How to Move Yourself, Your Stuff, & Your Pet to Portugal

So you’ve applied for your visa…now what?

In addition to paring down, packing up and possibly shipping things to Portugal, there are a few bureaucratic tasks and other to-do’s beyond the visa application to take care of before you leave the United States. Today, we’re going to talk about it all!

Declutter & Unclutter – it’s time to Minimize!

Before we get started, if you’re like me and just have too much stuff in your house, I recommend these two programs: and the . Decluttering our home was really helpful for staging our house to sell.

Everyday Portugal members an exclusive 10% discount on all Declutter Therapy programs with the coupon code: PORT10, so that’s kinda cool. If you’re interested in any of their programs, don’t forget to put that coupon code in at checkout to get the discount.

Now, let’s start with the bureaucratic stuff first since that can require some lead time.

HOW TO SHIP YOUR THINGS TO PORTUGAL

1. Shipping: If you’re planning on shipping a crate, palette or container to Portugal, you will need to get a from your local consulate in the U.S. in order to avoid hefty customs and import fees. There are a lot of helpful posts as well as the most updated requirements for getting a Certificado de Bagagem in the . Check the FILES tab in that group to find step-by-step instructions on how to get it done.

Since we planned on shipping things over, we applied for the Certificado de Bagagem the day before we moved and even before our items had shipped BUT we included a prepaid Fedex envelope with the customs agent’s address so that the Certificado de Bagagem would go directly to the customs coordinator once it was approved. Your shipping company can give you the mailing details for your customs coordinator in the event that you have to leave for Portugal before you would receive the Certificado.

There’s a lot of debate in the expat groups about whether one should ship their goods or get rid of it all and start a fresh life in Portugal. Here’s what we say – do what is best for you!

While it can be so liberating to start fresh and let go of the old to make way for the new, replacing all your furniture and home goods can be very pricey in Portugal and for much lower quality. The flip side is that apartments and homes are much smaller than what we’re accustomed to so a lot of standard sized furniture in the U.S. can be too large for the tighter spaces you’ll find in Portugal. So, you have to weigh all that when making your decision.

Our family decided to ship everything over. We had relatively new furniture that we loved and many items that were dear to our hearts. We also priced out what it would cost to replace many items and were shocked to discover that replacing our stuff at the same quality would be 2-3 times the cost and much more than the cost to ship it over and even store it until we found a home.

We ended up shipping and having to store our stuff for 2 years and it still turned out to be a savings. When we finally unpacked our furniture, art and items we were connected to, we felt settled; like we were finally home. Sometimes it’s nice to have a touchstone from your previous life to have something familiar when everything else is so new.

In the end, do what feels right to you! Don’t let the strong opinions of others sway you. We really regret taking the unending advice to not ship our car. When it was time to buy a car in Portugal, we ended up spending twice as much as it would have cost to ship and make the car EU compliant and ended up with a much lower quality car. So, take all the advice you hear with a grain of salt and go with your gut. You’ll know what’s right for you!

Here are the services we used to successfully ship and store our goods:

1. Shipping:

2. : We worked with Abdul Sulemane, on WhatsApp.

He and his crew of lovable movers have been wonderful to us and to our friends over the past two years. His crew unloaded our container and put everything into their storage facility for us. We didn’t visit the storage facility for the first 14 months that our things were there and were ecstatic to find everything in pristine condition. The storage facility is very well maintained. We had concerns about the humidity in Portugal affecting our stored goods and Abdul’s storage facility kept everything dry and mold-free. His team of movers are really sweet, funny and hardworking. They have moved our goods 4 times since we moved here and reassembled everything quickly. We’ve really loved working with Abdul and his team and are grateful we were referred to them.

2. Getting Your Documents Ready to do the Portuguese Driver’s License Exchange: For sure, the process of getting your Portuguese Driver’s License has gotten more complicated over the past two years. You’ll definitely want to check out the updates and the process in the FILES over at and .

If you’re planning on getting your driver’s license in Portugal (many of us do that to help with cutting ties with certain states for tax implications), you’ll want to get all the requirements that have to be done in the U.S. (or your home country) BEFORE you leave. It’s a real pain to get the apostilles you need in the U.S. once you’re in Portugal. It’s much easier to get what you need before you head over for a more seamless transaction in Portugal.

We’re not sure if you’re still able to do this (check over at and ) but we were able to forgo the apostilles altogether by submitting our official driving record to the consulate directly to be certified by them instead of apostilled by our home state. You may want to contact your consulate directly to see if getting your license certified instead of apostilled is still an option. Fingers crossed that it is!

3. Moving with Pets – moving with your pet/s is a fairly involved process with several moving pieces and critical timing issues. It can be one of the more stressful elements of the move, I’ve heard. Here are some of the basic steps for moving with a pet. You can find more information with real-time updates on the process over at . They have an excellent document in the “FILES” tab of their page with detailed instructions on the process. I HIGHLY recommend you review their file.

Basic Steps:

1. Visit the vet – get pet/s microchipped and an up-to-date rabies vaccine if they haven’t had the rabies booster in the last year.

2. Obtain a health certificate – The health certificate must be issued by an accredited vet. You have to make sure the actual vet is accredited (not the clinic). There’s .

3. Choose a transportation option – will you be flying them with you on a commercial flight or a ? If commercial, do they qualify to be in the cabin or the hold? Or, will you use a pet transport service? Determine what’s the best method for you, your pet, and your budget.

Here are some pet transport services:

Here’s a good resource article listing they tested.

4. Apply for your USDA Certificate & Notify the Portuguese Airport Vet – there’s really detailed info on this in the “How to Get Your Pets to Portugal” file in the group.

5. Arriving with your Pet in Portugal – you’ll have to go to the airport vet office with your pet upon arrival. Again, very detailed information on this is available in the “How to Get Your Pets to Portugal” file in the group that walks you through the process with information for the different airports in Portugal.

Now, to the personal stuff to prepare for your move.

1. Getting your Phone Set up so You Can Keep your Phone Number to use for calls/texts and 2FA (two-factor authentication): We wanted to make sure we could still use our US phone number from Portugal when we needed to text or call home or for receiving 2FA codes from our bank, credit card company and other services. You’ll discover very quickly that international plans are not only very expensive, they sometimes can’t be used for more than 3 months without your service getting shut down. There’s an agreement amongst the cellular carriers and a US carrier is not allowed to ping the EU towers indefinitely. This is true for many VoIP services as well including GoogleFi. So, what can you do to keep your number and continue to have service in Portugal?

At the time we were moving, T-mobile had the best and most affordable strategy to workaround this issue. So, we transferred our US cell number (which was on Verizon) to T-mobile. Then we chose to use on WiFi only. Note: This IS NOT an International service plan. It’s a plan that you’d only use while you’re on WiFi in Portugal but that you can use like you’d regularly use when you’re traveling back in the U.S.

Here’s about using a dual SIM mobile phone and their Talk & Text service. It’s worked perfectly for us for the last two years! You can learn more about how they told us to set it up here. When we first moved, we had a dual SIM phone with 1 e-sim “slot” and 1 physical nano sim “slot’. However, now some phone manufacturers only have dual e-sim slots. If you have or are getting a new iphone, you’ll want to check with Apple to make sure your phone is compatible for accepting your Portuguese number. According to Apple, the dual e-sim phones should work with MEO, NOS or Vodafone service. (we haven’t tested that out yet so please double check for yourself). for using both your US and Portuguese numbers on your phone.

AND NOTE: We just learned yesterday that T-mobile changed their policy for unlocking phones in January 2023. Essentially, they will not unlock your phone until you’ve paid off the balance of the phone (if you’re on a payment plan). So, this year, when we’re due to upgrade our phones, we’re actually going to buy the phones from Apple directly and use Apple’s financing program without attaching the phone to any carrier at first. Then after it’s purchased, we’ll call T-mobile to transfer our number to one of the eSIMs on our new phones. Special special note: Before you buy a new dual eSIM from the States, make sure your Portuguese carrier is set-up for eSIM service.

2. Getting your house prepared for sale: If you’re selling your home before you move, you may want to stage it. Staging your home can do a lot to improve how quickly your house sells and for how much. And the benefit of pairing things down for staging the house is that you’ll have much less clutter and fewer possessions to ship. We used a few really helpful programs like to help us pair down before the moves.

HOW TO PACK YOUR CONTAINER TO MOVE TO PORTUGAL

3. Buying Packing & Moving Supplies: we moved in the heart of the pandemic so it wasn’t easy to get the supplies we needed at local stores at that time. We ended up finding great deals online for boxes, tape, packing materials on Amazon and Big Lots…and everything was delivered to our door so that made it really easy peasy.

– we used these inside the actual shipping container itself to help with moisture and mold.

– we put these in every storage bin, box, and on all our furniture pieces before they were wrapped in plastic or boxed up. We use these desiccant packets in our clothing drawers in Portugal to stave off moisture/mold.

– to protect contents from water and moisture and mold while storing or shipping.

– we secured the lids onto our plastic storage bins with this security tape. Our thought was it might deter anyone from going through the boxes while our container sat on the docs or with customs in Portugal from opening/searching the bins because we made it a pain for them and to be able to easily see if our storage bins had been tampered with. We have no idea if that was even a legitimate thought but did it anyway. Our container sailed right through customs so it wasn’t an issue.

4. Selling your car: We used to sell both of our cars. We couldn’t believe how easy that service was. They picked the cars up only hours before our flights so we had the cars to use up until the last moment. It was great and super easy to do. We booked the Carvana service about 2 weeks before we left but we’d recommend researching them at least a month before you leave to make sure you get a pick-up slot for the best time/date for you.

5. Packing for your journey to Portugal: Since we were renting a furnished apartment initially upon arriving in Portugal AND we had no idea when our container of shipped goods would arrive, we packed a year’s worth of essentials to bring with us. We packed the usual clothes and toiletries but also our supplements and over the counter medications that we weren’t sure we’d be able to find in Portugal. We also brought English language kids’ books, small electronics like our computers (because we prefer the standard keyboards from the US), mobile phones, and important family photos and paperwork that we didn’t want to risk shipping in the container. All that stuff added up! So, our family of 3 ended up lugging 3 personal bags, 3 carry-on bags, and 8 full sized suitcases. One thing to check is how much luggage you can bring on your flight for free. The flights we took on AirFrance (because TAP wasn’t running during the Pandemic from our airport) included 2 suitcases per passenger + the option to pay extra for additional luggage.

We know those IKEA or are really popular to pack and bring over because they are so light but we want to issue a very light warning. It seems like the customs people that lurk around the “have nothing to declare” hallway at the Lisbon airport know that people with those bags are likely bringing in tons of goods from overseas and in the last year, two sets of friends have been delayed and had those blue bags searched. We’re sure that’s pretty rare but just wanted you to be aware of that. It might be better to bring in a large suitcase instead if that fits your needs and budget.

Here are the exact products we used to pack and maximize our luggage space all while staying within the airline’s size and weight requirements.

(for under your seat)

– we were advised by an airport employee to put the tags on the inside of your bag and not the outside so they couldn’t be removed.

– made it really easy to find our luggage and secured our overly packed bags

because we didn’t want to deal with getting a Portuguese SIM at the airport after a very long travel day and flight. So, we got a global SIM card and a few weeks after we arrived, we got a prepaid Vodafone SIM that we could charge up monthly without a 2 year contract.

Final note: Because we had so much stuff and couldn’t rely on finding a large enough taxi or uber, we organized car hires to SFO and from Lisbon Airport.

Whewf! Another long one but we hope you found these resources helpful and we wish you a safe flight and easy journey on your way to beautiful Portugal!!

Até próxima,

Everyday Portugal

 

ps – we’d love to hear from you and keep our coaching series as up-to-date as possible. If we have missed any crucial information that would be valuable or if there’s a topic you’d really love us to cover, please email us using the contact form below.

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