Transcripts for Episode 165 | Living in Portugal QA: Part 2

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Stacy: This was sparked by a recent Katie Couric media piece that came out. And I got so many messages. I got messages from friends, from colleagues, from people that are in my audience, podcast listeners, new people that found me through that piece or were exposed to me through maybe a friend. And I’ve gotten so many messages and so many questions. So I compiled a few of them, ones that I felt were representative of the many questions I received, and I’m answering them today. I answered already part one. I answered several questions in that episode. So if you haven’t heard that and you want to get more information about living in Portugal, go check out that episode. I will link to it in the show notes of today’s episode.

Stacy: Welcome to part two of what I’m calling an emergency quote unquote podcast series. I guess we’re in series because we’re in part two on living in Portugal and life in Portugal. This was sparked by a recent Katie Couric media piece that came out and I got so many messages. I got messages from friends, from colleagues, from people that are in my audience, podcast listeners, new people that found me through that piece or were exposed to me through maybe a friend. And I’ve gotten so many messages and so many questions. So I compiled a few of them, ones that I felt were representative of the many questions I received and I’m answering them today. I answered already part one. I answered several questions in the first episode on living in Portugal. 

Stacy: So if you haven’t heard that and you want to get more information about living in Portugal, go check out that episode. I will link to it in the show notes of today’s episode. And before I get into the questions, I have to tell you about a win that I had today. So we’ve been living in Portugal for five years, but it really kind of feels like it’s been maybe three years because of COVID So we moved here at the end of 2020. We all know what happened after that. And we had almost two years of really a lot of isolation and just kind of feeling like we didn’t totally live here yet. So while it’s been five years, it feels like it’s been less time.

Stacy: And maybe I say that because I feel a little bit embarrassed about the fact that I don’t speak Portuguese yet. And, you know, it’s not like I have put in consistent effort every day or something and should be there by now. It’s really just, I don’t know, life, being a mom, having a business, all of the things that sometimes make it hard to follow through on your own goals. And this year I have put more attention into learning and intention into learning. Although as I record this, I am a little off track because I took a summer break of weekly lessons and I have not restarted them. So, mental note to self, let’s get those back up. However, my goal at the end of the year is to be conversationally fluent in Portuguese.

Stacy: I’m probably not going to hit that, but I have become, let’s say, functionally fluent. Ish. And my win today is that I dropped my daughter off at school and we recently moved her to a Portuguese public school, which I’m going to talk about a little bit more today, because I have a question about that. And it’s very tough in the Portuguese public school system because a lot of the staff does not speak any English. Like, not a word. Maybe they do, but they don’t speak it to me. I don’t really know. But today I had to sort out an issue for my daughter. It wasn’t. She wasn’t in trouble or anything. It was just getting her signed up for some sports. And I did it all in Portuguese with no help and no translation. And there may been.

Stacy: They may have pinned some extra effort on the other person’s part. So the woman, if you’re watching on YouTube, you can see I’ll try to describe it as well. But when she said, you know, that the, the PE teacher was going to falar, she pointed to her mouth. It’s going to talk it’s, you know, she made an effort. So probably, maybe I wouldn’t have totally gotten it other than that, but I’m going to count it as a win. It was, it’s nice to Feel like some of the effort that I have made is resulting in some progress. And yeah, I’m getting there. But I will say it is a really tough thing to move to a country and not know the language. When we moved to the Dominican Republic, it was a lot easier.

Stacy: First of all, because I had already taken two years of Spanish in our very robust language system in the US I took a year in high school and then I took a year in college because a language arts degree required requires one year of language. And so maybe that was part of it. But I think it’s just that Spanish is much easier than Portuguese, like significantly easier. And even with my Spanish background, learning Portuguese has been very difficult. I think the other layer of that was probably the fact, you know, learning Spanish. I didn’t have kids. I was going out dancing, you know, going out with my friends, my husband, well, fiance at the time, and just had a very different lifestyle. So I was just out a lot practicing. And it’s just not that way in my 30s.

Stacy: So I’m taking it as a win, feeling pretty proud of myself and also feeling encouraged to keep learning and studying and hopefully soon reaching that goal of conversational Portuguese, which I again, I don’t think I’m going to hit this year, but I’m not going to set that as my end of year goal next year. I’m going to basically just bump it out maybe to mid year because I think I can get there by mid year next year. You can hold me accountable as a listener. Okay, so with all that said, let’s talk about you and your questions. I did not get a chance to get permission from everyone who sent in questions. So I have picked pseudonyms that are close to, not exactly close to your name, but starts with at least the same letter.

Stacy: So if you asked a question and you’re not sure if it’s your, you’re like, oh, I think it’s maybe my question. If you have the same first letter, it’s probably you. So let’s dig in. Our first question comes from Greta. Greta says, I read your article what it’s like living in Portugal nearly two years in article on your website. I’m currently in the process of planning a move there myself and I’m really interested in learning more about the path to becoming a citizen. I’d love to hear about your experience with residency and citizenship process if you’re comfortable sharing how’d you go about it? Are there any steps or tips you’d recommend for someone looking to eventually become a citizen. Does my DNA help me become a citizen? And the context there is that she has some Portuguese DNA.

Stacy: I’m really excited about the idea of making Portugal my new home and would greatly appreciate any advice you have. Greta, thank you for that question. There are many layers to that. I did answer some of this in the previous episode, but I’m going to go ahead and still respond to this as robustly as I can today. The residency process, as I shared a little bit about in the previous episode, was relatively. You think I’m going to say easy? I’m not going to say easy, hard. I say relatively because we’ve had quite easy processes. So when we moved to the Dominican Republic and Vietnam, I think I was. Honestly, I was so oblivious. I didn’t have any clue what was going on. I was in my 20s, my employer was taking care of everything. I didn’t even know really that we needed a visa.

Stacy: I know that sounds so ridiculous, but in my mind, I was like, oh, I’m. I’m good. I’m here. And thankfully, my employers were taking care of it. I was a teacher at the time and they had to do all that stuff. And so there were a couple of points in that process where. I remember a couple of points where there are a little bit of problems here and there, but it wasn’t on me to fix it. So that was awesome. Moving to Thailand was so difficult, so hard. We couldn’t seem to do anything correctly. Even though we followed all the steps. We had to leave every three months because if you overstayed your stay, they wouldn’t let you into the country again or you’d be fined. And so that was really difficult.

Stacy: Moving to Portugal, I did most of the process beforehand for myself, and we came over with a family reunification process. So what that means, and I talked about this a little bit in the previous episode, is that I was the one that applied for residency. Once my residency was approved, on the back of my residency, the family applied for theirs, but the family could be with me in the country because I’m an American citizen. We had that window of. I want to say it was. I don’t know if it’s six months, is that I’m. I actually don’t know. I don’t know how Latin Americans can be in Europe without a visa, because I had never been to Europe before I came here to move. So we did that. I did most of it myself, up until the actual residency appointment. So I did all.

Stacy: I followed all the processes. I’d Found online. I did a lot of research and thankfully, right before our visa appointment in San Francisco, which is where I had to go for our visa appointment at the Portuguese consulate, I had contacted an immigration company. There are immigration relocation companies out there. So I really encourage anybody to hire some support to get this process because doing it on your own is very difficult and it can be very costly if you mess something up. So we worked at the relocation agency. We were. Since I had already done about 80% of the first step, we decided not to hire them because there was only a flat fee. And it didn’t make sense because. Cause I had already done all this work. Because were planning to hire them for the next stage, we got a checklist from them.

Stacy: And that was really helpful because I was able to go through and make sure that I did all the things that I needed to do. And then when we got to the next stage, that company sent an attorney with us to the visa appointment. Then they did all of the paperwork for my family. And I think at the end of it, Maybe we spent two or $3,000, something along those lines. But it was well worth it. And I would absolutely recommend doing that. I know that sounds like a lot of money, but just being frank with you, if you cannot afford to spend that money on something like this, you should be really thinking about whether this is a reasonable move abroad. Because it is expensive to move abroad.

Stacy: And I don’t mean to sound whatever about that, but as an American moving abroad, you need to have some financial cushion. You need to have, you know, money to be able to move, because you cannot rely on Portugal as a place to earn money. It’s just not reasonable for an American to go from an American salary, begin living in Portugal and expect to make the same amount and have the same quality of life. So it sounds kind of expensive, but to me, it was totally worth it for the value that we got out of the service and the headache that it saved me. We are in the process of considering whether to apply for citizenship. And it always seems to surprise people when I say we’re deciding, because it’s like, well, why wouldn’t you do that? You can hold dual citizenship.

Stacy: So as an American, I don’t have to renounce my American citizenship. I can be a Portuguese citizen and an American citizen. The question I’m still trying to answer, and I will answer at some point and I will share what I learned with you, is how that’s going to impact my taxes. So at the moment, we’re on a. It’s called an own income visa. And I have a flat tax rate in Portugal of 20% for 10 years. After those 10 years, I, as far as I understand, I go now to a regular Portuguese taxation scheme, which is not good. It is a very high tax rate. It’s like over 40%. And just. I’m just not willing to pay 40% in taxes.

Stacy: So I got to figure that out and what we’re going to do, because I really can’t imagine how we can live here at a 40% tax rate. But I suspect there are some strategies that you can use as an American that will support that. So I’m investigating. I’ve already had one meeting. I have a few more lined up or will be lined up, and I will report back. I don’t know about the DNA. I’ve never heard anybody use that strategy. I know there’s certain countries like Ireland and Germany and places like that do that, and maybe Portugal does, too. That would be a good question to ask a relocation company. And I doubt. I’ve never actually. I’ve never heard of DNA. I’ve heard of ancestry. So usually it’s no further back than your grandparents.

Stacy: This is what I have understood from most stories I’ve heard of people moving abroad. So if your grandparents came over from Ireland, let’s say you might have a path to citizenship. But I think if it’s your great grandparents, that usually does not qualify. I hope this was really helpful. There’s not a lot to offering out on the citizenship front because I’m still in the process. I’m, I think, now eligible because it’s been five years, I believe, since my residency was approved, and I’m still kind of up in the air on it. But I will tell you, I’ve been considering it more heavily recently. So we will see. We don’t plan to leave Portugal, so I think it probably makes sense to become a citizen. But again, that big question about taxation is. It’s a big question mark for me.

Stacy: Okay, the next question comes from Joan. Joan says my best friend just arrived in Lisbon yesterday and is headed to Porto now. She is doing a scouting trip with the idea of moving there. I would love to hear more about how you landed there. I live in the US Just outside of Philadelphia. Well, Joan, let me tell you about how we ended up living in Portugal. We. So without giving all of the everything backstory, we moved to Thailand originally in 2018. Or no, wait, yes, 2019. And that was. No, no, no, sorry, it was 2018. So we moved to Thailand in 2018, it was everything I didn’t want from a moving experience. We had a lot of really scary hospitalization experiences. Our quality of life was really challenging for us.

Stacy: We really struggled with the immigration process, and more specifically, our youngest child was getting really ill. And. And again, we had many, many hospital visits, and the. The only good hospital was an hour away. And we. We kind of had this realization that weren’t. He wasn’t safe with some of. Some of what were experiencing. And plus, were just kind of tired of trying to make it work there. It just was not working. So one day when my son was really ill, we had a really scary experience. My husband and I looked at each other and were like, this is not working. But weren’t ready to move back. We really still held onto that dream of living abroad, and we didn’t want to just move back to Boise. That just didn’t feel right. I’m from Idaho.

Stacy: I loved it there, but it just wasn’t our home at the time. I didn’t feel like home. And so we cast a really wide bet. We Googled all the things, looked all around the world online, watched tons of YouTube videos, read articles, and we made a list of things that mattered to us. So top of the list was safety and good healthcare, good schools, close to an international airport, lots of nature, good cost of living. A lot of, like, health and wellness is really important to us. So we wanted a place that was. I mentioned the nature, but also just had a real connectedness to the environment, and it was clean and safe as far as, like, the environmental quality. So those were our main things. Oh, we wanted to move by the ocean. We loved.

Stacy: We loved living by the ocean, but we didn’t love all the other things that came with living in Thailand. And because we had lived in the Dominican Republic. Y hablo un poco de espanol. I really wanted to move to Spain, and so did my husband. We had this kind of. This idea that, okay, well, Thailand isn’t working, maybe we’ll go to Spain, and let’s see if that can work. Because we’d always kind of dreamed of living in Europe at some point, but for whatever reason, it didn’t feel accessible to us. We just felt like, I think maybe part of it’s because we’d lived in Asia before. And so for whatever reason, moving to Asia felt easier than moving to Europe, which. No, I just think that’s so funny. It’s just such a funny mindset looking back.

Stacy: But at the time, Spain had this visa where you had to like open a biz. I would have had to open my business in Spain. And the tax rate, again, it was like 40% because it’s in the EU. And I just was looking at that and thinking, oh, my gosh, that’s crazy. That’s the crazy tax rate. Plus I watched all these YouTube videos about people dealing with that process and what a pain it was. And it really just seemed overly complicated. The process now seems to be much simpler. And I think if it had been now, we maybe we would ended up in Spain. I think we would have.

Stacy: But because of that whole situation and some other things that we came across, we looked next door to Portugal and we started reading about it, watching YouTube videos about it, and, you know, just kind of digging into everything we could. We found this really Cute family on YouTube. We watched like, I don’t know, not all their videos, but a lot of them about their life and living in Portugal. And they were much more rural than we are British, this British family with a baby. And it felt like we could really get a good sense of what living in Portugal was like. And it just looked beautiful, like it looked idyllic and looked into the tax stuff, got a better sense of the visa process and they had a really good, attractive visa process. So that’s how we ended up here. That’s the short of it.

Stacy: There’s a much more detailed answer I could give. We are number seven on the World Peace Index, according to. I think it’s the. I don’t know if it’s the who, World Health Organization or. I can’t remember WHO raided it, but it’s some kind of real organization. Number 12 for healthcare. Cost of living in Portugal is very good. There’s just so many things. It’s not perfect. I have a lot of bones to pick with the healthcare system and the public school system and all of those things. And I realized, I mentioned at the top that I was going to talk about schools today, but I’m not actually going to go into detail because I was looking at last week’s questions and I already answered that. But, you know, originally we thought we’d be in the private school system.

Stacy: And so we didn’t really worry too much about the public school system. And because we’re in the Algarve in the south, which is more rural, we have a lot of things that are not as important consideration. They’re not as important to consider if you’re living in Lisbon or Porto. So your friends looking at Porto and Lisbon her challenges and opportunities that are going to be different than ours. Because it’s like saying, I’m thinking about moving to Boise or New York City. You know, they’re very different places. Yeah, I don’t know. I hope that answers your question. I think everybody’s story is so unique, and I also think I’m pretty hardy when it comes to moving abroad. I’ve had a lot of experience living in different countries.

Stacy: I have traveled all over the world, and I think that my experiences make me appreciate this place more than somebody who moves here as their first country. Because I know what it’s like to go through really tough visa processes. I know what it’s like to struggle in, you know, in the immigration process. I know what it’s like to be very unsafe. I know what it’s like to be held up at gunpoint in a foreign country. I know what it’s like to, you know, navigate so many difficult things in the three developing countries that I’ve lived in. So I think I appreciate it more than your average bear. And we really. We really love living in Portugal. At the end of the day, again, it’s not perfect, but it’s home for us, at least for the near future. And that.

Stacy: Actually, I kind of think I already answered the next question, which comes from Iona. How did you decide where to move abroad? I did answer that. I got it. You got it too far there. But here’s what I could offer that, you know, as a piggyback to that answer is you need to pick the place that really aligns for you. So I would make a list of those top things that are most important. Again, safety and healthcare were top, tip, top of our list. We come from Gun Toten, Idaho. And again, I love my hometown. I really do. And I have a very soft place in my heart for Boise and my friends and family there. And it really is a lovely place. So it’s not to. To just that. But I was so. And I was in a. A public shooting situation.

Stacy: I, like, literally lived through something like that. Not to the extent of what other people have been through, but I. I was in a situation like that. And so for us, being safe, having access to good healthcare, having affordability, were dealing with thousands of dollars a month in medical bills in Idaho. It was really hard. So there were a lot of those things that for us, were super top of the list. My husband’s a cyclist, so good riding, good cycling was super top of the list for him. So for you, as you’re deciding, really consider that, also consider your sturdiness. How resilient are you? Are you going to struggle being in a environment where not only do you not know the language, but maybe the customs are very different?

Stacy: Are you going to stick out for me, living in whiteaho where it’s 87% white, moving to countries where I literally like people stare at me when I go places and points sometimes, you know, are you ready for that? You really have to think about that and decide if that’s something that you can handle. And if you know yourself well enough to know that will be too challenging. Think about what options you have, where maybe it’s, you know, a more developed country, it’s an English speaking country or at least there’s a big English speaking population because even if you have friends that speak English, you still have to go to the doctor, you still have to go to the government office, you still have to pay your taxes.

Stacy: So really be mindful of all of those things and whether you have the disposition to handle it. I, I thought I had the disposition to handle Thailand, but I didn’t. If I didn’t have children, I don’t know how long we would have lived there. We probably would have lived there a long time. I still love Thailand. So really it’s a beautiful place and I can’t wait to go back someday. But living there was really hard and I would never live there again with children, personally. But again, some people love it. So I don’t know. It’s really about finding the place that really resonates with you, aligns with you and serves your needs and gives you the life that you want. I hope this was helpful.

Stacy: Gosh, there’s so many things that I could dig into about our life here and there’s a lot of things I haven’t even talked about, like what is a daily life like here? What do we, how do we get our food when living in Portugal? You know, we have a very different way of buying food here than I had in the US And a lot of things are sourced from farmers or sourced from different places in a different way than you do in the US there’s so many things I could dig into here. Please send me your questions hellotaciennes.com I love to hear from you. You can also just send me a note and say hi. Be sure that you’re on my email list. Stacey Annis.com join you can click the link in the show Notes.

Stacy: I send out two emails a week and I put a love, love into them. I really put a lot of time and attention into the messages I send you. And you’ll also be updated when I publish new content about living in Portugal or writing a book. That’s my main business, that’s what I do, is guide books into the world. That’s it for this week. Thank you so much for joining me. Thank you as always to Rita Domingues for her production of the Spine podcast. Honestly, I know I say this every week, but it could not happen without her, really and truly. She keeps me moving. She gets things booked. She gets it edited and published. So thank you, Feet. I appreciate you very much. And thank you to you for staying with me for this episode. Do you have 30 seconds?

Stacy: If you do, if you would rate and review this episode, I truly, I don’t even know how to actually express how much it matters to our ability to reach more listeners with the message of living a life that’s beyond better and share this episode with a friend. You know that friend who’s like, hey, I’m out of here. I want to move abroad. Maybe this will help them in their journey. Thank you for joining me. I will be back with you before you know it.