It’s still my plan to document the rest of our first trip to Portugal in February and our follow-up trip in October, but today was a VERY EXCITING day!
Today at 9AM EST we had our Portugal D7 Visa appointment in Washington, D.C. with VFS Global, the agency that handles visa appointments for Portugal, the Netherlands, Iceland, and a handful of other European countries. Those countries contract with VFS Global to ensure that visa applicants submit packets with the required elements.
Clearing this milestone was the culmination of a process that formally started on October 3rd, when Jill lined this appointment up for us. In the intervening time before the appointment we (and by “we” I mean Jill) had to clear the following hurdles:
- Establish a relationship with our trusted attorney in Portugal
- Apply for and receive Portuguese Tax IDs (called NIFs), which involved gathering lots of documents and getting them all apostilled (authenticated for international purposes)
- Open and fund a bank account in Portugal (to prove that we won’t be on the dole when we arrive)
- Find and secure a fantastic initial place for Team Praisner to live and get the lease registered with the Portuguese Finance Department (to prove that we won’t be homeless when we arrive)
- Get fingerprinted and pass FBI background checks and authorize Portugal to do it’s own criminal check
- Provide proof that we have monthly passive income (so we can support ourselves long-term in Portugal)
- Provide proof that we have qualified travel insurance that’s good for at least 120 days from the start date of our visa (which can be a bit challenging if you don’t know when your visa will start)
- Submit copies of our passports showing enough time for the visa process to be completed before they expire
- Submit two unflattering (no smiles please) European-sized passport photos
- Write our personal statements for why we want to move to Portugal
- Complete the D7 Visa application
This has been nearly a full-time job for Jill for the last two months and I was so relieved that she took ownership of this task. There’s a fantastic and supportive Facebook group (Americans & FriendsPT) that provided the roadmap through this process.
When we rolled into the VFS office the security guard and staff were very clear that there are no mobile phones allowed in the processing area – otherwise I would have gotten photo evidence of Jill slaloming deftly through the administrative gates.
We showed up with two file folders, one for each of us, and, since only one person is allowed at the window at a time, Jill took first chair and I sat in the waiting area directly behind her. Atul from VFS Global, who is rightly Facebook-famous in Americans & FriendsPT for being very helpful was training Richard today. So, Richard led the process with Atul checking his work every step of the way. My only role in the process was to come forward and sign my application (which has to be done on-site while they are watching) and to sign the UPS return label for sending our passports back to VFS Global once to have the visa pasted in once we are approved.
Given the scarcity of visa appointments and the requirement to come to DC, Jill and I were both feeling the stress of needing to get this right on the first try when we walked in. Atul’s supervisor asked Jill if she was nervous and when she answered honestly, he very kindly told her it was all going to be fine. I suspect he noticed the very organized file folders she had under her arm. Can’t say enough good things about the nice people at VFS Global.
The whole process took 30 minutes. While I was sitting in the gallery watching Jill and straining to hear the conversation she was having with Richard and Atul, I saw two other people bomb out of the VFS process for not being prepared. One was going to the Netherlands and then on language school in Poland and did not have his acceptance letter from the language school. And, best I can tell, the other was trying to obtain a visa with 2 weeks lead time and Atul’s supervisor had to explain to that person the visa process for that country takes 3 three weeks.
Jill, on the other hand, CRUSHED IT! She’d pored over the instructions from Americans & FriendsPT and had everything in sequential order so that when Richard requested the next document she just had to remove the paper clip (no fasteners of any kind are allowed in the packet) and say “This one is for Christopher and this one is for Jill.” The only thing that kept Jill from getting a perfect score was that the copies of our drivers licenses were only of the front side. But because she’d already impressed the VFS crew, she was able to just ask me for my drivers license and Richard made the two-sided copy for us.
And now we wait. Jill has been monitoring the posts on Americans & FriendsPT and someone this morning said that they’d received their approval 31 days after their DC VFS Global appointment. Once we are approved we will put our passports in a UPS envelope and send them to VFS Global. They will paste in the visas and send our passports back to us.
There are two options when requesting the visa: request a future start date or have it start immediately upon approval. We requested our visas start on March 1, 2024. The other thing that may or may not happen when we get our visas approved is that Portugal may also schedule our AIMA, the department that is in charge of issuing residency to visa applicants who are applying for D7 residency, appointments. The point of the visas that we have just applied for is to allow us to stay in Portugal long enough to present ourselves to AIMA to get temporary residence cards (followed at some indeterminate point by receiving our permanent residence cards by Portuguese post). Our understanding is that once in-country we show up at our AIMA appointments (which may or may not be at the same time or even in the same office – there are lots of stories of couples having appointments on the same day but on opposite sides of the country) with a packet similar to the one we presented to VFS Global along with our boarding passes from our inbound flight and our visas with a Portuguese entry stamp.
Once we are in Portugal with our visas we will be “stuck” there through the rest of the residency process. There are two reasons for that:
- Once we’ve received our visas, we can only leave the country and return twice before we have residence cards without invalidating the visa. We are going to keep those two free passes in reserve in case there’s an emergency that requires us to pop back to the US.
- We’ve heard that you have to be present to sign for your residence card when it arrives via Portuguese post. And we’ve also heard that if you miss that delivery your residence card takes an indeterminate path back to the issuing authority and may spend months lost in transit. We are going to ask if there’s any way we can just get notified when our residence cards are ready so that we can just go back to the AIMA offices where we had our appointments to pick them up, but we don’t have high hopes on that front. Failing that, we will do our best to be home every day when the mail comes.
This is all super exciting and slightly terrifying!
Adventure is out there!
Jill and Todd in Portugal 
Brilliant, and I can also see how you’ve built in an excuse not to visit us in Stuttgart until the mail is delivered. Very excited for you, and thankful for the trailblazing!
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