This week on the podcast, I talk about three struggles I’m facing right now: two of which you’ve heard me talk about in the past, one of which might surprise you. But first, let me be very clear that I love Portugal. There are so many things I’m grateful for in this wonderful country.
But no country is perfect, and I’m a human being, which means life is not struggle-free. Life is life wherever you live. In sharing the hard parts, I hope you’re able to see the full picture in your own life too—to be grateful and contented in your everyday, but to also acknowledge the challenges and navigate them with a mindset of choicefulness.
We choose to be here in spite of the challenges. But that doesn’t mean I need to ignore the things that cause me strife. Join me as I share three things that I’m struggling with right now in Portugal.
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Choosing Portugal even when it’s hard: 3 struggles right now | Episode 249 Transcript
These transcripts were generated by robots, not writers.
Stacy: Welcome. Welcome. This week I want to share some things that I’m struggling with here in Portugal. But before I do, I want to give you a little bit of a disclaimer about this episode. So I know the title of what I’m struggling with can feel a little bit negative, but I want to say I really love my life here. Portugal is an amazing place and there’s so many good things and I’ve talked about that at length. If you are newer to my YouTube channel, my podcast, wherever you are watching or listening to this, let me give you just a really quick backstory because I think it’s really important for you to understand my history to getting here in Portugal and the six years that we have now been here. It will be seven this coming fall. Nut.
Stacy: We first moved to the Dominican Republic before we had kids. This was in 2009. We then moved to Vietnam, lived there for a little while, moved back to the US eight years, had kids, all that stuff, grad school, yada. And then we moved to Thailand. We stayed there for under a year and then we moved here.
Stacy: And I’ve talked a lot about I love Thailand but all of the kind of disasters that happened there. But I think honestly that living in Thailand helped us appreciate living in Portugal much more. And so I just want to make sure that you realize when you listen to this or watch this that this is not trashing Portugal. I love Portugal. We’re here for a reason. If I didn’t love it, we would move. I have the ability to do that because I am location independent and another context set that I want to give you because I think this is important to the first of the three things that I’m going to share with you is that I am a location independent entrepreneur. I have a small team. Well now we’re at 4 because we lost one of our amazing team members.
Stacy: We will be rehiring soon but we have five of us in total, so four outside of me. We have one team member in Cape Town, two here in Portugal and then one in the us so we’re spread all over very much a remote first business. Although I found in recent years that I’m really appreciating having people here locally. So by the nature of having a remote first company, I do have complete flexibility in where I live, which is good, really great. And at the same time it can be kind of tricky because the world is huge, there are endless options, but we chose here and we continue to choose here. So I just want to be like, I know I’ve said it, but I’m super clear. I do love living here. But no place is perfect. No place is perfect.
Stacy: And especially when you have kids. I have two kids. I have a 13 year old daughter and a 10 year old son. I have a husband, I have a business. All of those things just make things a little bit more complicated than they were when I was, you know, in my 20s and gallivanting around the world. So these are the things that I am struggling with right now as a 40 year old mom and business owner and big dreamer and author and coach and all the things. Okay, so I did make a list I prepared for this one. And the first one is lack of entrepreneurial community. I’ve talked about this a little bit on the podcast in the past, but it’s tough living in a tiny little beach town.
Stacy: Sometimes I need to check our population because I should know this, but it’s not a lot. It’s in the thousands, like the low Thousands, probably maybe 10,000 people live here. That seems bigger than it probably is. I need to check that stat. But anyway, it’s a very small beach town and that it works here in the southern Algarve is there’s a lot of little beach towns. And so I would think, like, it wouldn’t even be that much in my actual city, but it’d be kind of collectively. Some of the villages around probably would be in that range. I never lived in a small town before this. All of the other cities that we picked to live in were pretty big. Although I would say we lived in Phuket, which wasn’t that big, but it was still pretty large.
Stacy: Like there was a lot of energy, a lot of movement, a lot of people. It was busy. And here is not. It’s very calm. And I love that because I am not like a naturally calm person. I strive to be a naturally calm person and I do a lot of things in my life to, you know, chill out a little. But I definitely have anxiety. But like, I feel like it’s the good kind, I guess if that, if there is a qualifier there, I’m more of a type a Person I am really, go for it, do the thing, hard charging. It’s not like that here. That is not the culture here. And so I’ve struggled a little bit to not have people that understand me in person.
Stacy: Now I’ve compensated for that with having friends all around the world that I connect with all the time who understand me, who get it, who are entrepreneurs. I go to London pretty frequently and actually, I think the reason maybe I’m feeling this a little bit more is because I did just go to London last month. I went to the London Book Fair. And yeah, it’s just a very different vibe, different energy, being around all my entrepreneur friends. I have a lot of friends who own businesses there, own companies and yeah, it’s just a. It’s an area that’s a bit of a struggle for me right now. I would love to have a community of not just business owners because there are a lot of, like, local business owners here and that is amazing.
Stacy: But it’s also a different type of business and a little bit of a different mindset when you are targeting a local community and tourists compared to. I have a global business and a global team and I’m in just kind of a different mindset and a different state of evolution as an entrepreneur. So I do miss that a lot. And I think for anybody that’s considering coming to Portugal to live, you really need to think about that. Obviously, it’s not such a big pain point that I’ve relocated because there are a lot of other wonderful things here in the Algarve, but it’s. It’s been something that, you know, it’s hard, it’s tough, and something that I wish that I had locally. Okay, so that’s the first one. Number two, you’ve heard me talk about a lot. And that is the bureaucracy. I know. Surprise, surprise.
Stacy: If you know anything about any government of any kind, but certainly European governments, you know that they love their paperwork and I mean literal paper. So we have been able to file most of our visa or residency, I should say related items online, but it first required, like collecting actual papers that I had to scan and upload. This has been a nightmare, dealing with the bureaucracy here. If you’ve never dealt with immigration before, it’s really hard for you, I’m sure, to understand. You’re probably like, well, just like follow the steps and I’m sure it’ll work out. It’s. No, it’s not like that. So my husband’s. I’ve talked about this before. My husband’s Residency expired last August, finally was able to apply for renewal last month in March of 2026. So he had been expired from August of 2025 to March of 2026.
Stacy: And while we’re not really worried about, like legal issues, because this is such a known problem and frankly, we’re also from a privileged country. And that does make a difference, even though it shouldn’t. It does. It does make it tricky because he cannot leave the country. He’s not allowed to. He can leave, but we don’t know if he would be able to come back. So that’s meant holiday plans have to go around that means if there’s an emergency back home in Idaho, he’s not going to be able to go. That’s a problem. So that’s been pretty tricky and I don’t really know what else to say about that, but that it’s not fun. So I’m like, I’m over it. Over it. Okay. And then number three may surprise you a little bit because it’s totally different than the first two. And that is dogs.
Stacy: I know dogs, they’re so cute, right? I’m a cat person, but I like my friend’s dogs and I like nice dogs on leashes and I want dogs to be able to run around and play and be free in spaces that are safe, especially if they’re non aggressive dogs. Like, I want that for dogs and I want it for dog owners. But here in Portugal, they do have some laws around dogs, but nobody really follows them. And so that means that dogs just kind of run wild. And most of the dogs are not aggressive, but some of them are. And you don’t really know when you’re out if a dog is going to attack you or not. Now, I need to give you a little backstory before you, like put me on blast for not loving dogs.
Stacy: But you have to understand, I lived in the Dominican Republic, Vietnam and Thailand, and in each of those places there are actual wild dogs. And in some of those places, some of them have rabies and some of them are very violent and will bite you. And so I have a little bit of trauma probably related to dogs and this kind of deep seated fear that’s really hard for me to overcome. I’m trying, I promise, and I like try to get calm and stuff, but even a dog on a leash makes me nervous. So I have to acknowledge this is probably more of a me thing, but I even know my friends that are not afraid of dogs, who love dogs, even have dogs they Find this troubling as well.
Stacy: So just as an example, I went on a kind of run hike with a friend of mine recently and we had it all planned out. We drove 45 minutes to get to this spot to go summit this. It wasn’t really a mountain. It’s like a big hill, although they call it a mountain here. We were going to go up this hike and we parked our car and there was a dog out and the dog didn’t look like it was going to harm us, but. But it was later on it started kind of coming toward us a little bit and barking. And then when were going on our hike up the. Up the road to get up to the top on the hike we wanted to do, there was another dog there that sounded very aggressive.
Stacy: We couldn’t see it, but we just decided to turn around. So we had to go change all of our plans, go find a new parking location. And then I found out later that the original dog, it didn’t bite somebody. I know, but it was aggressive to them. So this is just a mega problem here. There are farm dogs that are never kept, like, well, not never, but pretty much not kept in fences or controlled. And there are, especially in the mountains, they kind of just run around, they’ll run in packs. I find this very troubling. And there have. I actually know somebody who. She didn’t move because of that, but she was a cyclist and they. One of the reasons that she cited for not wanting to stay here was the dogs. So it’s not.
Stacy: It’s not like a small thing, at least for me. And I think it’s probably my least favorite thing about where I live, which probably sounds crazy, but if you were a runner like me and you’re out on the trails and this is just a constant, constant thing that you have to worry about, it’s not very fun. So it’s part of my struggles right now. Probably doesn’t bother other people as much, but for me it’s a problem. And that’s it. Those are my three things. I, of course, again, have to say I love it here. No country is perfect. I could make a list of other places I’ve lived and definitely about the US But I also acknowledge that I choose to be here. I chose to be here.
Stacy: A choiceful mindset, which I talk a lot about on this podcast, means that you have the beauty of choice. You see choice as a thing in your life, as an abundant, ever present quality of being alive, of having choice. And so I choose to be here and I love to be here, but that doesn’t mean it’s perfect. I can’t choose perfection. I can just choose to live into this life that I chose. So that’s what I’m doing. And much love to Portugal, especially if they’re. I know I have a lot of Portuguese followers, and so I love your country. I promise I’m not putting it on blast. And don’t put me on blast about the dogs. I said that earlier. It’s just a thing. We all have them. Okay, that’s it for me this week. Thank you so much as always for joining me.
Stacy: I really love making content for you. I love recording my podcast. I love creating YouTube videos, which is a little newer for me. It’s not something I’ve really done a lot of in the past, but I’m really enjoying it. So there we go. So I’m gonna do more of it. I love writing for you on my blog. I love writing for you in my newsletter. If you want more of this goodness, you want more on book writing, publishing, travel, Portugal, all of the lifestyle elements that I talk about on my various platforms, but specifically around book writing, join my newsletter. I’ll be sure to link to that in the show notes or in the description of this video on YouTube. Do join that, because I write you down an email a week.
Stacy: I get messages from people all the time that say, I love your newsletter because I actually write it and I put a lot of heart into it and it’s meant to uplift you and educate you and support you just like these videos are. You know, I talked about struggle, but there’s still goodness and uplifting in it. And that’s always my goal with the content that I create. And I have to thank, as always, Rita Dominguez for her production of my podcast, my YouTube channel. She does so much to get this to you and I am grateful. Do be sure that you have subscribed or followed so that you are notified of new episodes. You don’t want to miss out on it. And of course, if you love this podcast, please rate and review it.
Stacy: Or if you’re on YouTube, leave me a comment because I love getting comments. It’s so fun for me sometimes, you know, as a creator, you can feel like you’re creating to the void. And when I get a comment, there’s no void anymore. It’s like a real person. So I appreciate it a lot and I will be back with you before you know it.
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