He could have done his D7 alone. Here’s why he didn’t.

“Relatively easy, really. The first four or five days were tough, but beyond that it’s been flying. It’s an easy place to settle into. Easier than Egypt, for sure, and easier than other places in Europe, I think.”

“There are two sides to the equation: the practical side and the emotional side. Say Sweden had a very good practical route. I still wouldn’t be very excited to go and live there. It just doesn’t appeal to me as a place to live and enjoy whatever remains of my life.

All of southern Europe is appealing in that way, and Portugal is no exception. It’s the feeling you get in Greece or Italy or Spain. You get the same exact feeling here. The food is great, but really it comes down to the culture and the people. Walking down the street in a northern European city feels completely different from a southern one, and there’s a sense of community I already feel here.

On the practical side, I had applied for talent visas in two other countries and wasn’t accepted in either. Portugal accepted me. Without the practical side, you don’t have a choice.”

“Being rejected from both programmes led me to be really diligent with the requirements. I looked into every single requirement, every little detail and every potential problem. And you were just as diligent and passionate about it. I think it was that combination that led to the success.”

“There are a million questions, and AI doesn’t solve it. In fact, it can sometimes make your life harder, because it’s just wrong. That doesn’t mean it’s always wrong. I still use it. But you need a human being, an expert, and by expert I mean both a lawyer and someone who has done this a lot, so they know the system.

I’d already had a good experience with you on the NIF and the bank account. You were competitively priced, and you delivered in good time. Working with Mariana was a good call. Yes, it would have been nice to save the money, but it was very helpful to get her input on all kinds of details.”

“The ideal situation for a D7 is a pensioner. Every month the money comes into the bank, and that’s your source of funds. I had five or six different bank accounts. Whoever’s looking at that, if they’re not trained, will either be suspicious or confused. So in the end I came up with a system with Mariana, where I put a summary sheet on every file. She also advised keeping extra money in the Portuguese bank, above the threshold, to avoid any doubt.

Then there were the other issues. My FBI record had a problem that couldn’t really be fixed, so we dealt with it by mentioning it up front, with a letter from the service that handled it. My US bank statements were online printouts, and Portugal likes things signed and stamped, so we needed a workaround. There was a problem with my lease too, and you found it, so we could solve it. How could I have known that?

If I’d had to do all of it on my own, I would have been second-guessing myself all the time, on every single detail.”

“At first I couldn’t get an appointment at all. It was as if the website was broken.

On the day, I think I was overwhelming to them, just because of the size of the file. They have scanning limits, and I had about 500 pages. So you start asking yourself what they’ll do with your file if they can only scan 50 or 60 pages. All of these questions lead to a kind of anxiety.

They weren’t rude. I can’t claim they were rude. But they were uninformed and untrained, that was very clear. The tax documents are complicated, with some from the brokerage and some from the IRS, and they belong together. She wasn’t convinced, but I didn’t argue.

It isn’t the people, it’s the system. There’s zero transparency. It would be great to know there’s a minimum and maximum number of days, or that you’ll get updates. You go there, you deliver the documents, and it’s just a black hole.”

“They had my passport and my wife’s passport for over three months. I had paid for them to be delivered, and they weren’t. In the end I went and got them myself. I didn’t care by then.”

“There’s no direct flight from Cairo to Portugal, so we went through Germany. The first EU stop is where they check the papers, which isn’t too bad. They check the microchip and stamp it. Next we need a European pet passport, which a vet here does.

The flat was harder. When I came to Porto in February to see places, many of them refused pets altogether. The agency we were working with advised that as long as the contract doesn’t say no pets anywhere, you can go ahead. It’s a furnished apartment, so if the cat ruins anything, we pay for it. That’s what we did.”

“Not every document I needed was known up front. I discovered things along the way, and that led to a lot of stress. The letter from my US bank, for example. I never saw that referenced anywhere. The summary sheet was something I figured out with Mariana. Maybe that’s because not everyone needs one. It’s a custom thing, not one-size-fits-all. But if I’d known more up front, a master plan, that would have been helpful.”

“Rely on Novomove, but you know your situation better than anyone. Go through every requirement and every potential issue up front.

It was a lot of work on my side. But you made it much, much easier, because there’s an expert you’re working with. Every time I asked a question, I got a detailed reply. That was very, very helpful.”