A Tale of Three SEF Appointments + The Most Important Tip We Got

So, you’ve applied for your visa and now it’s approved! What happens next??

Look at your passport – on the visa page there is likely a link listed where you can see the date and time of your SEF appointment.  SEF (Servico de Estrangeiros e Fronteiras)  is the agency you go to have your residency appointment in order to receive your residency permit. Sometimes, your SEF appointment is not listed on your visa. If that’s the case,  go to SEF and register  to find out when your appointment is scheduled. Your next step will be to fly to Portugal to be present for your appointment. Make sure to note your visa expiration date so that you are in the country before it expires.

The residency appointment at SEF is pretty straightforward. You need to bring all the documents required for SEF to review. Our attorney, Joao Goncalves  +351 917 149 329  (WhatsApp), created a binder for us with all the documents needed for our residency appointment so that everything was at our fingertips. He also accompanied us to our appointments and acted as our translator which was a HUGE help as none of the three SEF agents we met with spoke any English. None of them did…and questions popped up during our appointments. Without our attorney, we would have been confused and totally lost. Having him there made the appointment stress-free. We just sat back while Joao spoke with the agent and submitted our documents. He just told us when to go to the fingerprinting scanner and when to pay! 😆 Easy peasy.

You’ll find in Portugal that an incredibly high number of people speak English except when it’s most important (government agencies, emergency services, doctors, etc). While, of course, there are some English speakers in those contexts, you can’t count on it … so it’s always good to bring someone to translate in those instances.

WHAT YOU MAY NEED FOR YOUR SEF Appointment: (requirements may change from time to time so make sure to check Americans & FriendsPT group for the most updated requirements).

Here’s the list of things our attorney asked us to email/provide him over the months before we got to Portugal. He brought everything we sent to him organized in a binder so we wouldn’t have to print anything out or worry about it. He said you don’t technically need all of this but in his experience, it’s better to have more documentation than you less because in the past, he’s been asked for each of these documents at one time or another.

He did also mention that if you don’t have a document they request that you’re able to submit it after the appointment so not to worry.

He wanted to be over-prepared and we like to be over-prepared so that was no problem for us.

We did bring apostilled marriage and birth certificates just in case since we had them anyway…also because my last name is different from my son’s. This way they could see we were a family if there were any questions.

Don’t forget to bring cash, credit or a multibanco card for payment. I can’t remember how much our son’s permit costed (it was less) but ours were a little over 156 euros/person.

These are things you may need to bring to your SEF appointment and what we brought to ours:

1. Everything we submitted to VFS for our visa application. SEF usually scans these documents into their system before your residency appointment but in case SEF didn’t, it’s good to have copies of all of those documents on hand.

2.  The Application Form  – our attorney filled ours out for us, translated it for us and had us sign it.

3. Your Passport (with visa in it)

4. Proof of Entering Portugal (this can be your boarding passes and flight itinerary if you connected through another EU country before landing in Portugal OR it can be the stamp on your passport if Portugal was your first point of entry.

5.Proof of Accommodations – you’ll want to bring the full lease or deed to your home to prove you have fulfilled the accommodations requirement.

6. Proof of your most recent monthly rental payment for your lease (your landlord can provide you with an invoice to show payment) or mortgage payment. It’s just an extra level of proof that is rarely requested but has been before.

7. Your NIF Document – our attorney registered our NIFs for us and brought the original document with him to our appointment.

8. Proof of your Portuguese Bank Account – we brought in a few months worth of statements from our Portuguese bank to show we had at least the minimum funds requirement in our account.

9. Proof of travel and/or Portuguese private health insurance – we brought both.

10. Apostilled birth and marriage certificates in case of different last names.

Here are our experiences with our residency appointments for Portugal in 2021. Important Notes: Many families are scheduled at different locations at the same time and same day OR scheduled on different dates and possibly different locations. Also, you can be asked for different information depending on which office you go to and which person processes your residency permit so we thought we’d share our story with you.

The #1 Greatest Tip we learned was to keep our boarding passes from our flights to Portugal as our flight connection was in Paris to Lisbon so France was actually our first point of entry into the EU. Without our boarding passes, the SEF agent would not have processed the husband’s residency permit. You can see the differences in each of our SEF appointments below. Our best advice: prepare yourself for every scenario…

BASIC INFO:

We are a family of three – 2 adults (husband and wife) and 1 child (age 12). Each of us came into Portugal on a D7 visa.

Our initial SEF appointments were scheduled for April 1st (the adults) and for April 19th (the child) all at the same SEF office near our apartment.

Our April 1st appointments were cancelled on March 30th (the same day we arrived in the country). Those appointments were rescheduled for late June at a SEF office at the other end of the city.

Lucky for us, April 19th was the day SEF reopened and our son was able to have his appointment.

OUR SON’S APPOINTMENT:

At our son’s appointment, they asked for:

-his NIF

-his passport

And that’s it….our attorney was surprised because usually he’s asked for the child’s birth certificate as well. We had our son’s birth certificat

OUR APPOINTMENTS:

Due to a personal situation that would require flying back to the US after our visas expired but before our June SEF appointments, our attorney requested two emergency SEF appointments and we got moved up to appointments on May 18th and May 19th in Setubal.

At my appointment, they asked for:

-my NIF

-my passport

-our lease agreement (which they scrutinized. We don’t know what they were looking for specifically in the agreement but the SEF representative read through the entire thing line by line.)

The next day, at the very same office but with a different SEF representative, they asked my husband for:

– his NIF

– his passport

– our lease agreement

– his health insurance policy

– proof of entry into Portugal

Since we didn’t fly directly into Portugal, our passport wasn’t stamped which is why they asked for proof of entry. Kind of crazy that they didn’t ask my son and I for the same thing but they didn’t (even though none of us have a stamp in our passports for Portugal). We had learned through a helpful post in  Americans & FriendsPT  though to keep our boarding passes and a copy of our hotel receipt for our arrival date in case we needed to prove when we entered Portugal luckily we knew to keep that info.

THE PROCESS:

All in all, the process was painless. I was SOOO glad to have our attorney with us at our appointment as the person next to me at SEF was struggling a bit due to the language barrier between him and the SEF representative. He did muddle through it with a good result but it was a much more relaxing experience for me as I just sat there while my attorney handled the entire thing.

Even though so much of the process from the Visa application to the SEF appointment can be done DIY, I am so glad we hired an attorney. For our family, time is really important to us and our attorney has saved us so much time and many bureaucratic headaches by making calls on our behalf and supporting us through the process with so many things from the visa, to getting us emergency SEF appointments, to issues with our bank in PT, to a red-tape nightmare with shipping/customs, to negotiating our lease and writing the contract to protect us from many things I see others struggling with, to about a zillion other things. So, if you value your time and don’t mind making a financial investment to have a trusted resource and support, I highly recommend hiring an attorney to save you from wasting time and energy on unforeseen hassles. Portugal is too magical to waste time in the weeds on bureaucratic things if you don’t have to!

Don’t stress too much about your residency appointment. It’s mostly a formality. Just make sure you bring all the required documentation and consider having an attorney or friend come with you to translate.

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.