Obtaining Residency in Portugal

Every year Portugal is among the most popular countries for expats. The reasons for this are mainly weather and cost of living. It has been on our radar for years, but we are seasoned enough travelers to know that there is a lot more to a place than costs and weather. We wanted to live there for awhile before we made a decision. That is what we did last August and September. We dog sat in a small northern town in the Vinho Verde wine region. Loved it. Lots of cycling, beautiful scenery, nice people, plentiful wine…

We have been working on the process to become residents ever since. This has consumed our time and thoughts for the past 5 plus months.

The first wrinkle was that we could not apply for Portugal residency from Portugal. This is only the first of the nonsensical rules we will find. Requesting residency must happen from USA, and not just anywhere in the country, but from our state of legal residence; for us California. But not where we live in California, but San Francisco. So we will need to come back from Europe and go to San Francisco for an in-person meeting. 

After the meeting the paperwork will be delivered to Portugal and scrutinized. Then, after a period of 60 to 90 days, Portugal will make a decision and (hopefully) stamp our passport with a residency permit, and return it to us in California. The rub, you may have missed is, during this 90 days, we will not have our passport. So we cannot leave USA. We will be traveling domestically in the near future. There is a work around for this, but it extends the timing another week to send the passports in after the approval.

Picture a scavenger hunt. We have a list of items to collect. Some easy, some more difficult. Many things would be easier to get if we were in Portugal. Other things need to be done in the USA. In neither of these locales are we. We started this from the UK, our Schengen limitations prevented us from visiting Portugal after we left there in September.

Another dilemma, to get a NIF (Financial Number, similar to a social security number), you need an address; but to get a lease, you need the NIF. Same with the bank account. How does one solve this cart-before-the-horse infinite loop?

We hired a Portuguese attorney to accomplish the first items on our list: a portuguese financial number, and open our bank account. She would be using her office address we assume, so our lack of address is not a problem and we can change it later. Circular loop solved. However, in her humble opinion, Mark could not reproduce his signature adequately enough. Seriously, he sent her at least 20 examples of his signature, none did she think matched the signature on his passport. She finally gave up and we gave her power of attorney to take care of these details. Finally we obtained our tax id numbers. 

The lawyer’s second duty was to open bank accounts for us. Four and a half months later, we finally got one. Wiring the money took a couple days, and we were able to take a screenshot to prove we have funded a Portuguese bank account with enough funds to live on for an entire year. The second item in the hunt. Check By the way, the amount deemed enough for a couple to live on for a year, in Portugal is just under $15,000.

The longest pole in the tent is proof of a home. This must be a deed for a purchased home, or a twelve month lease for a permanent stay. Our choice is to rent; we are not ready to make a purchase decision. We know customs are different and we do not know them; buying would be too risky. Turns out renting was hard enough to accomplish and we would prove to be very naive.

A signed lease is a requirement for our residency meeting; this meeting will be about 90 days before we go to portugal because it will take the government that long to issue the visa. So, ideally, we would like a lease that starts 90 days after our meeting date. How naive. Portuguese real estate is as hot as everywhere else. No way is a rental owner waiting 4 months or more for rent. They want rent starting immediately, and they can get it. We need to get comfortable that we will be paying rent 4-6 months before we step foot in the home.  Fold in also, things move slowly in Portugal.

Guess what, being American is not a benefit. No one wants to rent to us! I guess we like to push our customs on others and do not want to abide by the local customs. Landlords do not want to deal with renters that do not speak the language and do not know the expectations. In US real estate, we would call that a PITA factor: “Pain In The Ass”. So we had a real hard time getting any realtor or property owner to answer our requests to rent. Probably got an answer to one out of twenty requests. Some of those answers being “No”.

It is customary for Portuguese people to have a guarantor. We do not have one of these, so owners want several months of rent paid up front. Some wanted ALL the rent up front. By “Up front” they meant, before they would provide us a lease draft. Our stellar USA credit rating is meaningless over there; comes as a rude surprise to be treated like we are 18 and renting our first apartment or buying our first car.  These requirements were just a few of the customs we had to learn to accept.

We focused our search on a known expat and tourist area, even though we know ultimately this is not where we want to live. We sought out holiday rental property managers, thinking they would be more friendly to us. These companies would be accustomed to dealing with foreigners and likely speak English. As a bonus, we could rent a fully stocked house. Appealing to us because we own exactly zero house goods. 

Finding our ideal living situation became a wish a long way down the list of needs. How funny, we are selecting an apartment without consideration of where we want to live. We realize we are going to have to take whatever we can get. The months are flying by without being even close to obtaining this lease. 

I should point out, we are not seeing any of the apartments. Nor have we been to most of the towns under consideration. We are selecting an apartment based on pictures. When we finally got a property manager willing to lease to us, we saw our apartment via a video call. We finally got a lease delivered electronically. And just this week, 2 days before our residency meeting…. We obtained a signed lease. A full 5 months after beginning our house hunt.  We feel very lucky we have an apartment. If it turns out we do not like the apartment, we will only have about half the year left to live in it. We plan to spend a lot of our first year traveling the country and figuring out where we really want to live. So no worry.

One of the checklist items that we need to be in the States to collect is an FBI background check. We must get fingerprints to the FBI to commence the check. This can be done from Europe but with the long delay of transatlantic mail, made worse by covid. We elected to arrive in the States a week before the meeting. Get the prints done and request the background check right away. It should get delivered in time and of course we know it is going to be clean. Fingers crossed.

The rest of the scavenger list should be easy in comparison to those first ones. Passports, birth certificates, marriage certificates, passport photos; all the standard stuff. Except not so standard. Portugal has a different size passport photo than us. All the places we tried would not help us. Finally we got a nice person that looked through her choices and noticed that Canada’s size is the same as portugal’s, so she printed us some Canadian passport photos. 

Our original birth certificates were too old. What, by definition shouldn’t they be our age? How can an original birth certificate be too old? We sent off to our respective birth cities and requested new birth certificates. Got them. Check. Marriage license too. Social Security cards: who has their original social security card? We do, now.

We are collating our huge packages for our meeting when we get a notification that our meeting has been canceled. Someone in the office has covid. 

We reschedule an appointment for the following week. Drove 8 hours up to San Francisco and checked into a hotel. Next day we arrived at our appointed time and handed over our paperwork, one item at a time. We had one problem. Our first appointment was at the end of January. The new one is in February. The fee for the visa is in Euros, but must be paid in a USA money order in dollars. Every month the consulate recalculates the currency conversion. Our money orders were in the January amount. 

Mark had to run out of the office, down the street to the nearest bank and quickly get 2 more money orders, in the amount of $0.48 each. Forty-eight cents. We did that, and submitted four money orders along with our packages. Whew! Now the long wait for the decision.