Stocks A to Z / Stocks B / Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A) ❤
No. of Recommendations: 0
No. of Recommendations: 1
The funny bit I took from that article is that it's much easier and faster to go to Portugal on a retiree or digital nomad visa than a golden visa. It costs a few thousand Euros and takes months, rather than years (I think the average time to approval for a Portuguese GV is something like 3 years now). But it does obligate you to spend most of your time in Portugal if you go the regular long-term visa route.
No. of Recommendations: 1
portugal is lovely tho the langage is difficult.
do make sure that you have up to date info, as I think I was just reading they were tightening up...
No. of Recommendations: 5
portugal is lovely tho the langage is difficult.
do make sure that you have up to date info, as I think I was just reading they were tightening up...
Oh, I'm all set - so long as USDA is still functioning enough to issue my Cats' health certificates before departure and martial law isn't declared first. D8 visa issued 63 days after appointment, leaving on the 25th, one month AirBnB reserved for the housing search, and best of all, I hit the jackpot and got a much-coveted permanent residency card appointment only 10 weeks after arrival, and only an hour from Lisbon (some people wait more than a year for theirs and spend hundreds of hours phoning and emailing AIMA for the appointment).
Rather annoyed at the recent shift in the EUR <-> USD rate though, as it reads on my desire to get enough money outside the US to survive on, worst-case. Now that Thiel and Musk are repurposing the SSA databases to suppress people they don't like, I expect they'll quickly figure out that declaring someone dead in the SSA database to prevent their accessing any financial services etc. need not be limited to just immigrants, but can trivially be done to citizens they don't like, as well.
No. of Recommendations: 1
oddhack wrote: "best of all, I hit the jackpot and got a much-coveted permanent residency card appointment only 10 weeks after arrival"
Was that sheer luck, or are there tips you can share to help expedite the process?
-LB
No. of Recommendations: 2
Was that sheer luck, or are there tips you can share to help expedite the process?
Pure luck. Some people don't get an AIMA appointment with their visa at all, and they are thrown into the hell of endlessly calling and emailing (and occasionally, suing) AIMA to get an appointment. Some people get an appointment but it's at the other end of the country (admittedly not a huge country, but still an overnight trip). After you get the card you have to renew in 2 years and again in 3 before being eligible for citizenship, so one time lucky means nothing. The biggest drawback of not having it (that I'm aware of) is that without the residency card, you are extremely limited in travel outside Portugal (one exit / entry, after your initial arrival) and still fall under the 90-day Schengen stay limit when in other Schengen-zone countries.
I don't think any of the immigration lawyers have any "inside contacts" of value(*). AIMA is a big, bureaucratic organization that appears to be dramatically underfunded / understaffed for the work they're doing. I expect we'll see similar results with US government agencies going forward once they discover that "AI" cannot, in fact, replace all the people they fired or the budget cuts they endured.
(*) Which said I don't really regret hiring a lawyer to help with NIF / bank account / VFS visa submission appointment prep / lease review / other delimited tasks. She was cheap on the scale of overall cost of getting to Lisbon, and gives some additional confidence. Others happily do it entirely on their own.
