Two winters in Prague was enough for Yulia, my wife.
She adored the city. Loved the area where we lived just two metro stops from Old Town, easily one of the most picturesque in all of Europe. She’d become conversant enough in Czech that she could hold conversations with locals and not only understand what was going on, but could express her wishes clearly.
But the snow…
That’s where the train ran off the rails.
Which is how we ended up in Portugal… thanks in part to my colleague, international real estate scout Ronan McMahon.
But we’ll come back to Ronan in a bit.
Just recently, The New Yorker printed a story about the rising number of aggrieved Americans who’ve decided to call their homeland quits.
They’re decamping in record numbers for Latin America, Asia, and especially Europe.
A report from CS Global Partners, a UK-based global citizenship and residency firm, earlier this year reported that US expatriations increased by more than 100%. A Gallup Poll, meanwhile, recently found that “More Americans than at any time in the past two decades say they would like to move away from the US permanently, with the sentiment becoming increasingly politicized since 2017. Younger American women’s desire to leave the U.S. has surged to unprecedented levels in recent years, widening the gender divide to more than 20 points, the widest recorded for any country in the World Poll.”
One of the top spots they’re landing in: Portugal, where I know live… because of Prague’s snow.
Yulia grew in Crimea, on the Black Sea. Cold, snowy winters were never her vibe. She’s always been a fresh-sea-breezes girl.
And while she tolerated Czech winters for a couple of seasons, she told me one day that she really wanted to move our family closer to the sea and warmer, non-snowy weather.
So, we went hunting.
Spent a year touring southern Europe, looking for a possible Prague replacement: Athens and a couple of the bigger Greek islands; Malaga, along Spain’s Mediterranean-fronting Costa del Sol; Croatia and Montenegro, just across the Adriatic Sea from Italy.
And Portugal.
Portugal won out, largely because I could secure one of the country’s new digital nomad visas, she and our son could follow me on a family-reunification visa, and we’d be able to slip into Portugal’s so-called non-habitual residence tax regime, the NHR program, that would give us a 0% tax rate locally.
It all just made sense for our life.
But nothing is ever as easy as it appears on paper, particularly in the world of citizenship and residency. Rules are never static. What one embassy, consulate, or ministry office wants bears little resemblance to the demands of another. You jump through hoops of fire to collect a document you’ve been told is a must… only to have the visa agency look at it quizzically and ask why you submitted extraneous and useless paperwork.
Portugal presents a particular kind of chicken-and-egg problem we had to navigate.
Obtain a residence visa requires proof of habitation—that you have secured a place to live locally by providing (in our case) proof of an apartment lease. Yet to get an apartment lease, you need to show a residence permit.
No doubt you see the chicken and the egg…
Because this is such a choke point in the process, visa agencies often offer services in which you pay additional money for what is essentially a bogus, temporary address just to get you through the process. But, again, that’s extra money I didn’t want to spend on top of the thousands I was already spending on my visa and the family reunification visas.
“The other option,” my visa rep told me, “is asking someone with Portuguese residency to sponsor you. Do you know anyone who lives in Portugal and has legal residency?”
Why, yes… Yes. I. Do.
Which is where Ronan joins the show.
Ronan’s is the most Portuguese-Irishman I know.
He had Portuguese residency for several years, including at the time I was moving to Portugal, so I asked if he might consider sponsoring me as a means of cracking the chicken-and-egg conundrum. He graciously obliged. It was, I know, a bit of a hassle for him, having to travel from one city to another to obtain notarized this and that, and then overnighting the documents to Prague.
But he did it, for which I am forever grateful.
Several weeks later, the Portuguese immigration agency set my meeting to officially apply for residency… which is how my wife came to trade cold and snowy Lisbon, for warmer and rainier Cascais, a beach community west of Lisbon.
That turned out to be a mistake… but more on that next time.
Stay tuned…
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