Buying a house in Portugal as a foreigner – back to traveling and a crazy idea

Buying a house in Portugal

If you are new to this story – see the previous parts here

Back on the road again

Exploring again the idea to move to UK, we made trips to Cardiff and Dublin in Ireland. I like Ireland so very much, but because of the weather, it was a no-go. Again, maybe not such a good decision, considering the recent hit waves? I don’t know!

It is 2019 now and we started to travel again very much (every 2 months travelling to a new place)  to explore other options. We went to France, we visited Marseilles and all those little towns near the sea around Marseilles.

Why Marseilles? While visiting France, I started reading about this journalist from my country who moved to Marseilles and I said, we have to go there to see what is all about, so we went.

I loved the area, but France is a very expensive country, at least for our budget. If you were to purchase a home near the sea in a small little town at the level of Portugal resorts, you would have to pay millions. So it was out of the question. We were back to square one. It was a very good trip to France, but we didn’t have the budget for that (either).

Getting a loan – a very bad or a very good idea?

In June 2019 we were on a spree to raise money, but we were anywhere near the sum we needed. So an idea sprung to my mind: why don’t we get a loan a bank loan to pay for this house?

You have to understand, we are not people who take loans. We own our house, we own the car.  We have our businesses that we own. We are not in the habit to get into debt. We are against loans and this is why it never crosses my mind, until that point, to take a loan. I don’t like loans. I don’t think, generally speaking, it’s a good idea to be in debt to the bank. I think it’s a great thing to  be free to make any decision at any point in your life.

But by that point I was starting to get even more depressed being  such a long way from the point of raising the money we needed. So I started to think about this crazy idea. How about taking a loan?

Of course, it was a very controversial idea in our home because we never discussed this topic in our life, as a couple.  But one day I just said: look, we have two options, we wait three or four years to raise this money or we take a loan and we are paying this loan in two or three or four years. In the meantime, we actually have the house in Portugal, that we can live in, and, why not, thinking about renting it, to offset a part of the loan.

We discussed it for a long time and in the end we decided to at least try to apply for a credit in Portugal. I think we agreed just because it was such a long shot. I don’t think there are many persons from Romania applying for a credit loan in Portugal with income from dividends!  So it wasn’t just a question of making a trip to the bank with a piece of paper from my employer. We had to go to the bank with all the financial statements translated from our language in English.

But because I was really depressed about the prospect of waiting years and years to purchase this house, I was trying to make something happen!

I’m going to stop here the story and continue in another post this saga. But let’s stay in touch, write me your questions and experiences and see you in the next chapter of this story! Meaning here!