Plan B is Back! And Here to Stay!
Our worst fears came true, it was time to take action.
Having fallen in love with Porto in 2018, and dreaming about what it would be like to live there, we came home and went back to our day to day life. After all, the notion that we could actually pull up stakes and establish a new life in Europe seemed so far-fetched. Not to mention the need to learn a new culture and a new language. Reality check.... Yup, that would be crazy...
Meanwhile, back to our regularly scheduled life in Philadelphia...
Despite the turbulence in DC1, life seemed to be going along okay in Philly until 2019 when I hit a few major life roadblocks. I will spare you with all the details, but between January of 2019 and January of 2022...
My mom unexpectedly passed away.
I was diagnosed (and successfully treated) for Esophageal cancer
Covid shutdown arrived just days after I felt mostly recovered from cancer surgery
Once vaccinated, I drove 3,000 miles to California to check in on my father
I then moved him to our house in Philly2 (then flew back to CA, and drove back to PA)
And then in January of 2022, he passed away.
So much happened in such a short amount of time, I simply felt overwhelmed by life.... Thankfully, I began daily walks3 and found a therapist to talk it out with.
Several months after the loss of my father, I began to come up for air. By spring, we began to finally get serious about plans for a massive renovation of our now 170 year old rowhouse. The realization of having a new dream kitchen and primary suite were tangible and the planning had begun. I completed the installation of our vintage 1870s cast plaster medallion, and had custom picture rail milled for the living room. Finally it felt as though the beautiful home I had been carrying around in my head for years now was going to come to fruition. Or was it?
As summer settled in, the inevitable decisions by the Supreme Court were released. The period approaching the announcement of the Supreme Court's rulings for the year is alway an interesting time. Often filled with either joy or sadness, sometimes a bit of both. It was late June of 2022, while we were away in woods on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State for a family wedding, that the Supreme Court flexed their conservative muscle and reversed Roe v Wade which up to that point had been settled law. BAM! That was the turning point. Everything is different now. Plan B was alive again.
If the Supreme Court had determined that a woman's choice is not really her choice, then what else would they reverse? Our marriage suddenly felt like it was on the table for the possibility of being reversed or at least stymied in some manner. I cannot ever forget that night as we lay wide awake in our bed in a cabin in the woods (it was a destination wedding) using our very spotty internet madly researching next steps to revive plan B.
With plan B back to life, the challenge was to figure out how the hell to make it happen. Shortly after arriving home from the wedding (where we finally caught COVID), we booked a seven day trip to Porto for August.
Six weeks later, we flew into Lisboa and then climbed aboard our train to Porto. After delays4 due to my miscalculations and ongoing wild-fires, we arrived about nine hours late to our Airbnb in the Bonfim neighborhood. Bonfim is mostly residential to the east of the city center and just outside of the tourist zone. After spending far too many hours doing research on the perfect neighborhood for us to settle in, Bonfim was at the top of our list. We stayed in a magnificent Airbnb which was formerly the home of a wealthy merchant nearly 200 years ago.
We focused our visit not on tourist activities, but on activities from the perspective of a local (as best we could). We explored other neighborhoods, we shopped in grocery stores, we explored various aspects of daily life (like the post office, public transit, etc...) in an attempt to get a feel for the lay of the land. We generally avoided the crowded tourist areas, but one night decided to wade into the masses and ended up having a delightfully romantic dinner in the Ribeira along the river near the famous double decker LuÃs I Bridge. We both felt our feelings of love for the city deepen that week. We felt strongly this was the right place for us. We also made plans to return for another week in December... Just to experience the city in winter.
I will save the details of our process for another post, but after returning home, we started our serious research into how to make this move happen. To be completely transparent, it is fairly straightforward, but it isn't super easy.....
We will be applying for a 'D7' Visa, also known as the Retirement Visa or Passive Income Visa. If you are independently wealthy or retired with a pension or SSI coming in, the process isn't that hard. It is intended to attract retirees and other foreigners FT to boost Portugal's economy5. For the record, we are comfortable, but certainly not wealthy. The biggest roadblock is that in order to obtain a 'D7' visa, you need to show an established flow of passive income. That turned out to be one of the more challenging things to sort out. It also means we will be renting for the first few years.
Our visit in December had us landing only a week before Christmas. It was quite different from our trip (only a few months before) in August. As mentioned, we wanted to experience the city in winter, we wanted to experience the holiday season in the city, we had a new list of things to check out and learn about. We chose to again stay in Bonfim and ended up at a different Airbnb only two blocks from our prior visit.
Stay tuned for the next post where I will write about our December trip. Let's just say that my (our) love for the city only deepened.
During the course of the now nearly seven years since the Orange F*cknugget became president, we have felt the slow unraveling of democracy in the US. A feeling I would later refer to as "Death by a thousand cuts". (You can be sure I will definitely be writing about that.) In a nutshell, it felt that despite some small advances under the Biden administration, our nation is slowly being dismantled, little bit, by little bit. Sure the election of Biden was a relief, but really only a short-term one at best.
He had lived in California (mostly Sacramento) since the early 1940's and spent 75 plus years as a member of the same church.
In April of 2020, I began walking every single day. I am currently walking between three and four miles each day and as of this posting I have 1375 walks in 1375 days. Full disclosure, there have been four days in which I was unable to walk due to scheduling around travel, I made them up on other days within the same week as separate walks.
Our train day was a fiasco. Not long after the train left Oriente Station in Lisboa, we discovered that the train tickets I bought were for the prior day. We ended up getting off the train in the tiny town of Santarém where we bought new tickets, and then waited four hours until the next train. When the train arrived, we boarded, found our seats, and then about half an hour later we arrived at Entroncamento where we sat for the next four hours waiting for the wild-fires north of us to die down so the train could proceed. We arrived in Porto nine hours late.
Portugal like many European countries is facing both the loss of population as well as the aging of the population. They have created this visa to attract folks of varying income levels with passive sources of income (be it from pension, social security, or investments) to bring money into the country.
I am enjoying reading your posts and welcome you to Porto!