How Much Did Our Move to Portugal Cost?!
Alright friends! I’ve been promising this for literal months, but we actually just finally paid for the very last thing we needed to pay for, and our move is officially complete!
(well! I think there are like 2 boxes in my friend Sarah’s house, and I think 2 boxes in Laura’s house! And I’ve got a bike in the basement of my old apartment (sorry Hannah!) but like… complete enough!)
So a little explanation before I dig in - we didn’t set out to move to Portugal on the cheap. As soon as I started doing research about getting a digital nomad visa I knew my case to prove my income level to qualify (small business owner making money with two different creative businesses) was going to be challenging, and I was hitting walls with my independent research left and right. I also knew that I had to prove in my documents that I could support my family on my income, which meant I had to work more, leaving less time to dedicate to this process.
Pretty much right away I hired help.
Help/Education/Extras: $5,835.61
I spoke about this in my hard launch back in May of 2025, but I bought a class, realized I absolutely couldn’t do this by myself and hired Start Abroad to help, and I can absolutely safely say that was money very well spent and that I wouldn’t have been able to do this myself successfully or at the very least, it would have been a hell of a lot more stressful!
I’m also including in this category our trip to Porto in September which wasn’t absolutely necessary but was certainly helpful!
We also had to fly to Washington DC for our Visa Interview and we made that a little vacation with a trip to Baltimore that also wasn’t strictly necessary but holy shit that was an absolute lifesaver after that shit show of a trip.
Necessities for Visa Application: $10,644.28
There is a TON of annoying shit on this list! Please take SPECIAL note of how many fucking times I had to fucking DHL docs for bank! Getting a novobanco account was, and kinda still is, fucking annoying. Despite being promised that my scanned documents were being looked over before I mailed them, basically every time I mailed them they found something wrong which meant I had to remail them. DHL Express is expensive!
Also a huge expense was when our flights to DC were cancelled and we had to buy last minute tickets. That really sucked!
Also, the visa application is handled by a company called VFS, who was just super exposed by the Times or someone for shitty nickel and dime-y practices. You see toward the bottom the VFS Services came to $241.42 - that was all she was going to get out of me! She tried to tell me a bunch of other things I needed, but because of Start Abroad I knew it wasn’t true. Still! Annoying.
And then there is the double rent! Because you need to be paying for an apartment before you even apply, we paid double rent for 3 months.
Pets: $13,548.20
THIS was a doozy! Again, when I started doing research I just absolutely freaked out and pretty much immediately hired a service to handle pet transport for me. I found Starwood Pet Travel and just fully bought my peace of mind for $10K. That is a psychotic amount of money to spend to get three animals from the US to Portugal. But get here safely they did and yeah, like I really had a choice.
I mean, I guess I could have taken the cats with me on the airplane but like FUCK! I guess I could have taken Royal with me and put him in storage under the plane but like FUCK! I just couldn’t do it. So yeah!
And yeah I guess I could have just left them! But like I couldn’t have?
Literal Moving Expenses: $10,688.06
So yeah you’re seeing what I’m seeing! Moving 3 baby animals cost more than moving ALL OF OUR STUFF!
Shane and I were talking about this recently - in retrospect, do we have regrets about what we moved and how we moved it? We kinda landed on that we probably could have trimmed a few boxes down, and saved a couple hundred dollars here and there, but overall no!
I think we both think we bought too many clothes, Shane even in some estimation got to a point where he kinda said he brought too many books and records! So I think realistically we could have trimmed this down by maybe $500-700? Not worth crying over!
We ended up shipping 22 boxes of stuff, and a crate with my sentimentally important work table and a small table Shane had made for him by a friend. So shipping cost of our stuff was $6803.51, duties and delivery was $3090.69 BARF! You’re just paying taxes on your own shit! IT KILLS ME!
SOLD: $8,509.55
I sold anything remotely valuable! I ended up giving a ton of stuff away. I destashed a lot of sweaters, fabric, yarn, and craft supplies! Shane sold some stuff he had been carrying around with him since childhood. My goal was to make $10K to offset costs but we just didn’t have $10K worth of stuff! But this income of course helped offset costs, and I’m super grateful to everyone using something that I once owned!
Total: $40,716.15 - $8,509.55 = $32,206.6
I mean, the numbers don’t lie!
When I first started saving for the move I was thinking it would cost like $20K. This was before I knew how much it would cost to move the pets, which I was guessing would be around $6K and ended up being over twice that, and before I knew about the paying double rent thing, which added nearly $8K.
When I very very first started doing research people kept talking about how the unexpected things always add up, and we really saw that with our move, from relatively small amounts (those DHL Express payments for the same fucking bank documents over and over), to large amounts (last minute emergency plane tickets), to even larger amounts (taxes on our own shipped boxes!).
If you’re reading this because you’re thinking about moving to Europe and you want to cut costs, the easy answer is don’t move pets, and don’t move stuff!
If you don’t have pets, or want to leave your pets in the care of willing loved ones, obviously you can cut our expenses down to $27.167.99 (if you want to abandon your pets to a pet rescue, you can FUCK RIGHT OFF this website!)
If you move with just carry on and checked luggage, which I know a lot of people do, that would have shaved off probably $8K, as we would have had to pay for extra bags on our flights etc, so let’s take our expenses down to like $19K ish at that point then.
If you have a more straightforward visa application, like a Golden Visa, or a boss who can approve your Digital Nomad Visa, I can image you could get away with not having to hire a company to help you, which would take your moving expenses down to, what, $15K?
At the end of the day we did what worked best for us, we saved every penny we could for YEARS to pay for this move, and we have set up our lifestyle in a way where we chose to afford it. And, now that we are living here, we have reduced our cost of living to such a comfortable amount that Shane and I can live off my income while he figures out his next moves.
At the end of the day, what else would I want to spend $40K on? We invested in our happiness.
We’ve never owned a house, we haven’t had a car since like 2016?! We aren’t having kids. We saved, and we made a big purchase! Just like most people do. But our big purchase wasn’t a wedding, or a house payment, or something else mostly socially acceptable lol
It was this! And, 7 months in, I can safely say that we got a really good deal.
