Next steps

I got sidetracked from this story for a while by some crochet projects, but I’m back! I’m coming up on my 2 year anniversary of arriving at my new apartment here in Lisboa, and I want to celebrate here by reminiscing. But, I also like somewhat linear story-telling, so I need to hurry up and at least skim over most of 2023!

When I returned to Atlanta in April 2023, one of the first things I did was contact the real estate agent who helped me buy my house. In hind sight, that was a big mistake – I should have talked with a few more. But I avoid beating myself up over that by telling myself that things worked out this way for a reason.

This story might have gone differently if I had chosen a different agent who was actually good at selling houses. Instead, it took way longer than I hoped for her preferred contractor to do the work she decided was necessary to get the house ready for the market.

The real estate market in Atlanta was still fairly warm in late April / early May 2023. It had been hot and heavy for years, so I think this agent got used to being able to relatively little and still earn a fat paycheck.

And the contractor she wanted to use was… Let’s just say I would not recommend him for anything. What should have been a few days of work dragged out for weeks of two hours here, three hours there.

In hind sight, maybe she wanted me to fire her from the get go, and I was just too inexperienced and socially awkward. But again, I can’t change the past, so I’m going to justify it as what was meant to be 😂

The house FINALLY went on the market on June 24.

And it sat. And sat. And sat.

Meanwhile, I was continuing to work my full time job, nearly completely remotely. I was in “quiet quitting” mode, just coasting until I could sell my house and get my visa to leave. I had tenure and was making about $102K/year, and that meant I just kept tucking more and more into savings.

When I started on this path, once I decided to become a coach, my plan was to coast along in that job while I built a solid coaching business. From everything I’ve heard, it takes 2-5 years for a new business to become self-sustaining – as in, revenue minus business expenses equals a living wage for the proprietor. So financially, it would make sense to just coast along doing the least for at least 2 years.

But I just wasn’t happy where I was.

There was a point in late 2022 when I started thinking that maybe I would just list my house for sale, quit my job, and make the leap without even visiting. I was just that antsy to leave. But, then I talked with my supervisor about working from Portugal for a couple of months, and started planning my trip instead. I’m so incredibly glad that I did that, because I expected to love the Algarve and probably would have moved there and hated it.

But I digress!

So when I came back from my 8 week visit in April 2023, my plan was to stay in my job until I was ready to move. I needed to sell my house, apply for my visa, wait to get the visa approved, and then I’d have some time (I want to say 90 days, but maybe just 60?) to actually make the move.

So keep collecting that paycheck until I had the visa approved, and then put in my notice.

And then, the university president decided to issue a RTO mandate.

Now, I was tenured faculty, so I worked from home as often as not before covid. I went into campus when I had meetings to attend or classes to teach, but not on days when I didn’t. And when I did go in, I’d often only be there for 4-6 hours, getting the rest of my work done before heading in or later in the evening.

This was political nonsense that was stricter than anything I had actually done before covid.

And I knew there was absolutely no rational justification for this, it was just a magat’s political bullshit. And I’m too autistic to just go along with that!

So I put in my notice, with my last day being Aug 15, 2023. I did wind up regretting that a little bit, because if I had set the date for Aug 31, I would have had a perfect 12 years in that role 😂 But oh well!

It was a huge risk, since I still had no offers on my house.

Sometime around then, I fired that initial real estate agent and hired someone else. Within days, she had two crews of contractors out to give estimates on work that she thought needed to be done, and the only reason it took a whole week or two to get the house re-listed was for the optics on the listing site.

This new agent was actually good at her job, but the interest rate increases had poured ice water all over the real estate market in ATL. And having the house sit on the market for as long as it did was another strike against me.

I finally finally finally got an offer in late October!

I had all of this time, and did do some de-cluttering, but not nearly as much as I should have. So now I had to jump into high gear to clear out the house. I gave away almost all of my furniture – I tried selling what I could, but just didn’t have the energy to do much of that. The vast majority of it came from Ikea – I got the better quality real wood stuff instead of particle board, but still, it wasn’t exactly heirloom pieces.

And it was time to contact a consultant – someone a former neighbor recommended – to rent an apartment, because I would need a valid lease for my visa application. I told her that I wanted to move to Setúbal, and she could do that. It would cost a little more to cover the expense of traveling there, because she’s based in Lisboa, but we could do that.

But, she did know of an apartment in a great area in the outskirts of Lisboa that was being renovated, wasn’t on the market yet, and would be a perfect fit for my timeline… It was even getting air conditioning installed! That wasn’t a make-it-or-break-it requirement for me, but this felt like that path of least resistance, which was important for me at the time. The lease would be for 2 years, but I could break it without penalty after 1/3 of the way through – so 8 months – with proper notice. So this would work for my visa application, and if I don’t love it, then I can look for a new place while living in Portugal.

And that’s how I wound up in Benfica, instead of Setúbal!

My lease on this apartment started 1 Dec 2023. The sale of my house closed the day before that, on 30 Nov 2023. But, I still had to apply for my long stay visa.

Thankfully, a friend welcomed me to stay in her spare bedroom while I was in this transition. That month of clearing out the house and getting it ready to hand over was pretty frantic.

And then, I had to stalk the VFS website to get an appointment to apply for my visa – they were generally booked for months in advance, but if you catch the website right after a cancellation, you may be able to grab something on shorter notice.

And I kept going back and forth on whether to stay in ATL while I waited for my visa application to be processed, or whether to go over on a tourist visa. Portugal is in the Schengen area. I think some things have changed since then, but at that time, Americans could travel to the Schengen area without any prior approval and spend up to 90 days out of any 180 day period there.

I love the friend who welcomed me into her home, but I didn’t want to overstay my welcome. So I started doing the math on finding a short term rental in ATL, and that was not great.

And then I was able to get an appointment to apply for my visa on 22 Dec! I would have to travel to Washington, DC for that. And I decided that I would go ahead and fly over to my new apartment in Lisboa on a tourist visa while I waited for that to be processed.

Getting the visa application together

The details of this process keep changing, so please remember that this is only a snapshot in time, focusing on 2023.

When I started on this path, I expected to apply for the D7 passive income visa. My understanding was that it was intended to attract retirees, but they interpreted “passive income” as any income from outside of Portugal – including active remote work. For that, you had to show assets + income worth at least the monthly minimum wage, which is less than 1000€.

Passive income could mean Social Security payments, rent payments, dividends from investments, or whatever. But, since remote work was getting lumped in this space, I came up with a bunch of new courses for Library Juice Academy!

To qualify based on assets alone (money in the bank, not recurring monthly income), you need to be able to show enough to cover that monthly amount until you can start drawing retirement – so the younger you are, the higher this amount will be. But I wasn’t focused on this, because I expected to be able to meet the monthly income level with remote work.

And then, they introduced the digital nomad or D8 visa. That separated out remote work from fully passive income and quadrupled the income requirement for those relying on remote work. That’s still not a huge amount by US standards, but a lot more than I was ready to show on any sort of reliable basis.

In theory, I could have kept my house, rented it out, and used the lease to show the required passive income. But that seemed risky. I know most tenants are good, but I’ve seen what a bad tenant can do.

When I was a kid, my mother and her husband mostly worked as the prep team for apartment complexes, cleaning and painting units between tenants. And when I visited in the summer, I’d go to work with her. Most of the time, I just helped with removing the covers from light switches and outlets, and covering them with tape, but every now and again there would be absolutely disgusting trashed units. The one that stands out in my mind was where they had thrown at least a dozen eggs on the walls and left them to dry there.

And that’s not even counting the horror stories I’ve heard since people started cooking meth in their bathtubs.

The whole process of hiring a property management company and dealing with them from abroad just seemed overwhelming, and I was ready to shed that connection. So I decided not to go that route.

And so, I needed to sell the house and get that money in the bank before I could apply for my visa.

I bought in a gentrifying neighborhood in 2018 for $265K, and sold for $385K in 2023. I also refinanced in 2020 and rolled those costs into the mortgage. So I cleared about $120K – which is an astounding amount of money to me, but not enough to cover the D7 requirements at my age.

But, that would still cover nearly 3 years of the amount required for the D8 visa before factoring in my actual income. So I hoped that would be good enough for that initial visa!

I had to compile a whole packet explaining my finances plus bank statements, plus get an FBI background check, plus have a valid lease or purchase agreement for a home in Portugal, plus have a funded Portuguese bank account, and a few other things. I took care of getting the bank account while I was in Portugal in early 2023. I did include evidence of my income from teaching at LJA, and a letter from the founder verifying that my location would not affect my ongoing contracts there. I also probably went into overkill, because I included a business plan showing how I intended to build my business to meet the D8 income requirements over the next two years, so that I would be self-sustaining before I exhaust my savings.

And then I had to travel to a VFS office to submit my application in person. VFS Global handles this process for a whole bunch of countries. They basically collect your paperwork and payment, make sure you have everything in the right order, and then hand it off to the embassy to process… At least, that’s the case for Portugal.

There are several VFS locations around the US, and where you live determines which one you have to go to. At some point during the time I was in this journey, the DC office was overloaded, and opened new locations in Miami and Houston. So I could choose between the three locations, and wound up going where I was able to get the earliest appointment once I had everything I needed together.

So, I traveled to DC on 20 Dec, so that I’d have time on the 21st to get my bearings to make sure that I would arrive on time in the right spot the next morning. And it was the first time I spent any time in DC, so I did spend a little time exploring on foot!

Everything went smoothly at the VFS appointment, and I flew back to ATL on 23 Dec. That was its own mess with a flight that just kept getting delayed and delayed further, until I was able to book on a different flight. My original flight eventually made it to ATL around an hour after I did! And luggage wasn’t an issue, because I didn’t check anything for a 3 day visit.

I don’t remember whether my friend was still in town then or not, but she headed off to spend xmas with family. So I had a couple of days in an empty house packing and repacking the two bags I planned to check and my carry-on.

I was getting ready to go move into an empty apartment, but was anxious about the visa application.

What if I take too much and it gets denied?

That was a theme for the next couple of months, until I finally got the approval!

And then, on 27 Dec 2023, I headed to the airport to depart at 2:44pm ATL time. I would connect in Boston – which I don’t recommend. JFK is much simpler, at least if you’re flying on Delta. And then my flight was scheduled to arrive in LIS at 6:25am on 28 Dec.

And that feels like a good stopping point for today!

I can’t believe that tomorrow will be the 2 year anniversary of my arrival in Benfica!