My son wasn’t old enough for school to be compulsory yet. That was the whole of it. One year where the decision was still ours, and twelve to sixteen years on the other side of it where it wouldn’t be.
The school day there ran roughly nine to five. Which is most of a day, and the days were a good part of why we had gone in the first place.
So we kept the year open. We traveled together, went into the city, did museums, made a full day out of it when the day allowed. That choice changed both the days we had available and what those days cost.
Before we left, we had a number for Portugal: $35,000 to $40,000 a year, US dollars, for the four of us. It wasn’t a guess. It came out of the ordinary research anybody does before uprooting a family, and I’d spent a career in cash flow and treasury, so it was as close to a fair model as I knew how to build.
I want to defend that number for a moment, because the obvious reading of what comes next is that we were naïve about it.
We weren’t. The $35–40K life was real and it was available to us the entire time we were there. It looks like living farther out from Lisbon instead of in it. Cooking most nights. Local markets. Beaches, which are free, and which are among the best things in the country. That isn’t a deprivation budget. Plenty of people live exactly that way in Portugal and are not sitting around feeling short-changed.
We spent something closer to $80,000 to $100,000 a year. Roughly twice what we planned.
What an empty Tuesday costs
Here is what a budget built out of your current spending cannot see.
I wasn’t working during the day, and my son wasn’t in school. That is what created the openings to spend.
An empty Tuesday will hold a train ride. It will also hold the metro, breakfast out, a museum, a sport for one of the kids. Ordinary things, none of them a splurge, any one of which you would say yes to without thinking about it. We knew we’d travel. We did not anticipate the volume of it, inside Portugal and outside it.
Every one of those occasions was cheap. That’s exactly why they were so easy to say yes to. The frequency was the expense, and frequency is the one thing a budget written from your old calendar has no way to model.
We could have said no more often. That’s the honest part. Nothing forced the higher spending, and describing it as something that happened to us would be a lie.
We said yes because we did not know how long we had. The plan had been roughly two years abroad while the kids were small, and two years is a number you write down, not a thing you know. Portugal might turn out to be a short experiment or it might turn out to be the rest of it, and we couldn’t tell which from the inside. What we could tell was that a year he wasn’t in school was not going to come around again.
So we chose the more expensive version, on purpose, having checked that we weren’t short whichever way the duration went.
I’d written the reasoning down before we ever got on the plane. “There is a money value of time,” I wrote back then, “and I consider it a bargain to be able to have more time now at this special time.” I didn’t mind borrowing a couple of years of later retirement and stability to spend more time with my young children while they were young enough to want it. Kids are only young once, and you see so much less of them once they go to school and get friends and activities and lives of their own.
The whole point of moving the retirement years up was that money accumulated for later tends to arrive when you have less time and less energy left to use it, so we traded some of it for the time and energy while both were still in supply. Spending it on trains, museums, and long family days was part of pulling those retirement years forward.
The part I’d rather leave out
In the second year the portfolio went down, and a set of cash outlays landed that I had not properly allocated for, and there were real times when I thought, do I have the runway that I want?
We both ended up looking for work during the stay.
I’ve spent a lot of this piece establishing that we could afford the life we chose, and we could. That and the runway question are both true, at the same time, and I don’t intend to smooth them into each other. Having enough to support either version of the stay is one condition. Feeling comfortable with your burn rate and the timing of your withdrawals while the market is doing what markets do is a different one, and I had only arranged the first.
That’s the part where I didn’t take my own advice. I had modeled what the life cost. I had not set aside the cash for the life we actually picked, which meant the shortfall showed up on the worst possible schedule, when selling to cover it was the last thing I wanted to be doing.
The choice was affordable. It was not comfortable. Those are allowed to both be true, and anyone telling you that having enough money removes the feeling has not tried it.
The plan didn’t fail
The $35–40K model was not the mistake in this story.
The research was sound, the figure was achievable, and the life it described was one we could have lived well. What it could not do was tell us which of the available lives we would choose once we could actually see them. It priced the family that hadn’t gone yet.
Which is the thing I’d want you to take out of this, if you’re currently trying to settle a big change with a spreadsheet.
Your budget is built out of what you spend now, and what you spend now is a record of what your current days permit. You are not modeling a place. You are modeling a way of living, and specifically the one you already have, transplanted. Change what a Tuesday is allowed to hold and the spending changes with it — not because you got sloppy, but because you finally have the room to do the things you moved for.
I can’t hand you a percentage for that. There isn’t one, and anybody offering you a tidy multiplier on your expat budget is guessing with more confidence than the situation supports. What I’d say instead is to name the version of the life your number buys, out loud, in specifics: where you live, how far from the city, how often you’d travel, what the kids do on a Wednesday. Then ask honestly whether that’s the version you’d choose once nothing is stopping you from choosing the other one.
If the answer is no, you don’t have a budget problem. You have a plan that prices the wrong life, and the time to find that out is before you’re standing in it.
We spent about twice what we set out to spend. We chose that on purpose, it was worth it, and we were not short whichever way the stay turned out to go.
A budget can be right about the money and wrong about the life.
Reply and tell me: if your calendar emptied out next month, what would you start spending money on that isn’t anywhere in your budget?
— Ashleigh