makes me feel good. It makes me feel like I’m living my values and feeding my family well. So the food is a really big deal to us. We are a completely whole food family. My husband and I, you know, because we’re parents, sometimes we have to eat things that are a little faster on the fly. But for our kids, they eat completely a whole food diet, organic. And it’s just really easy to get all the things that we need here. And it’s in season and it’s really improved our family’s health a lot. Okay. Other things I love because I could talk about food for a whole episode and that would be really boring. So I’m going to keep going.

Cost of living is great here now in our area, unfortunately, it’s not that great. It has gone up crazy, like a crazy lot, since we moved here. But it’s still more affordable than our home in Idaho, even though Idaho has relatively low cost of living compared to the rest of the country. And then if you are living in less popular areas, like. Like in the north of Portugal or central Portugal, which, of course, would have the downside of not being that close to the beach, cost of living can be very low and very affordable. If you’re living in a major metro like Porto or Lisboa, Lisbon, or in my town, which is in the Algarve, any of the popular algarvean villages or cities, your cost of living is going to be a lot higher.

And unfortunately, we’ve had a lot of development come in, so, meaning developers buying up things and raising prices, it’s become pretty tough for local people to afford to live here. But for those of us who are foreigners and bringing in foreign income, we are part of the problem. We are, but we’re also paying into the system and putting a lot of money into the economy. Unlike these huge developers that are buying up all the properties and making it hard for local people to afford anything. In cost of living, I’ll include medical care. To be able to go to the ER and not think about money is life changing. If you’ve been in my ecosystem for any amount of time, you know, I have a child who has a lot of medical needs. Our whole life has been in and out of doctors.

And to go to the ER with your child and have to think about money is a horrible experience. You probably have experienced this for yourself or for your kid? I remember. I think I maybe have told this story on the podcast before, but I remember when my daughter was a baby and were in Idaho, I had to take her to the ER because she was just vomiting uncontrollably. She was so pallid, and I was so worried about her. And the ER wasn’t far from us, so it was five or ten minutes away. So I drove her there, and she vomited in the car on the way in. I was so scared. And I brought her in, and I was sitting, waiting for the doctor in the emergency room.

And before the doctor even came in, they brought in a credit card machine, and they made me pay $600 before the doctor would come in. And I just remember sitting there, and were not doing that well financially at the time. It was a struggle to afford all the things that we needed to do, needed to afford for our family. And I remember sitting there and thinking, do I have enough that if I process this, we’re going to have enough money for all of our other things that we need? I didn’t know the answer to that, but I had to pay the bill, and I think I ended up putting it on a credit card because I wasn’t sure that we had enough cash flow.

And it was a really embarrassing moment, even though, obviously, the person on the other side had no idea all the things going on in my head. And then for my attention to get pulled away from my daughter, I felt angry, I felt embarrassed, I felt sad that I was thinking about money when she was so ill. Yeah. And I felt angry that this was happening to us when she was so sick. So to not have that experience anymore, obviously, we’re in a much better financial situation, thankfully. But just to not have to think about that. When my daughter was really sick a couple years ago, and we ended up being in the hospital for a week, surgery, all kinds of things, it was only €600, which is like, $615 around there. And what a difference, right? It’s such a difference.

So that cost is massive. We do have private health coverage. It costs about $400 a month for our family. And that bill that I just mentioned from when my daughter was ill for a week, well, she was out for a long time, but in the hospital for a week. That was in a private hospital. So we pretty much only go to private hospitals unless it’s, like, a more specific emergency, because unfortunately, the private hospitals don’t have specialists available 24/7 so if you have, like, let’s say your kid has a really serious head injury. Knock on wood. That’s not going to happen to any of us. I don’t know if you could hear the knock if my mic canceled it out, but I did. Knock on wood. You wouldn’t go to a private hospital because they probably wouldn’t have a neurologist there, a pediatric neurologist.

They might have a regular neurologist, but it’s not the same thing. You need a pediatric one in those cases. You really need to go to a children’s hospital, public children’s hospital. But the problem with that is we don’t have any in the Algarve. So if you have a really serious medical situation, you have to go to Lisbon. I’m going to talk about that a little bit more in our challenges. But the cost of living is really good, comparatively. I love that we have a close knit community here. Everybody knows each other. It’s very small. We have really great friends here. I feel so lucky, so fortunate. It really makes a difference to have a great community. And I feel very supported.

And I feel that if we had something happen that we would have people rallying around us and that I can call my friend and say, hey, I need help. Can you watch my kids? And she’ll say yes, and she can do the same with me. So for me, that’s everything. It’s so important. I feel very at home here. It feels very comfortable and familiar to me, even though obviously, I’ve never lived in Europe before this, but even just coming here, I felt very at home. Now, I will say I feel that way a lot of places. I felt that way in Vietnam and in Thailand, which doesn’t make a lot of sense because I had no exposure to those cultures beforehand. But I feel it more here. It feels very calming, very peaceful. I feel very at home. I also love that it’s safe.

That’s so big just to feel you can be in a public setting and there’s a sense of safety to not worry about a lot of things that I worried about back home. It’s definitely not perfect. Crime is rising here. There have been some break ins not too far from us. We do have an alarm system on our house, so it’s not perfect. But when we’re talking about violent crime, that’s not such an issue here. You certainly have a lot of petty theft. We know somebody who had her car broken into really close to us and her device is stolen. That just makes my heart hurt. I can just imagine that would be so frustrating. I mean, think about how much of your life flips on your laptop and your phone. So those things do happen for sure, and we’re not ignorant to it.

But as far as some of the more severe stuff, it really isn’t such a huge issue in our area. And even in the bigger cities, you’re, you know, I’m not going to mention some of, just in case there are younger ears listening, some of the bigger things you need to worry about as, you know, adult humans out in the world, or even kids. But it is. It’s a lot safer, and we really appreciate that. I have the next one on my list is kind of like a love and a challenge, so I’ll talk about it here. I’m not going to talk about it in the challenge section, but I actually kind of laugh.

I’m laughing when I’m reading my notes because I wrote down making progress with Portuguese, and I wrote that in my love section, which is kind of funny because I feel like I kind of am making progress. But, okay, let me say I do feel like I’ve hit a little level up with my Portuguese. Mash et difficil. I’m learning Portuguese, but it’s difficult. I’m learning more about the verb conjugation, pronunciation, vocabulary. As I’m recording this, though, I’m about to take a month off, just because I’m needing a break for summer. And so I will say, you know, a big part of this has been my lessons that I attend every single week with my friend and a teacher that has really made a difference. And that’s just a pro tip for anything you want to do.

If you have support and you’re meeting regularly, it is a game changer. You have accountability. You know, somebody is expecting something of you. It really makes a difference. So let’s see how I do on this month break. This pausa, this break. Hopefully I am going to achieve my goal of becoming conversationally fluent by the end of the year. I’m telling you, I have to make this goal. I cannot go another year in this country without at least having basic conversation with people. It’s really a problem. I need to make this goal. It is a very hard language. I read somewhere that it’s, like the second or third hardest language to learn in the world. I don’t know if that’s accurate or not, but it sure feels like it. So love, hate. Not hate. Love, challenge.

And then my last note on our love list is the outdoor culture. It’s so beautiful to just live in a place where everything is outside restaurants, are outside. Recreation is outside. Events are outside. It’s just such a calming way to live, to be outdoors. And we, you know, we’re so close to all of these natural spaces. So a lot of those events will happen in, you know, around the borough, the forest, or, you know, it’ll be near the beach, so you can see the ocean while you’re at this place. Or it’ll be in our old town area, where these gorgeous, ancient buildings are around you. And it’s just the coolest thing. I mean, we had a. There was a festival recently. I can’t remember what the whole festival was about, but they had, you know, outdoor food. They had all these booths and stuff.

And, I mean, compare this to, like, I don’t know, the fair, the western Idaho fair, where you’re just in, like, you felt grungy and there’s all these noises and, you know, boos and stuff. I mean, we like the fair, but it’s not very peaceful. And then here we are in this portuguese outdoor thing, and there’s this ancient wall behind, you know, this ancient castle that or fort behind this. These food booths, and there’s this beautiful church to the side and then the ocean on the other side of the road. I mean, it’s just. It’s epic. So I love, love that about living here. Let’s move to the challenges. And I’m going to try to speed this up a little because I’m realizing I just spent 30 minutes talking about all the things we love.

But I think that’s a good balance because we do love most of the things here. But we do have some real challenges. Medical care access. I mentioned this already, especially pediatrics. We do not have an emergency pediatrician in our area. So when we have a situation with a child, which we’ve had a couple, we’ve had to call an ambulance two times. It’s number one. The ambulatory care is awful. It takes forever to get to you, even though the place is five minutes from our house when they arrive. So far, my experience has been very. It’s been a very poor experience. They cannot take you to a private hospital. They have to take you to the public hospital. The public pediatrician is an hour away, and the public hospital that’s an hour from us is not good. So this is a real issue for us.

It’s something that we are really struggling with in our area. And if you are considering moving to the Algarve specifically, you really need to be clear about this in whether you can deal with it. It’s better on the eastern side of the Algarve or on the western side of the Algarve, but it’s still not amazing. It’s going to be a lot better for you if you’re near Faro, which is where the airport is. But Faro is not as nice as where we are. We have just a dreamy, beautiful everyday life here. It’s just not as nice over there. So, yeah, it’s a real challenge. If you’re in a major metro, or even outside of a major metro, you’re okay. And actually care can be quite good.

But in general, my experience with public hospitals in Faro, in Lisbon, in Porto, I’ve been to public emergencies in all of those places. They were all bad. I did not have a good experience in any of them. And I don’t want to, like, hold back on this because it can be really easy for people to look to public systems like Portugal, like the UK, and, you know, Portugal’s ranked, like, number twelve or something like that for medical care in the world. It’s not well run, and it’s a very. I don’t know what, I’m not getting the right word in my brain right now, but I saw a report here that people were waiting over 12 hours sometimes to see a doctor. I think I saw one that said, like, 18 or 19 hours.

And we had a similar experience when were in Lisbon a while back. It wasn’t that long, but I think were at the hospital for like, 7 hours, which I guess isn’t probably that different than the US. It didn’t take us as long to get in. We actually got in pretty quickly to see the doctor. But just the volume of people come in, the way that they run things, it’s very fractured, very fragmented, just like any normal medical system is. And it’s just not as good as I think people assume it’s going to being in public care. All that said, it is better in a lot of ways than what we had back home. And especially if you have less money, you can get the care you need without having to think about the cost, and that is massive.

If you consider moving to a country like this, do get private health coverage, it’s super important. It’s something that you need, and I would not scrimp on that. I would 100% get private health coverage. And along the same lines as medical care, access is therapy or specialists or anything that you need, especially if you need english services. So if you have a child who has, you know, needs extra support with learning or they need occupational therapy, physical therapy, speech therapy. If you need extra academic support in a school, it is so hard to find in the Algarve. It feels impossible sometimes for some families. You’re going to have a lot more access if you live in a major city. There are a lot of alternative medical providers, especially in the Algarve, so you can find energy, healing and natural medicine.

Osteopathy, which is not the same as osteopathy in the US. They are not medical doctors here. I made the mistake of thinking that an osteopath here was the same as an osteopath in the US. They are not the same thing. They’re totally different doctors. And actually an osteopath is not a doctor here. They’re like, I don’t even know what their designation is, but they only have two years of training, I believe, whereas an osteopath in the US is a fully qualified medical doctor. You need to understand what specialties mean. And I just know that a lot of the available resources, especially I can speak to the Algarve. You really need to check their credentials and the quality of care because there are a lot of options for alternative care.

And again, if you have been in my ecosystem for any length of time, you know, I am open to all sorts of different things. I will try, as long as it’s not going to hurt me, I will try nearly anything because I really believe in the power of our body’s natural ability to heal. But sometimes I feel that we have more. Not I feel. Let me say a statement. We have a lot more access to alternative medicine than we do specialists. And so when you really need a specialist, whether it’s therapy or medical, that is really tough. Next is school access, especially secondary school. Again, if you have an english speaking child with any additional needs of any kind, even if it’s basic one one support at school, like a little extra help, that’s really hard to find at a school here.

They don’t have very many resources in the private schools. We have very limited secondary options in the western Algarve. There are a lot more in the eastern Algarve. And I don’t know about the access to other things, but I know that on this side it’s quite tough. Okay, totally different topic on challenges. This one is kind of. Yeah, it’s very different. And this is substance use by the expat community. I do not drink, I don’t do drugs, I don’t do anything that harms my body. And I mean, I might have a drink of alcohol every two, three months at a event. If I’m, you know, feeling like I want it, I don’t. I don’t not have it for any reason other than I just don’t want to and I don’t feel good.

So we completely abstain, my husband and I, both, from all mind altering substances other than coffee, which probably should be on that list. But sometimes that can be a little hard because a lot of ex fat culture can be very substance use heavy. This is not universally true. We certainly have many friends that are of a similar mindset, or they’re more moderate. Right? Like, they might drink a little bit, but they are mindful about their drinking, and they only do it, you know, every so often. It’s not a habit, but I just find that a lot of families here in our area, because it is a wealthier area. A lot of people don’t necessarily work like they have, or they work very little bit.

They have maybe retired from a big, fast career, like, they had an exit from a company or they had something else that brought them in a lot of money, and they were able to step away from their full time work. And so I find that maybe they have more time on their hands, and these things become maybe more habitual. And for us, it’s hard because, you know, we’ll be at events sometimes and we’re the only ones not drinking, or we’re just kind of noticing, like, I might not even notice that’s happening. But then as the day goes on, you kind of realize your conversations are getting a little weird. So, you know, this is where it’s important to surround yourself with people that share your values and live similar lifestyles to you.

I just find it a little harder because it just takes a little more time to get to know people or not get to know people, get to make friends that really align with our values. So that’s been a little bit of a challenge. Another challenge related to community is that people leave during the summer, and that can get a little lonely. So people will leave one to two months during the summer. We did that last summer. Or they have somebody in town like their families, so they’re not available to meet and hang out. And that can be hard because you build your community, and then it just gets disrupted in the summer. But I suppose there’s good and challenging things to that.

My family’s about to come in a couple weeks to see us, and I’m really excited to get to spend time with them. So, you know, it’s great to have family come, and it’s great that others get their family here, but it does get challenging when your kind of life and rhythm and connection to people gets disrupted. Okay, two more challenges on my list. Tourists. I love that they support the economy, but oh, my goodness, driving with tourists in the area is terrifying. They’re just such bad drivers. And it’s not. I think it’s just mainly they don’t know how to drive in Europe or they don’t know how to drive a stick shift. But, like, you really need to learn the rules of a country before you come and drive in it. It’s dangerous. And I don’t look forward to this.

Every summer, the tourists, they also walk in the middle of the street. Like, what is with that? We’re driving on our normal roads, but people are on vacation, so they’re just, like, walking in the middle of a well trafficked road. Like, nobody drives. This happens every day, multiple times a day, often where they’re just kind of like walking in the middle of the street, and we’re like, y’all, people live in your house. It’s just. It’s funny. I laugh about it, but, you know, June, July, August, even into September. It’s interesting because we don’t have weather seasons, but we have people seasons. So the winter is very chill, calm, peaceful. Beaches are really open. You might go to the beach and there’s, like, one or two other people there. And then in the summer, it’s all the people come.

It’s so busy, so much traffic, so full. And I’m really grateful for the money they bring in. We need it. But, my gosh, like, walk on the sidewalk and check the rules before you drive in a new country. Last one for my challenges. This is personal, and you may not resonate with this, but I really miss the bustle of a city. I miss the energy of a city. I don’t have a lot of entrepreneurial or community connection here. At my level of business, I’m a mature business owner. I’ve been in business for 15 years. I have a team. It’s just a different space, a different mindset than being a freelancer or a solopreneur. And certainly I have friends that are in those spaces, and I don’t need somebody to match me entrepreneurially to be friends with them by any means.

That is not how I make determine friendships and whether I pursue a friendship with somebody at all. But I really crave that personal connection with people who understand where I’m at and who can provide me with. I don’t know, challenging me with pushing me. And I can do that for them. I like being able to talk to people about things that I’m areas that I’m growing areas I need support and to just have that rapport with somebody. I miss going to events for entrepreneurs. I missed a walking in a city and just feeling the energy of a city. I miss that a lot. And I’m probably missing it more because I haven’t been to London in a while. I went to the english countryside in June, but I haven’t actually been to London in probably like five months or six months.

And I normally go there every three months. So maybe I’m just missing it more because I haven’t been there recently. But yes, I’m missing that. Okay. Overall, you can’t see my arms, but I’m doing a big circle. Let me just sum this up for you in my big summary. We love our life here. We love it. It isn’t perfect. You heard me detail a bunch of challenges. They’re real and very big challenges. But this feels like home to us. And it’s really hard for me to imagine returning to the US full time. It’s not the place it was. I’m really sad to see the state of things right now, and I don’t feel safe there. And so for me, feeling safe, feeling like my family’s safe, it’s massive. It’s huge. And so for now.

For now, we’re happy and we’re staying here and we like it. And I’ll be doing another update, maybe year six. I promised at the top of the episode that I would give you a few things to consider if you’re thinking about moving abroad. And I. This is how I did it, and I think this is a good approach for anybody. Before you start researching countries or start making a decision, I would make a list. I would make a list of all the things that you need and all the things that you want. And I would just make a big, huge, hairy old list. And then I would sequence that list. So I would sit down for like, 20 minutes and I would start writing out all the things. Good access to schools, quality medical care for us.

We added great cycling routes because my husband’s a cyclist, close to an airport, strong community, whatever it is, good food, whatever it is that close to the ocean, make that big list and add everything. Don’t hold back. And then I would prioritize that in order of needs and wants. So rank it by the things that are absolutely non negotiable and then move down the list to things that you would really like, because you’re not going to get a place that has every single thing that you want. It’s just. It doesn’t exist. There is no perfect place. Place safety was tip top for us, for example, but there were other things that we didn’t get here, like, we don’t have access to mountains. That’s really important to us, but we don’t have it. So rank it, like top to bottom.

This is what I have to have. This is really important, but I can live without it. And you have to put it in order, like, it has to be rigged because otherwise you’ll have no way of measuring. And then I would start researching countries that you’re interested in and measure them against this list that you’ve made. Help you make the decision that way. We watched YouTube videos, we read articles, we talked to people, went Facebook groups. Everything you could imagine just dove deep for months researching. Then you can visit the place and see if it feels aligned for you. But I actually have never visited a place that I moved to, ever. We moved to four countries and I had never visited any of the cities that I moved to.

I had been to Thailand, but I had never been to the island that we moved to. So I think it’s great to go and visit, but I have not lived that as a rule. So I can’t tell you that you have to do that. But I think it is really good practice. But you really cannot measure in a couple weeks whether you’re actually going to like living in a place. It’s just impossible. Our brains seek confirmation. It’s called confirmation bias. So if you go to a place and you really want to live there, you’re going to pay attention to all the good things, and it’s going to be really hard to notice the hard and the challenging things. And many of those things do not reveal themselves for a really long time.

So when you’re seeking information and when you’re doing your visit, you must put yourself in situations and talk to people who are unhappy or have challenges. I did not do this when we moved to the Dominican Republic. And while I loved so much about my time there, it was one of the most challenging experiences of my life from a safety perspective. And I still carry a lot of baggage, emotional baggage, from the experiences that I had there and the times that my life was at risk. So I, you know, again, wouldn’t change anything. Much love for the doctor, but would I have moved there if I had known what I was going to go through there? I don’t think so.

And before we moved there, the teacher that was in the rule before me, because I used to be a high school English teacher, told me all the things, you know, she warned me. She told me all the challenges in the job that she experienced, and I just wrote her off and I didn’t listen. I was only in my twenties, so, you know. But it’s just really important that you pay attention to both the positive and the negative. Usually both will be very loud. The people that you want to listen to are the ones who offer the balance. I think I’m a good example of that. I just went through all the things that we love out there, a lot of the challenges that we had. I was really honest with you about it.

These are the kind of things that you want to seek out when you’re considering moving to a new place. You might have a conversation with somebody who lives in my city who has a totally different perspective. So do listen to podcasts, watch YouTube videos, read articles, and really immerse yourself in learning about the place. Then. Then sometimes you just gotta go for it. You know, you just gotta make it happen. A lot of times, people will spend way too long researching and never taking action. So for me, I got tired of that. My husband and I were like, can we stop talking about moving abroad and let’s just make a plan? So we set an 18 month timeline. We project managed back. It was me, to be honest, that was doing the project management planning.

That’s, you know, my nerd said, and then we just set a date. We told people and we jumped in. And to be honest, it didn’t work out the first time. Thailand was a disaster in a lot of ways. We had so many beautiful experiences. I’m glad that we did it. We wouldn’t be in Portugal if we hadn’t gone to Thailand. But we made a choice, and then we made another choice and we left. So sometimes you jump in, it doesn’t work. You jump out. My sister says, how does she put it? She says, I jump 2ft in and 2ft out. So when you’re going to do something, go all in the. And then if you find out it’s not right, you can jump back out. No choice. Well, nearly any. Like, nearly every choice that you make is not the last choice, right?

Like, you often have more opportunity than you think to make different choices and shift. And then the last thing I want to say is that all of this is not as hard as you think. Millions of people have already done this it feels big, it feels new, it feels fresh. It feels like a totally different thing. But then you get to a place and you’re like, oh my gosh, everybody else has done it already. Why did I make such a big deal out of this? So really it is about setting that vision, creating the plan, and jumping in and doing it. That’s it for this week’s episode. I hope that you enjoyed listening to me go on for an hour almost about my life in Portugal. If you’re considering moving here, I hope it was useful for you. Send me your questions.

I’m happy to do a follow up episode about your specific questions. You can write me at hellot@stacyennis.com and thanks for joining me. I appreciate your time and energy today and I’ll look forward to sharing more about our life here in Portugal. You can always go to my website to read some more articles and listen to more episodes about Portugal. If you click on blog and click the little search function and type in Portugal, you’ll get all the things that have to do with Portugal so you can do a deep dive and get all the information that I’ve already put out. I want to thank, as always, Rita Domingues for producing this fine podcast. She does an amazing job at everything, including all the marketing stuff, but certainly this podcast that I am so grateful.

I will ask you one more time at the bottom of the episode to leave a five star review if you have a moment and rate this podcast. Well, I should say a five star rating and review the podcast. It’s such a big deal to me as a podcaster and I really appreciate your time and energy doing that. And if you’ve done it, thank you. I appreciate you and I will be back with you before you know it.