I’ll Be Living in a New Country by Mid-Summer

It’s Time to Bid Farewell to Prague

All going well, I’ll be living in a new country by mid-summer…

I just submitted my application for Portugal’s new digital nomad visa, which means by summer, my wife and I expect to relocate from Prague to a Portuguese beach community 40 minutes outside of Lisbon.

We’re making this move for what we see as a lifestyle upgrade.

We both love Prague, and there is absolutely nothing downscale about this gorgeous, Old World European capital. It is, and has been, a wonderful first step in building my expat life as a digital nomad in Europe.

But the siren song of life at the seashore calls… as does a fast-track path toward a European Union passport by way of Portuguese citizenship that we can claim after just five years of living there.

And I now have a sneaking suspicion that my Road to Portugal is going to become increasingly fashionable.

See, news emerged this month that Portugal is ending its hugely popular Golden Visa program. This was a scheme by which foreigners could buy immediate Portuguese residency through a property purchase worth at least €280,000, or roughly $300,000 at the moment.

Americans, in particular, have been big fans of the program through the years.

The country has so far brought in nearly $6 billion in so-called “foreign direct investment” through the program. But as with pretty much anything that’s good, there comes a downside. For Portugal, that downside was escalating property and rental prices because of the flood of property buyers.

So, the government is culling this golden goose.

All of which means that the new digital nomad visa Portugal launched last October now stands out as one of the best ways to gain access to a legitimate Portuguese life.

There’s also the D7 Visa for passive-income earners, which lots of digitally nomadic workers had been glomming onto. But the government is trying to deep-six that strategy since the D7 is really designed for financially self-sufficient pensioners and those living off investment and rental income.

Instead, the government wants to re-route working-age expats onto the digital-nomad visa track.

Which is me.

As I’ve previously noted, this is not a visa one pursues on a whim. Serious costs are involved, particularly if you’re relocating with a family, as I am.

But those costs, to me, represent opportunity. (If you’d like to chat to me in person about the Portuguese visa application process, I’ll be at International Living’s Ultimate Retire Overseas Bootcamp this September in Denver. Details here.)

The world we live in today is racing full speed toward madness.

I’m locking in a serious lifestyle upgrade by moving to this beachside community 40 minutes from Portugal’s capital, Lisbon. (If you’d like to learn how to do the same, join me at IL’s Ultimate Retire Overseas Bootcamp later this year.)

The emerging commentary in America about a “national divorce” is just one, highly problematic example. It’s not necessarily that a member of Congress actually tweeted about the “need” for the states to separate… it’s that congressional leadership didn’t say a word to slap down such stupidity.

Makes me wonder if this is now part of a larger, longer-term agenda, as I’ve worried about over the past decade.

If so, I want to begin my march toward a non-U.S. passport now. Because later, the flow of European passport seekers could be a tidal wave. And Portugal is one of those destinations that people will look to for a European home.

Already, the Portuguese locals I’ve met on my holiday and business trips to the country joke that there are now more Californians living in Portugal than any other place outside of California.

Clearly not true, but Californians are popping up all over Portugal’s Algarve because of the similarities between the two beachside regions. And you can’t wander into Lisbon or Porto coffeehouses without stumbling upon an inordinate amount of digitally nomadic Americans at work with their laptops and lattes.

That allure is readily apparent.

Fitting in here in Portugal is so easy because Americans have such deep European rootstock. The culture is comfortable. The cuisine and the wines are among the best in the world… and ridiculously inexpensive relative to a Western budget.

The housing is quite lovely and, even in a major European capital like Lisbon, so affordable compared to even secondary and tertiary American cities. Beaches lines two sides of the country, and the interior is quiet, hilly vineyards and picturesque green river valleys.

Spend any time driving the country, and in the non-touristy corners of the local culture, and you reflexively understand why Americans have been among the biggest buyers of Portugal’s going-out-of-business Golden Visa program.

And it’s why I expect Portugal is going to see an unusually large number of Americans begin chasing a digital nomad visa.

With any luck, I’ll be there first… as early as mid-summer.