On Friday January 9th, 2026, at approximately 5:30 AM, I woke to these words from my wife – “I figured out how we can move to Portugal in three months.”
Our lives changed in that moment.
Look, if you know one or both of us, you know – we are not spontaneous people. We are smart, busy, nerds who work from home and rarely want to leave the house. We own a house. We have two cats. I knit. Lisa reads. I cook. Lisa…enjoys my cooking. We watch British TV. We talk about retirement. And travel.
Over 10 years of marriage, we often talked about where we would live when we retire. My wife, our Official Travel Planner (OTP), went to work looking for our perfect retirement locale and discovered that Portugal is considered one of the best, most affordable, and safest places in Europe to retire! A generalized plan for a possible retirement somewhere in the EU and maybe Portugal was hatched. And then, life happened. And the world fell off its axis. And one evening, we agreed that it was time for a big life change. We would move to Portugal in three years.
And then my wife stayed up all night, researching and planning and crunching numbers, and at approximately 5:30 AM, woke me with these words – “I figured out how we can move to Portugal in three months.”
Welcome to The Portugal Papers. Lisa and I will be your guides.
The Portugal Papers 
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