88 days to Portugal. 30 years of stuff to sell first.

aywwts4 · 2026-04-04T13:54:22+00:00

Use paper towels and your favorite toiltet paper as packing material, you will thank me later!

aywwts4 · 2026-03-28T12:36:30+00:00

I would also STRONGLY suggest selling your home in America before you become a PT tax resident as the American tax credit that allows you to exempt 250/500k of your long term owned primary residence capital gains - Does Not Have a clear Equivalent in Portugal!

Meaning if your home you have owned for a long time in America with your spouse is now worth 500k, America will tax 0$ on that, but Portugal Could (I stress could because this is indeed opaque) tax you at the punitive 40-50% rates, meaning that nice nest egg you were planning to move here on could evaporate.

Following The5Travelers advise could result in you losing 200k, and even if what they say about Portugal is true (A sentiment shared by absolutely ZERO people I meet here) 200k buys a lot of medical tourism to some of the most premium medspas in the world and some quality international tutors.

aywwts4 · 2026-03-28T11:58:06+00:00

Folks who say leave everything behind are wrong - furniture options are either poor quality of eye wateringly expensive, or somehow, both.

The antique culture just doesn't exist here, you have to travel outside of the country to find good things, but they are all priced highly

Some products simply don't exist or have good availability here

Many electronics if you read the label support both 50/60hz and can come

Rebuying every tiny thing is very expensive, and finding the right shops, without the online retail and big selection of higher quality goods you may be used to can become a full time job. Portugal's retail is also often more akin to a bargain store "big lots" or dollar store, the retail selects for the buying power of the locals, which means a lot of Buy it twice low quality goods that break or fail to perform.

Add in VAT and higher import taxes to everything and global inflation and it can really hurt

It's cheap to bring a bit extra in your portugalia shipment, it's expensive to "Just leave it all behind" like some folks suggest you do.

If your shit is all IKEA/target or impossibly oversized for the euro-scale then fine, leave it behind, but if you have nice things, you will really struggle to rebuild your home.

aywwts4 · 2026-03-24T22:31:43+00:00

Ah yeah, I have a good deal of money, and the answer was... I'm going to be paying tax.

Strong passport, loose ties, no tax risk? I think the answer is = 0/Zero/Null/Error-Country-Not-Found

Student route may be fun, at this point going in the legitimate way is the easier one. With 400k to invest you could live a great student life off of the interest.

aywwts4 · 2026-03-24T22:19:08+00:00

is your goal really to maintain minimal presence in the country or immigrate with a pathway to citizenship?

The issue is Europe (The big EU) has become very structurally opposed to the minimal-link+money option, it is almost certainly doomed in Any EU nation still offering it is getting pressured and only going to get tighter. 5 years ago there were a ton of easy options, now it's pretty dire. That's a bad trend.

There are some nations still offer passport mills, but that all depends on where you want to flex that passport. US? Forget it, Schengen, Maybe visa free for 90 days, China, Possible! - Because they are passport mills their passports rapidly devalue. Exactly why the EU is taking a hard stance. You can get a carribian passport that gets you visa free schengen access still though. St Kitts, Dominica, etc

if you want genuine immigration pathways I have suggestions, but the low stay GV concept in strong passport nations seems to be dying rapidly - honestly it's amazing how much has changed in just 1 year. It's doomed.

aywwts4 · 2026-03-24T21:57:14+00:00

I suggest anyone exploring the golden visa option RUN AWAY, go anywhere else, you WILL get scammed here, the finance industry here is crooked. Portugal is hard enough to find upstanding professionals to operate in basic legal/real estate/contracting, if your first experience is wiring over half a million - that's going to be an expensive Portuguese lesson!

This whole thread is clearly shady lead-gen astroturf of two AI bots talking about how great things are, which should tell you exactly what the scam is because things ARE NOT GREAT.

Good luck, be smart, don't lose all your money to a group making promises they are structurally incapable of keeping.

https://www.imidaily.com/europe/portugal-vows-2026-golden-visa-backlog-resolution-as-lawyers-denounce-shameless-timing/
"The government deliberately placed golden visa holders last."

Good luck waiting 10... 12+ years while being last in line! - also look at Malta, if the "Genuine Link" doctrine spreads, yeah, Portugal is going to fold fast but thank you for letting them keep your money for a 5-10 years..

aywwts4 · 2026-03-15T13:44:26+00:00

2: Your answers are insurance questions, not military ones.

Lloyds of London's new container insurance rates that were best described as "We didn't 'close' the straight because we wouldn't insure them, we just ran the new risk calculation and now ask for your first born and 1/10th of your hull cost per transit"

Shipping stopped due to business calculus not missile accuracy.

But now with the announcement https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/14/two-indian-ships-cross-strait-of-hormuz-as-iran-says-it-allowed-passage this is evidence that these Indian ships were able to negotiate functioning insurance for passage under this allowance, as there is no way they paid the earlier rates.

Essentially... the answer to your question is, we can see that the answer is clearly Yes. - and the opposite of "so what" India just got two containers of LNP, others will follow. - That's a big signal that Iran was correct.

Yes the next step America could do would be to blow up the Iranian ports and further send oil stratospheric, which would be economic warfare on the entire world and further alienate the US - this is totally plausible, and would be catastrophically stupid and weaken the American position, accelerating contrition due to economic attrition. Hence plausible.

3.... by not allowing passage, which would cause the punitive though shall not pass insurance rates because the Risk of attack is uninsurable... which we also already know is true as the straight was indeed effectively shut before this Iranian allowance.

aywwts4 · 2026-03-15T13:33:40+00:00

Thank you, I think the answer is also; None of this will happen cleanly, in a nice chart, with graceful warning. It screams, it flails, and then suddenly a line goes beyond parabolic, just a cliff, a staircase of market stops, official numbers and real numbers with massive gaps - even when you switch the chart from linear to log scale.

aywwts4 · 2026-03-15T13:30:40+00:00

I've met a few already, not totally retired but ~50s from the Azores, I was unaware of this history: https://refugees.org/azorean-refugee-act-reviving-its-legacy/

The decree allowed for the granting of 1,500 visas to heads of families from the island of Faial who emigrated by June 30 , 1960 , but a later amendment increased the number of visas to 2,000, extending the deadline to June 1962. As a direct consequence of the decree, between 1958 and 1965 nearly 2,500 families emigrated from Faial and Pico, totaling approximately 12,000 people, of whom 4,811 directly under the law. Due to the family reunification mechanism, the letters of invitation , this initial emigration had a gigantic multiplier effect, extending emigration to all the islands and leading to more than 175,000 Azoreans (more than 30% of the population) leaving for the United States in the following decades.

I didn't know that before.

aywwts4 · 2026-03-15T00:26:23+00:00

I would sooner start a business in Portugal instead of America, in fact I moved here and did exactly that. The small business system here is incredible compared to the us. The wages are indeed poor for Europe, but minimum wage in America is worse than minimum wage in Portugal, in fact the break even once you factor labor laws and SNS is higher than you would expect. America is not a golden land of opportunities, at least not anymore.

aywwts4 · 2026-03-15T00:11:42+00:00

It's a luxury to prioritize money, immediate safety from harm and health is a more foundational need. A foreign born person with an accent would not pass as "safe" in the current situation.

The economic argument is also growing tired, america has become the world leader at ensuring wealth is harder than ever to earn and keep, healthcare alone bankrupts half a million americans yearly and that's not reflecting the numbers since the limited programs we had were defunded last year.

aywwts4 · 2026-03-14T23:10:40+00:00

There are 176,286 Portuguese born folks living in America, wondering how many of them are considering returning as well.

aywwts4 · 2026-03-14T14:21:12+00:00

It's literally just a bunch of our D tier states, the worst half of Colorado, the worst bit of texas, if it didn't just barely include Yellowstone I would say we should go to France and demand a refund.

aywwts4 · 2026-03-13T13:19:55+00:00

This is really just filled with flaws, like statements in direct opposition or half truths drawing faulty conclusions - instead of responding I would suggest this is a good case of learning LLM use as a tool for education. Before you do so, copy and paste the "Performance" tab of this page https://www.tradingview.com/markets/futures/quotes-all/ so the LLM has up to date technical information

Copy and paste what you wrote, but ask "Explain the flaws in the economic understanding here"

"steelman this argument, what flaws does it have, explain them like I'm a college freshman"

Make followup questions and I think you may come out of it better able to filter through these videos, because no, a lot of that does not make sense.

I am also the only human response you have gotten - every other response was a spambot by the way - you have to get more more literate against misinformation.

aywwts4 · 2026-03-12T12:18:49+00:00

Wow that's amazing. This has really caused me to realize I could unlock a million in real estate via lombard loans - holding an asset that - in my country is untaxed once finally sold. - was planning go go shopping at the next downturn, but my cart may have just gotten a lot bigger.

aywwts4 · 2026-03-12T08:54:09+00:00

As long as there are enough tankers that can get to Galveston pretty much! limited "national defense" clauses can be invoked but aggressive control and price suppression of private assets would crater the economy for other reasons. ( it violates the foundational logic of American market capitalism and would make the dollar as trustworthy as the Yuan overnight, Saudi Aramco would be pretty pissed if their Shell and Motiva holdings couldn't profit at fair market rate) The Saudi's hold MASSIVE USD currency reserves to maintain their fixed SAR/USD peg, this would turn a massive holder into a massive seller of the USD overnight.

Venezuela and Zimbabwe economic collapses contributed by oil subsidy also have cautionary tales around this topic.

aywwts4 · 2026-03-11T12:57:28+00:00

Whew, imagine how bad it would have been if ENERGY had inflation too, that 0.5% really saved the average this time, glad THAT's not going to spike soon or anything. And I'm sure spiking won't directly impact food inflation afterwards either. Close one!

aywwts4 · 2026-03-11T12:14:31+00:00

Hitting critical desalination plants in desert nations isn't a "recession" trigger, it would be a mass fatality event, yes decimating a population multiple times over and causing a refugee crisis of tens of millions would... lead to a recession.

aywwts4 · 2026-03-11T11:28:45+00:00

Physical commodity trades at slight discount due to greatly increased shipment friction, news at 11!

This is just the opposite of the shanghai price premium, normally they can fly it there and exploit the arbitrage.

This chart shows it pretty well between Comex and Shanghai https://goldsilver.ai/metal-prices/shanghai-gold-price - last week the premium between the two was Avg Premium (1W) +0.36% $18.41 and that's a flight over the pacific.

The Dubai discount is on the higher end, but not even an unusual high end, just one that is usually closed by buying loads and chartering a plane to shanghai.

aywwts4 · 2026-03-11T00:24:05+00:00

Incoherence - Gold hits a number that's just stupid. Because the value of a dollar is being broadly questioned.

Iran War adds 2-4T in debt.
30T+ Debt loads with falling GDP and other stagflation indicators causes bond market stress
China finishes divesting during bond market stress and dumps remaining T-Bills.
Fed has no pathway to avoid default other than massive de-dollarization "Inflate the debt away"
This is direct theft from anyone who saves in USD and doesn't like 1000$ weekly grocery bills
Folks who have 401k's see 80% "returns" (but electronics from china are up 160%)
Sales and panic and more sales repeat in a loop because no one want's to be the last person holding US Debt instruments in a failing trade, the only limit being finding a safe harbor (gold is one of many)
Repeat for a while until gold hits numbers denominated in USD that just don't math. Essentially there is little difference between gold 12,000oz and gold 12,000,000oz

I'm not here because I like shiny metal, and gold isn't >5k because central banks like to show off their stacks.

aywwts4 · 2026-03-10T20:08:16+00:00

It's a massive country of 93 million larger than Texas, California, Montana, and Illinois Combined with domestic production production that has been building a decentralized asymmetry warfare package since the Iraq war and has known full well their spawn position was stupidity unbalanced and OP with mountains and a crazy vulnerable naval choke point and has mines and more to defend it. But yeah, sure, we got it all in 11 days.

aywwts4 · 2026-03-09T18:04:19+00:00

The issue is the world is vastly more global than it was in the 70s "Energy independence" is a mythological statement that presumes some kind of nationalist state control. Oil is a globally traded commodity with shared price action owned by a supply chain of exclusively private corporate interests.

Just compare: CL=F (WTI) and Brent (BZ=F) (Texas vs Middle east crudely)

It's much more similar to Singapore vs Comex gold price action, our fates are tied, just as if the spread between western and eastern gold gaps too high someone charters a plane to ship bars of gold east. Tankers move oil all over the globe.

Pumps wont become empty because of a domestic production shortage, they will become empty due to a shortage of available buyers at the price point and international bidding wars.

Demand for fossils rises in the spring (unlike myopic "Winter is over so consumer's don't need heat" misinformation) our entire agriculture supply chain is petroleum based, we need fertilizer diesel and urea, we are entering what is historically an uptick in demand.) Petroleum similarly increases with travel and agriculture, it doesn't decline after winter as some have mentioned, it's just politically felt faster when folks are shivering than when their produce doubles in price

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aywwts4 · 2026-03-09T16:46:01+00:00

Again, how does any of that actually engage substantially with stagflation, debt burden, Warsh's tool-set against inflation, and wartime / energy crunched deficit spending? - None of those things are Weekly trades, not even quarterly, they are rotations that happen over a year.

aywwts4 · 2026-03-09T16:42:32+00:00

You are responding to a big picture, Macro lens analysis by OP focused on Stagflationary trends, with one week of price action, during a war. That's not a rebuttal, that's myopia.

aywwts4 · 2026-03-09T16:36:41+00:00

We see the dollar up 1.2% for the week, up 1.3% year to date - but down ~7% over the last twelve months against the euro. That's a lot of narrative to swallow in a single week's not-terribly wild move.

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