From a family who did it on a D7 with three kids under five — the paperwork, the money, the hospital, and the part nobody warns you about.
This isn't a pitch for Portugal. Portugal doesn't need more people talked into it. If you're still weighing it up, read module 00 — it's free, and it argues the other side.
Crèche waitlists, school choices, giving birth in the public system, the paperwork each child needs of their own. The parts most guides skip because most guides were written by people who moved alone.
We used one. They were excellent, and they were expensive. This is the same road map, written down, for the price of a nice dinner.
We moved to Portugal in the middle of a pandemic, on a D7 visa, when I was six months pregnant with our first daughter.
We bought a house we'd only seen in photos. We landed in Braga, in the north, and spent three years there. We had our first daughter in the Portuguese public system, then twins. We learned that the first place you pick isn't always the right one — and that's fine. Then we moved south to Ericeira, where we found the community we'd been looking for, and where family actually wants to visit.
Along the way we hired a lawyer, a relocation agency, and an accountant. The agency was excellent. It was also expensive. This is the option we wish had existed: the whole move, step by step, with the checklists and the honest parts — what the paperwork really involves, what a family actually spends, what the hospital is like, how to think about taxes before you land, and how to choose where to live so you don't have to do it twice.
We've never once regretted the decision. But we'd have done it faster, cheaper, and with fewer 3 a.m. Google spirals if someone had handed us this.
[Danya — your real founder copy goes here. This is drawn from your notes as a stand-in.]
Founding price
10% of every sale goes to Just a Change, renovating homes for Portuguese families in need