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Today’s Five-Minute Friday is about how I am moving my family to Portugal.

I recorded this episode a few days before I moved with my family to Portugal – including my two-year old and four-month old. (We have now been in Portugal for two weeks)

So, how does this all work?

We booked our flights using airline miles accumulated from all those travel hacking.

We are going to live in this little village called Atouguia da Baleia which is about an hour north of Lisbon. Atouguia is a surf community – it turns out there is a lot of great surfing in Portugal.

Why Portugal?

Lisbon is a digital nomad hotspot. Portugal is not super expensive compared to the rest of Europe, so it seemed like a good potential location. There is already a community of people I know and several co-working spaces. There is decent English spoken there.

This will be the third year that we left the United States to live abroad. So, we’ve got some experience under our belt. Right now, we are packing up our things and trying to have as little luggage as possible. We ended up traveling with 4 large checked bags.

A consideration when moving abroad is trying to find a house as quickly as possible. Normally we wait until we are in a new city to fid housing.

When we announced that we were moving to Portugal on our Facebook, one of our friends who happened to own an AirBnb property, reached out.

That house is where we then ended up arranging to stay. That saved us several days of house hunting and a lot of headache.

Because we have friends in Lisbon and Atouguia, we were also able to have a couple of connections. We already have a driver who will pick us up from the airport, we already have an access to a nanny for the child care. Through digital nomad Facebook groups, I was able to get connections with folks that live in our village. We ended up being tapped into a community, thanks to Natalie Sisson, a fellow podcaster and digital nomad who owns the Airbnb.

I plan to go to the local bike shop and see if there are any group rides so I can build a community through meeting cyclists. I am also planning to play ultimate frisbee. I’m told the frisbee community there is really good.

Co-working spaces are also a great place to meet people. I plan to go and do some workshops and talks which is really a good opportunity to develop potential business opportunities and collaborations.

We will be two miles from the beach and will have access to a car so we will probably go to the beach and surfing frequently.

So, that are some of the considerations that we are going to take when moving to Portugal. As U.S. Citizens, we are given three months or ninety days to stay there, so that is what we are aiming for right now.

Hopefully you found this episode useful and we’d love to hear from you!