The move costs we did not know to budget for

This week I set our required-cash target. The app now says that task is complete, which is technically true and slightly misleading, because the number had been forming for weeks and only got written down on a Saturday.

I want to be straight about two things before the numbers.

The first is that I am not going to publish our actual figures. I will be transparent about the structure of this, and about what surprised us, but our bank balance is not content. What I will say is this: we will be living better in Portugal than we do in Austin, for a significantly lower monthly number. That part is real and it is most of why we are going.

The second is that the move itself costs more than we thought. Four years ago we moved from East Austin to Great Hills, across town. The cash we need in hand for this move is about five times that. After the deposits come back, the net cost settles around four times.

The rent number is the one that unlocks everything else

We started on Idealista, looking properly rather than browsing, and that is what forced us to decide what we actually want to spend on a place. Not what we could spend. What we want to.

That single number then sets the deposit, and the deposit is where the surprise lives.

Deposits in Portugal are higher than what we are used to, and here is the part nobody warned us about: your US credit score means close to nothing there. Not good, not bad. It simply is not a thing landlords can read. Two decades of paying everything on time buys you exactly no negotiating room. What replaces it is cash up front.

So the chain runs: what we want to pay in rent, times a bigger multiple than we would face here, in cash, with no credit history to soften it. Get the first number wrong and everything behind it is wrong.

Four cats, and the line item I did not see coming

We have four cats. They are family, and they are coming.

Across town, moving cats meant carriers in the back seat and listening to Toby cry the whole way down the highway. He is not a good traveler. That was the entire cost.

For a transatlantic flight it is a different thing. Each cat travels in the cabin, under the seat in front of a person, and each one needs a human attached to it. We are not putting them in the hold. That is not a debate in our house.

Two of us are moving. Four cats need four people. So two additional round trip tickets go into the move budget, and a round trip across the Atlantic is real money.

That is a genuine move cost and it sits in the estimate.

What does not sit in the estimate: the rest of the family. It will probably be all three kids plus my son in law on that plane. Those tickets are not a requirement of the move, they are what you do with family, and putting them in the budget would be pretending they were forced on us. They were not. We want them there.

I mention it because I think a lot of move budgets quietly mix those two categories together and then read as more expensive and less honest than they are.

Portuguese is not going to happen on my phone

I have been working on the language. I tried the apps that everyone recommends, and they are genuinely good, and they do not work for me.

I need another person who expects me to show up. That is a fact about how I learn, not a verdict on the software. So the study is going to be in person once we land, and I have stopped pretending otherwise and planning around a version of myself who sticks with a streak.

Knowing that now is better than discovering it in month four.

What did not move

The document pack. I got a few things uploaded and meant to do more.

Some of it is genuinely easy and I am just not doing it. Scanning my passport takes minutes. The one with actual friction is a certified copy of our marriage licence, and even that is only friction in the sense that it requires leaving the house. It is Texas, we were married here, a certified copy is a half hour errand. Not an apostille, not a translation, not yet. Just a thing I keep sliding to next week.

That is most of what a move abroad actually is, at this stage. Not dramatic obstacles. A short list of thirty minute jobs you have to stop putting off.

Where the dashboard actually sits

Foundation is four complete, six in progress, five not started. Visa Prep, Scout Trip and Arrival are all untouched, which is correct. We are not supposed to be there yet.

And a confession about that number. Several of those items moved in the app this week, and the work behind them happened earlier. What actually happens is that I sit down on a weekend, open the timeline to see where things stand, and think: oh, I have that document already, I just never put it in one place.

That is the real experience of using your own tool. Not a neat progress bar. A weekly pass where the record catches up with the life.

Next week I want to find out what the document pack genuinely requires versus what I have assumed it requires. My guess is the gap is bigger than I think, and that gap is usually where the expensive surprises live.