Apartment Hunting in the World’s Best Retirement Destination

Life happens. Things change. Wants, needs, dreams, desires slowly move you in a direction you never intended. Basically what I’m saying is: New year, new beginnings. 

This dispatch is about online real estate listings for various cities in Portugal: Lisbon, Porto, and across the Algarve, the sunny, beachy region at the bottom of the country. 

I never intended to move to Portugal, though I’ve always liked the country. Love the food and wine. A custardy pastel de nata pastry with an espresso is one of my favorite ways to start the day. But relocating my life to the Iberian Peninsula wasn’t on my list of things to do. 

Alas, for more than a month now, I’ve been researching apartments to buy in Portugal…which is where the “Life happens. Things change” comes to bear. 

I’m telling you this story because—spoiler alert—the word “Portugal” is increasingly a siren song to an ever-growing stream of Americans looking for a better, safer, less expensive, more laidback life than they have or can afford stateside. 

Combine Portugal’s new digital nomad visa and the tax breaks available to new Portuguese residents—0% on foreign-earned income for a decade—and suddenly the Southwest corner of the Iberian Peninsula represents an opportunity to really squirrel away savings, or to afford even more home than you otherwise could. 

My path (potentially) to Portugal started, oddly enough, when I moved to Prague, in the Czech Republic more than four years ago. It was a dream come true for me—living and working in the heart of Europe…experiencing life and culture at a level deeper and richer than any holiday can offer…traveling the continent and seeing Europe from an entirely different perspective than vacationers know. 

The journey has been one of the happiest adventures of my life so far. 

But along the way, I ended up remarried to a European woman from Crimea, who came pre-packaged with a then-7-year-old son. They moved to Prague in fall 2021. Both made friends they adore. They love it here.  

However, Russia soon invaded Ukraine (my wife is Ukrainian/Russian), and her son has spent much of the past 18 months they’ve lived here battling low-level sinus and respiratory issues that constantly lead to infections. 

Now, Yulia, my wife, is tired of the infections and wants to move somewhere warm. And European efforts to reject Russian passport holders in the wake of Putin’s aggression have convinced her that she and her son absolutely need EU passports. And among all the EU nations, Portugal makes the most sense for us because: 

1. I can secure the country’s new digital nomad visa. 

2. The long-term residency visa that comes with it turns into an opportunity to request citizenship and a Portuguese passport after just five years. 

In January 2024, I will have been in Prague for five years and I can obtain permanent residency. After another five years—January 2029—I can request citizenship and a passport in the Czech Republic. The issue, however, is that I have to pass a Czech language exam to seek permanent residency, before the clock begins on a potential citizenship application. 

I will tell you there is a reason only 10 million people speak Czech. It’s a damn-hard language to learn, a fact particularly true for native English speakers, according to the U.S. State Department, which ranks language difficulty. 

In Portugal, I’d be able to apply for citizenship/passport in 2028 (assuming we move next year), and I am already fairly conversant (in an understandable-gibberish way) in Spanish. The leap to Portuguese would be so much easier. 

And, so…I’ve been scrolling through Portuguese real estate websites. 

We’ve decided we probably want to own rather than rent. So many more freedoms to do as we wish with our home. And in an inflationary era, I want to own rather than face continual rental increases.  

The fact is, for as much as we pay in rent in Prague now, we can afford a helluva nice apartment in Portugal.  

I found an 1,150 square foot, three-bedroom, 2.5 bath apartment spread across three floors in the center of Porto. It’s lovely. Perfect layout. Master suite on the top floor. Kids room and office on the second floor. Family living on the ground floor, including a glass-roofed sunroom. Cost: About $1,550 a month in mortgage, slightly less than what I pay now in rent. You can see the apartment in the images below. 

Down in the Algarve, a few blocks from the Arade River running through Portimao, I’ve found a 1,600-square-foot townhome (new construction) with three big bedrooms and a separate office, with a great terrace, and just 1.5 miles from the beach. Yulia, a bikini girl at heart, would be ecstatic with that. Cost: pretty much the same as the place in Porto. 

Or here’s one in Albufeira, where we vacationed over the summer and a city Yulia likes a lot. Nearly 1,250-square-feet for three very nice bedrooms and two baths in an apartment entirely refurbished in a modern style just a couple years ago. And there’s an 1,100-square-foot rooftop deck. Oh, and for Yulia…just a quarter-mile walk to the beach.  

So, we come full circle, back to where we started: New year, new beginnings. 

Portugal is very likely to become our new home. The country offers pretty much everything we want: beach life for my wife, a digital nomad visa that lets me live and work locally, an exceptional tax regime that will allow us to save even more money (more likely, travel more), and the property market offers up quite lovely apartments at affordable prices and in great locations. 

Now…I just need to start learning Portuguese.