Move the slider to zero

This week I did not make many changes to my own move plan. I did something more useful. I fixed the app.

When I logged in, it told me one of the first steps was still incomplete. The step was done. One sub-step was not, and it turned out to be an NIF step that did not belong in the move plan at all. The only NIF task left is one I can only do in person, once we are in Portugal.

That sent me digging, and I found more. There was no notification system. The app assumed people would log in on a schedule to make sure they were on track, and that is just not how anybody lives. If there is something to do, the app should tell you. So now it will.

Past the embarrassment of missing something that obvious, it led me to a bigger realization. This blog has been wrong too.

Back to the story

I have been writing these posts as if every week of a move comes with a new step to report. It does not. Most weeks nothing on the plan changes, and a week-by-week list of tasks would get boring fast, for you and for me.

So this blog is going back to what it was when it started: the story of two people moving to another country, and all the stuff that comes with it. I will still tell you when the app helps, or when I find something in it that needs fixing. But the move is the point, not the mechanics of the tool I am using to do it.

Here is this week's.

Breakfast at Rudy's

Caroline and I have our usual Saturday breakfast at Rudy's. It is an Austin barbecue place that happens to make excellent breakfast tacos. We talked about everything, and of course we talked about the move.

Over tacos I set up a new search on Idealista. This time I searched for what actually matters to us: walkable neighborhoods, close to the metro, with a decent chance of a view of the water, the river or the ocean.

I also lowered the size in square meters, on purpose, to see more options and lower rents.

Here is why. We want to buy a place in Portugal within about three years, and one of our goals is to do it without touching our savings beyond what it takes to move and get settled. The less we spend on rent, the faster that happens. We also know that the mortgage on the kind of home we would buy will be meaningfully lower than the rents we had been looking at. So I wanted to see what was out there closer to that number.

I was happily surprised. There are some really great places, walkable, with ocean views, for meaningfully less than we had been assuming.

One more American assumption

It is amazing what you find when you move the minimum rent slider to zero instead of assuming a lower rent could not possibly work.

I was doing the same thing with size. In my head, anything under 250 square meters was going to be too small for us. That is simply not right. It is one more American assumption I did not know I was carrying until a search result proved it wrong.

Your turn

I want to hear from you. What do you want me to write about? The money, the cats, the paperwork, the neighborhoods, what we are nervous about, what surprised us?

Leave a comment below, or just reply to this email. The best posts on this blog started as a reader's question, and I would like to get back to that.