It’s been a while since we posted… but it’s all for good reasons. After more than 3 years of life on the road, we have embarked on our next adventure: international living in Portugal. If you follow our social channels, us moving abroad doesn’t come as a shock since we spent more than half the year abroad between Mexico and Costa Rica. But Portugal might seem out of blue.
Why move from the US to Portugal?
Good weather, beautiful beaches, rich culture, fresh foods, established public transit systems, historic architecture, relaxed pace of life, safety, and low cost of living… honestly it’s hard to find things to dislike about this beautiful country. But, there was one thing that was preventing us from making the move: qualifying for a visa.
Before 2023, visas tended to focus on high net worth immigrants that were already retired and had fixed incomes (commonly known as the Golden Visa in Portugal). With the sale of our house, we were close to qualifying for these income types but fell short on a few key requirements. We had our eyes on Portugal for a while, but we simply couldn’t make it work in the eyes of the law. October 2023 is when Portugal started accepting applications for the D8 Visa AKA Digital Nomad Visa, targeted at remote workers with non-EU income with minimal (or no) savings but higher monthly income.
The newly-created AKA Digital Nomad Visa finally gave us a legitimate opportunity to move to the EU and Portugal.
Why did you leave the USA?
There wasn’t one occurrence that made us want to leave but a cumulation of experiences that led us to make this decision. We did the traditional “American dream” – we had a nice house in a nice neighborhood with high-paying jobs – we worked hard and played harder.
Even before van life, we were traveling most weekends to go to concerts and experience all we could with our 2 weeks of PTO per year. We started developing our blog and side hustles to help supplement the costs of our travel and concert addictions (and to help others learn how to maximize their travel while working full time). Then…. the pandemic struck.
In 2020, we realized just how hard we had to work in our full time jobs all to be stuck in our house doing the same thing day after day. We missed the adventure. We craved freedom and autonomy as our workplaces started tracking our every minute spent online during remote work. So, we decided to leave corporate life, learn into our developing businesses, adopt Ziggy & Ditto, buy a 1986 RV, rent out our house, and hit the road for a new adventure together.
For a little perspective, our expenses for our house each month (mortgage + utilities + HOA) totaled to about $2,600. That may be a lot for some; it may be minimal for others. Including annual special assessments, that meant we were spending about $35k/year to have a roof over our head, not including food & fun too! We decided to make the massive shift to living minimally while earning income from our house instead.
This minimal living really opened our eyes to just how much we could do when we don’t have fixed expenses. We could work more when we had more concerts to attend and work less while we were relaxing and embracing the great outdoors. This lifestyle also gave us the flexibility to live in Mexico in our rig – our first taste of what it would be like to move abroad.
Our first taste of international living
While in Mexico, we experienced low cost of living, delicious foods, and a culture that embraced enjoying life more than working through life. We decided we could no longer see ourselves in the US full time after extending our time abroad year after year. So, after nearly 3 years of renting our house, we sold our home in 2022.
We were very fortunate to have an amazing real estate team (shoutout to MAV Team) made up of my sister and brother-in-law to help us navigate both the purchase of our home in 2019 and sale in 2022. I am proud to say that through our minimal lifestyle and sale of our home, we were able to pay off more than $90k in debt (including Mike’s student loans!), fund necessities in our new businesses, and have savings leftover for a potential investment property.
You may be thinking… ok… what does this have to do with international living? All of this set the ground work for what was to come next. Without transparency, this seemed like an easy flight and BOOM, we’re living in Portugal. The reality is it took years of work and drastic lifestyle changes.
We moved all the furniture from our 3-bedroom house into a storage unit with the full intentions of buying a more affordable rental property in Arizona. Well, it turns out that no longer existed at the end of 2022 and into 2023. Since we were now debt free, we felt that sense of financial freedom and autonomy we had always longed for and took the opportunity to spend the holidays in Costa Rica with my brother and family.
What started out as a one-month trip, turned into an extended stay as we maxed out our tourist visa at 3 months (it was extended to 6 months in 2023 for those looking to travel there!). My brother, Connor, is a real estate developer in Costa Rica – his builds are truly amazing. Check out GPW Development to see his latest projects. So, he’d take us around to see potential properties he was looking at and show us his future plans throughout our stay. We even made a short vlog from when we first arrived and saw his properties:
During our final weeks in Costa Rica, he showed us a property in San Vito, a lesser-known Italian-Costa Rican town at higher elevation with cool temperatures. He was looking at a lot with a little 1-acre lot connected to it. We realized our money would go so much further in Costa Rica than it ever could in the US and bought the 1-acre property! It now has a road and is ready for a little house.
The extended period abroad opened our eyes to how much we valued living simply and happily. What mattered to us was spending time in nature, laughing with friends and family, community, fresh foods, safety, and a slow paced of live. The US is amazing when it comes to convenience, but