We devoted our first few days in Portugal to financial and business matters, although we did take time for some great food and wine and to connect with friends.
As I’ve mentioned in earlier episodes, I’m moving my consulting company to a Portuguese business. This company is the catch-all for my LinkedIn class authoring and the various other customers for whom I do things like give talks, create videos, deliver training, and help plan strategies.
I also use it as a place to collect money for voice-over work and music licensing – things which I intend to spend more time on in the future.
Having a Portuguese company simplified the tax situation, and as a “high value-add content producer,” I get preferential treatment from the Portuguese government for the next 10 years. I’ve been working with a very smart Portuguese tax accountant/business lawyer for the past nine months, and he’s helped me set up the business model. The only things left to do were actually register the company, and then open a business banking account.
I’ve really enjoyed my conversations and email exchanges with Leonel, and it was a treat to meet him in person for the first time. We met bright and early, 9:00 AM at the Registo Nacional de Pessoas Colectivas (National Registry of Business Entities).
A brief digression about how Portuguese society is right now with Covid. The law is that you must wear a mask in any enclosed space unless you are sitting at a table in a restaurant or bar eating or drinking – the staff is all masked. When you’re outdoors, masks are not mandatory unless you are somewhere you cannot socially distance.
Pretty much everyone is totally compliant with this, which is great – and which has also contributed to Portugal’s successfully dealing with the epidemic. There are some minor hotspots, but the hospital system was never even close to overwhelmed; since February, they’ve lost less than 1700 people overall.
Anyways, because Leonel had already laid the groundwork, we were able to get my new company set up in about an hour – it was an absolute best-case experience, it could have easily taken a few days.
From there, we headed directly to the bank to open the business account – it’s a government requirement that it happen immediately. Once again, it was a remarkably simple experience. By noon, we had it all wrapped up and we headed back to the hotel to pick Kristie up for lunch.
The three of us ate at a great place recommended by the hotel. These articles aren’t about food or tourism, but definitely look up Sr. Lisboa – it’s on a side street parallel to Avenida Liberdade, and it was amazing.
After lunch, we walked up to the Pombal monument to the bank we selected for our personal account. This part of the day was a bit more complicated, since Kristie doesn’t have a Portuguese tax ID yet. The bank is able to get her one, but at the end of the day it was easiest to open the account in my name, and we’ll add her on in a week or two when the ID is ready. Luckily, our US accounts are still available, so she’s not stuck being dependent on me.
Not everything has worked out quite as easily, however.
We’re scheduled to get the keys to the apartment a little early, so we want to move out of hotels as soon as we can. Since the minimum requirement is a bed to sleep on, that had to be priority one. The question was, could we arrange for delivery of a mattress?
I had done some advance footwork on this before we left the US, and it’s more complicated than you’d think. There are a lot of “mattress by mail” companies, but those doing business in the US don’t deliver internationally. There are companies in Europe, but either they don’t deliver to Portugal or they are super expensive.
After reading a bunch of reviews and asking for recommendations, it looked like Ikea was our best option. They actually have a couple of highly rated mattresses at their higher end, which is still very affordable.
There are stores in Lisboa and Porto, so we figured we’d go on a field trip to check it out.
Normally, we would be doing Metro, but during the epidemic the idea of being in enclosed crowded spaces with strangers doesn’t have the same charm as usual …We’ve also had to do less walking than typical, since I’m still a little physically impaired. I not only aggravated my hip during the air travel excitement, I bruised my Achilles tendon overwalking in bad shoes. It’s getting better, but I’m decidedly less mobile than usual.
We’ve mostly been using Uber to get around, and it’s been super easy. Uber is also very affordable; you can get across town for €6 when it’s not surge pricing.
Anyways, we go to Ikea and make our way (slowly) through the acres of self-assembly furniture and assorted furnishings until we reach mattress world. We were able to physically see and test the mattresses we were interested in and were able to make a decision on which one we wanted. We also picked out a rug and some small nightstands.
Armed with this information, I went online to order things. Ikea Portugal even has an English-language site, so I figured how hard can it be? And here’s where it went south …
To make a long and complicated story short, I couldn’t complete an order online. One week later it wouldn’t be a problem, since all the financial maneuvering would be done and I’d have new Portuguese credit cards, but in the interim I couldn’t put a US billing address into their system because it wouldn’t accept a ZIP code – wrong format, so sorry.
So, back to Ikea, back to the mattress department. Once there, we were able to get one of the salespeople to help us; she created the order and arranged for the mattress delivery on July 31. Unfortunately, she couldn’t add the other items we wanted – we had to collect those in the warehouse, pay for them, then take them to shipping to add to the order.
We get through the checkout process with no issues – since we were there in the flesh, there was no problem paying with a US credit card. We then headed over to Transport as instructed. However, this was another disappointment – they couldn’t add items purchased from the store to a shipment coming from the distribution center. They also couldn’t ship things purchased in Lisboa to Porto, so we wound up returning all the extra items – we’ll just have to wait until Porto for all that, but at least we have a mattress! This sort of sets August 1 as the day we’ll be able to move out of the hotel, which will be a real milestone.
In between logistical and practical matters, we have had a chance to spend time seeing our friends. We met Amin one evening at a bar by the hotel we liked in the past. Temporary Covid restrictions require that if you sit at their outside tables after 8 PM you have to order food, and all they had was weird vegetarian chow. However, right around the corner from our hotel is Solar des Presuntas, a well-known fish restaurant which has been there for over 50 years. We had a terrific dinner and then wound up sitting in the hotel lobby talking and drinking brandy until midnight.
The next evening, we caught up with another friend, Haseen, for drinks and dinner on the rooftop terrace of the Tivoli hotel. This was pretty darned swanky, with an incredible view of the city as well as darned good food.On Sunday, we’re out of Lisboa and headed up to Porto via train. We’ll pick up the story there.
Next episode: Welcome home!
A Modern Odyssey - Expatriates in Iberia 