The Next Milestone

We’ve just returned from a productive, whirlwind visit to Valencia — and we’ve got the paperwork to prove it.

Moving can be a real pain in the neck. Even moving across town can be challenging, so you can imagine how moving cities – and countries! – can require a higher level of planning and coordination.

When we moved to Portugal in 2020, I didn’t have a huge amount of support available to help me organize and plan. Yes, I had my lawyer in Portugal working on my citizenship, but they were very targeted (and they dropped the ball on more than one item). The rest? That was up to me. I had to navigate shipping our belongings (and pets), setting up utilities, opening bank accounts, wrangling taxes and insurance, and figuring out health care.

And finding a place to live had some special challenges, since we were in the depths of COVID. Our planned apartment-hunting visit had to be scrapped due to travel restrictions, so we wound up having to choose from a limited selection of places that we only saw on video. Frankly, we never would have rented our first apartment if we had seen it in person, but we did what we had to do.

This time, I enlisted the aid of professionals. I spoke to a few different agencies that help with relocations, and eventually selected Valencia Expat Services. The owner, Laurence, is a French woman who has lived in Valencia for years, and her team includes local experts in apartments, various bureaucratic requirements, and other relocation needs.

We spent 12 days in Valencia, and with the aid of the team managed to get a LOT of stuff done. An important first step was to get our NIEs – our foreigner identification numbers, which are used for tax purposes and are needed before you can do pretty much everything. Laurence drove us out of Valencia to the town of Port de Sagunt, since she has connections there. We had appointments all set up with the Immigration police, and we were in and out in less than a half hour. We were impressed with how smoothly the government agency performed – it looks like Spain’s bureaucracy isn’t as challenged as Portugal’s.

With NIEs, we were able to open Spanish bank accounts. Now, here’s a thing – although I bank with Santander in Portugal, and Santander is one of the biggest banks in Spain, it’s not as simple as just moving the accounts … they are two separate companies, and their systems are not connected, so I had to open completely new accounts in Spain. Laurence facilitated an appointment, and the experience was much less painful than expected.

Next mission: apartment hunting. Marta from the team took point on this one. I’ll save the full story for a separate post, but spoiler alert — we saw 10 apartments and found the one. Lease signed, and a big checkbox ticked.

Now that we have an address, Marta will set up all the utilities for us with direct debits from our Spanish bank account. This took me literally weeks in Portugal, so I’m very happy not to have to worry about it.

Laurence also herded us through an appointment at the town hall to get our digital signatures set up. This system allows you to do a lot of bureaucratic stuff online with your mobile phone, so it will be a big timesaver in the future.

One last thing which is a personal accomplishment for us – we bought a new living room sofa! Our current sofa came from Ikea, which was pretty much the only option during the summer of 2020 and COVID and, well, it’s time to move on. Out with the functional-but-uninspired, in with the comfortable-and-stylish!

There are still things that need to doing:

• Register as a self-employed person
• Get internet and phones set up
• Register with the health system and get assigned a doctor
• Get the car registered for Spain
• Change to Spanish car insurance from Portuguese
• Get renters insurance

The good news is that most of these can wait until we’re actually in-country, and the team will be assisting with most everything.

On our end, I need to finalize things with the moving company, but I already have a solid quote. I’ll also get things set up with the local utilities to stop billing at the end of the lease, but that should be pretty easy. Other than that, it’s time to start packing!