This week my children did a full-day soccer camp. Futebol. I asked them what they were served for lunch: fish, rice, salad, squash soup.

This is one of the many reasons I love living in Portugal! My children were fed nothing that was purple or processed. Feeding children junk for lunch is not done here and (to my knowledge) no one fights for the right to do so. This aligns with our family values and is one of the many reasons we decided to move here.

I won’t argue that Portugal is the best place on the planet, although I could. It is healthy and affordable, Lisbon is the closest European city to the Eastern seaboard so it is easy for family to visit, and the country was bumped up two spots to #3 on the UNESCO Global Peace Index this year. The US is ranked #128.

I said I wasn’t going to make a pitch for Portugal and then I did just that. I can’t help myself because I’ve got such a crush on this place. More what I would like to articulate is why Clayton and I selected this country as a great place for our family for right now.

Last year when we began discussing a possible move abroad, we began with a Danish island called Ærø. We had learned about it from a magazine article from a friend and it sounded magical. It is one of the most eco-friendly cities in the world and Denmark is frequently cited as the happiest country in the world.

But after some research, we learned that Denmark has a 55% tax rate, some of the highest consumption rates of sugar in all of Europe, and nightfall comes by about 3 p.m. in the winter. Also, it takes about 20 hours of travel to get to Ærø from the East Coast of the US and we thought this would be a lot to ask of visiting family. Denmark may be a wonderful place but these data points do not align with our family values – especially the sugar and the tax rate!

When a friend suggested to Clayton that we consider Portugal, it was a “No duh!” moment. I was sold on the idea from the first syllable, which happens to be Port, which I also like!

To try to further explain our choice, I will address some of the questions we get when we tell people we’ve moved to Portugal.

• Do you have jobs in Portugal? 

No. We work for ourselves and we work from wherever we want. We have done that since Clayton left Fox in 2017 and we now consider ourselves fairly unemployable due to this addiction to freedom. We try to teach other families to empower themselves to do the same in our Financial Freedom Academy. 

When we returned from summer travel in 2018, we realized that we were calling “home” a place that we had only moved to for our news careers. New Jersey is a lovely place for families but we did not choose it so much as end up there. Now that we no longer worked in New York City, we could choose to live anywhere and if you can choose to live anywhere, you should choose to live somewhere. If we did not make a deliberate choice, we would get stuck in New Jersey as our children got older and increasingly invested in their lives there. I did not want to be stuck only because I never really thought about any other option.

We also asked ourselves, “How will we feel in five years knowing we could have moved to Europe and didn’t?” We try to make decisions based on our intuition and this question gave us both a pit in the stomach. I believe that if you are called to do something, you will know it and you should do it. This felt like a strong pull for us and we did not want the regret of not having followed the trail.

• Are you Portuguese? 

No but my maternal grandmother was Spanish so I do hark from the Iberian Peninsula. 23andMe confirms it.

Clayton had errors in two DNA tests that led to 23andMe rejecting his tests and refunding his money. I swore it was because he is Blue Avian. He was hoping that his mysterious DNA would show a strong Portuguese bloodline but when he had a successful test with Ancestry, he found that he is no more Portuguese than he is Blue Avian.

We are neither of us Portuguese. We are humble guests of the Republic.

• Do you speak Portuguese?

Increasingly so! I speak fluent Spanish so I can construct a sentence in a romance language and I have taken Berlitz classes to learn the intricacies of this Romance language. I would say that upon arrival I was at about 40% fluency. After about a month, I am closer to 60% and I get such a rush of accomplishment when I can complete errands without speaking English. The other day I returned a car seat to a store, dropped off dry cleaning, used a coupon to buy gas, and called customer service at Vodafone, all without any English!

I’m not saying my Portuguese is beautiful. It is choppy and my accent gives me away. Many Portuguese people are taught English in school so when they hear me butcher their sounds, they rescue me in English and I have to ask them to let me keep trying.

Não vou ficar melhor se eu não falo em português! 

My children will be attending an American school where they will be taught Portuguese as a second language. I’ve tried to give them a head start by using my trusty label maker in our apartment:

One of the amazing experiences that you can have with your children abroad is to watch their little ears begin to adjust to the sounds of a new language and watch them work up the courage to speak it. Like when the baby says “Hoh-j” for hoje (today) or “ob-ree-gah-dah” for obrigada (thank you). My middle child beams with pride when she can take try the language. Like when she handed in her own tickets to the merry-go-round and said “bilhete aqui,” amazed at her own courage. My son asked me how to ask his futebol coaches for his water bottle because even though they speak English, he wants to communicate with them in Portuguese.

My husband also took Berlitz classes but has no romance language background so he has less of an advantage. He tries really hard not to rely on English and his Portuguese is improving every day. I am proud of him for his humility and determination.

Clayton and I are going to take more classes at a nearby language school in the fall when the children begin school. I can’t expect them to study if I don’t. Also, I can’t let them get better than me!

• Have you met Ronaldo?  

Ainda não. Not yet. 

• Have you met Madonna?

Madonna is said to be leaving Portugal on unfriendly terms. Still, I have this fantasy of meeting her at a cocktail hour for American expats. 

In this fantasy, I am taken to a back room by a handsome man in a tailored suit wearing an earpiece. I imagine that Madonna travels with lots of men like this. She tells me that she read my recent post about moving to Portugal and all the nasty press my family received about it. She says that I am right to tell them all to go to hell, which she has had to do many times in her life. She welcomes me to this wonderful country and then we run off to a windy beach in black slips and step-touch the night away singing Like A Prayer in front of an angry bonfire.

• How long will you be there? 

I honestly do not know. Our original plan was to be abroad while we build a house in the Pennsylvania mountains but now that we have arrived abroad, we realize that we know even less about our future than ever. And we are somehow comfortable with that.

When we decided to move to Portugal last year, I called my father to explain it to him and he said, “Well, you change your life in a major way every three years so this doesn’t surprise me. It is maybe a little more drastic than other changes but you’re a capitalist. You’ve worked hard to be able to make these choices. I support you.”

I was touched by his support but a little shocked to hear him say that I make drastic changes every three years. I had not realized that pattern in myself. I asked Clayton, “Do we do that??? I guess we do!”

What’s worse is that we over-improve our homes, thinking we’ll be there for a lifetime, and then the winds of change turn our heads and we leave it all behind. Why had we not seen it this way? We’ve wasted so much time and energy on things we cared so little about. If I truly loved that Elfa-designed laundry room, wouldn’t I have kept it? Why did I put so much thought and money into things I could so easily let go of?

After this tough pill to swallow, Clayton and I put the breaks on big commitments. No more making expensive and unconscious decisions! Maybe we are serial nomads who should not own the house we live in. Maybe we are not meant to know where we belong yet. All we know for sure is that we live in Portugal this year and we love it here. What awaits us has yet to reveal itself.