Patience.
And more patience.
Maybe a little more patience.
While that is somewhat said in jest, it’s mostly truth. Moving to Portugal, or probably any foreign country, is not something that happens quickly. For us, from first thoughts of moving to our arrival in Portugal will be right at a year.
Visas
Once you’ve decided where you want to move you’ll need to explore how you can legally do so. That’s most likely going to involve getting a visa. U.S. citizens can travel to Portugal (or any other EU country) for 90 days as a tourist without a visa. Beyond that a visa is required.
For Portugal, there are numerous visas that one can apply for depending on why you are moving. Will you be a student, opening a business, investing in a business, seeking a job once you move, do you already have a job lined up, or maybe you’ll be retiring? Each of these options, and more, require a different visa.
We will be applying for a D7 retirement visa, more accurately a passive income visa. This means we are showing we can support ourselves in Portugal without a job, although we are not prevented from working if desired. Rather we will be supporting ourselves with passive income — money from a retirement account, pension, social security, rental property income, etc.
Applying for a visa
Once the type of visa you need is known the fun really starts. Now you have to compile all of the necessary documents to prove you qualify for the visa you are requesting. In our case, this includes:
•Visa application
•Personal statement about why we want to move to Portugal
•Documented housing (a lease or deed for a purchased home)
•Número de Identificação Fiscal (NIF) – this number identifies you within the Portuguese bureaucracy for tax purposes
•A funded Portuguese bank account (more on that later)
•Proof of income and assets
•Most recent U.S. tax return
•An apostilled FBI background check
•A signed authorization for a Portuguese criminal background check
•6-months of travel health insurance that will cover repatriation
While getting all of the required documentation together we had to get an appointment for our visa interview where we will turn over all of our documents for processing. Unfortunately, except for people living around Boston who can go to the Portuguese consulate, the visa interviews are all done by a third party company called VFS.
This adds another level of complexity to everything because VFS doesn’t always know what they’re doing. Sometimes they ask for documents that are not required by the embassy and sometimes they don’t want to take documents that are required. It just depends on the day, the VFS employee and the VFS office. We chose to hire a Portuguese-based relocation consultant to help us navigate all of this so we’re prepared to deal with VFS.
Housing
Moving to Portugal requires that you prove you have 12 months of housing lined up when you apply for your visa. This can be a lease for a rental (house or apartment) or the deed to a purchased house or apartment. It cannot be an Air BnB or other short-term rental. If it is a lease, the property owner must register the lease with Finanças, the tax authorities. This ensures the property is a legal rental, the landlord will be paying her/his taxes, and both parties are legally protected.
We have both a registered lease and a contract to purchase a house. Because the house we’re purchasing has some paperwork that needs to be squared away before we can sign the deed, we needed to secure a rental to ensure our application will be accepted.
Portuguese Bank Account
It’s not enough to show that you have assets sufficient to support yourself in investment accounts or bank accounts in the U.S., you need to have euros deposited in a Portuguese bank account. This proved to be a rather significant challenge.
In 2014, Portugal’s Banco Espírito Santo (BES) collapsed due to funny business by the Espírito Santo family that owned the bank. Portugal’s central bank had to intervene, creating Novo Banco (New Bank) to absorb the healthy assets of BES. As a result, all of the Portuguese banks came under more scrutiny and each bank tightened their rules to ensure new accounts are legitimate and not being used for funny business.
Long story short, we have accounts with two Portuguese banks, Novo Banco and BPI. Unfortunately, due to strict security measures we cannot access the Novo Banco account from the U.S. so we haven’t been able to transfer funds and actually do any banking. Fortunately, our BPI account works perfectly and is fully funded to show we can support ourselves once we move.
So how much does it take to retire in Portugal?
The bare minimum required to get a “retirement” visa is the equivalent of the Portuguese minimum wage in passive income. The 2025 Portuguese monthly minimum wage equates to €1,015, about US$1,200. Not too high of a bar (unless trump really keeps fucking the U.S. economy). Of course, more is always better both for showing authorities on your visa application and for living comfortably.