I’m a pretty good planner and organizer. I actually enjoy it. My normal mode of operation is to have as much stuff planned ahead as I can, typically with at least two contingency plans if things don’t work out or circumstances change.
I’m also an early planner. Our social calendar typically has things scheduled weeks in advance. We start plotting our next trips as soon as we get home from the last one.
The downside to this is that I don’t always do spontaneous very well … but the good news is, planned things usually happen when and how they’re supposed to without problems.
I started doing the advance work for the assorted logistics of the physical relocation to Portugal in the summer of 2019. The biggest issues, things like where we were going to live, how we were going to get our stuff there, and how were we going to move the pets I’ve already talked about. But let me share some of the other little odds and ends, too.
Phones
A lot of people have asked if we’ll still have our US phone numbers. The answer is, “Yes, but …” The good news is that Kristie and I have fairly new unlocked iPhones, so we want to be able to use those in Portugal, right? We’ll need to sign up with a local provider and get new sim cards installed.
This will give us new Portuguese phone numbers, which is important for local stuff. However, just before we leave, we’ll port our existing numbers over to Google Voice and cancel our service with ATT.
Using Google Voice means that we will still be able to use our old numbers for texting, and people will be able to leave voice messages – we just won’t be able to answer calls and have conversations as they occur. We will be able to call from that number using Google Voice, though – which means no international roaming charges on phone calls.
People can also still text and call us on our existing numbers using WhatsApp (the biggest communication platform in the world outside of the US). Plus, we’ll be able to do audio and video calls through Skype, Zoom, Teams, Messenger, etc., etc.
Forwarding mail to Europe is a little trickier than just putting in a forwarding order at the Post Office. Postage would be insufficient for anything received, right?
Of course, we’ll be putting in change of addresses with all the individuals and businesses we have ongoing relationships with, but you’d be surprised at the number of companies whose systems cannot accommodate European addresses! And that still doesn’t account for the random mailings or packages from people who either didn’t get or didn’t register the change, or the Post Office’s fairly consistent errors, etc.
Solution: A mailing service. For a small monthly fee, we have a US address to use as our forwarding address for the USPS. They’ll sort all the mail they receive – they’ll discard obvious junk and scan the outside of everything else and post the images online. We look at the pictures and decide if we need it forwarded or not – we can also have them open it and scan it and look at the contents. For stuff that needs to go to us in Portugal, they’ll bundle it up and send it at a discounted international rate (we pay extra for that). Everything else, they shred.
They can also act as a freight forwarder for things we buy from the US, if necessary – rather than paying individual international shipping rates for packages, we can have stuff sent to the central location, where they’ll re-box it together. I don’t know that we’ll use this service much, but if we do it will save us a ton of money.
This is also a good solution since we may be moving around the country finding the perfect place over the next few years – we’ll just update the service as to our current location.
Cars
Our original plan was to not own a car in Portugal, and to stick to mass transit. Although we’re close to the Metro in Porto, after a lot of discussion we decided that we probably could use a car. Sometimes we’ll need to cart things around (especially as we rebuild the household). And when we want to explore the country, it’s not always practical to rely on trains or busses.
Even if we only rented cars when we wanted them, we’d still need the legal right to drive, so International Driving Permits were a requirement. There are only two sources for these in the US, and there’s only one where you can go in person to get it – your local AAA office. Even for non-members, the cost is about $75 with a picture, and it only takes 20 minutes … that is, if the office isn’t closed because of the epidemic! Luckily, our local offices opened back up June 1.
But what to do with the existing cars? Sell ‘em! But I absolutely hate the private party car selling process – it’s nothing but trouble. People call at all hours, they make appointments to look at the car and don’t show up, they want to haggle over the price, they quibble over tiny scratches, and on and on. I just don’t have the patience for this anymore, so I looked for an alternative.
While I was looking up the Kelley Blue Book value of the cars online, I saw on the site a button, “Get a cash offer for your car,” so I clicked it. Within five minutes, I had five offers! Granted, none of them were at the high end of the car’s BB value, but they weren’t unreasonable.
One of the offers was from a local dealership. They were the lowest, but when I spoke with a salesman and provided him with the other offers, he told me that they could make me happy. News flash – they lied. I drove away.
I wound up using a company named Shift. They gave me a solid quote, on the higher end of the spectrum – they came out to the house, looked the car over, test drove it, and signed the paperwork and drove it away. Three days later, the money was in my bank account.
I was going to use Shift for the second car, but a personal connection decided they wanted it, which is even better.
Voting
Both Kristie and I take our responsibilities as US Citizens seriously, and we will vote in every Federal election. But who, exactly, is responsible for getting us our ballot?
For starters, it is the LOCAL voting authority – in our case, the Washington County Oregon Election Commission. I had to file with them, using our existing address – even when we leave, Hillsboro is our official Oregon place of residence because it was out LAST place of residence.
In practical terms, we need to register with the US Embassy in Portugal, too – so when Oregon doesn’t send us our absentee ballots (I totally expect this, since they were having so much difficulty with a non-US address …) we can get our substitute ballots from them.
By the way, having a registered address in Oregon does NOT mean that we have to pay taxes in Oregon, at least after 2020. I’m closing down my US business that’s registered with the Oregon Secretary of State, and I won’t earn any money in Oregon after this year. Taxes are actually a whole long and complicated story in and of themselves, so look for discussions about that in future episodes.
Next episode: Down to the wire!
A Modern Odyssey - Expatriates in Iberia 